The Martyrdom of Maev and Other Irish Stories gathers for the first time all of the Irish work Harold Frederic completed in his lifetime. He planned more, but died of a stroke in his early forties, in England, where he was employed as The New York Times London Correspondent. He had earlier written his publisher that he had been "toiling for years" on the archeology of the Iveagha (present Mizen) Peninsula in Cork, and that the projected book of historical fiction underway would be unique. The Martyrdom of Maev and Other Irish Stories brings together the four sixteenth-century stories that Frederic finished and published in magazines in 1895-96, and two of his stories set in the west of Ireland of the second-half of the nineteenth century.
Acts of Faith and Imagination wagers that fiction written by Catholic authors assists readers to reflect critically on the question: "what is faith?" To speak of a person's "faith-life" is to speak of change and development. As a narrative form, literature can illustrate the dynamics of faith, which remains in flux over the course of one's life. Because human beings must possess faith in something (whether religious or not), it inevitably has a narrative structure?faith ebbs and flows, flourishes and decays, develops and stagnates. Through an exploration of more than a dozen Catholic authors' novels and short stories, Brent Little argues that Catholic fiction encourages the reader to reflect upon their faith holistically, that is, the way faith informs one's affections, and how a person conceives and interacts with the world as embodied beings. Amidst the diverse stories of modern and contemporary fiction, a consistent pattern emerges: Catholic fiction portrays faith?at its most fundamental, often unconscious, level?as an act of the imagination. Faith is the way one imagines themselves, others, and creation. A person's primary faith conditions how they live in the world, regardless of the level of conscious reflection, and regardless of whether this is a "religious" faith. Acts of Faith and Imagination investigates the creative depth and vitality of the Catholic literary imagination by bringing late modern Catholic authors into dialogue with more contemporary ones. Readers will then consider well-known works, such as those by Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, and Muriel Spark in the fresh light of contemporary stories by Toni Morrison, Alice McDermott, Uwem Akpan, and several others.
Shakespeare, Lee Oser argues, is a Christian literary artist who criticizes and challenges Christians, but who does so on Christian grounds. Stressing Shakespeare’s theological sensitivity, Oser places Shakespeare’s work in the “radical middle,” the dialectical opening between the sacred and the secular where great writing can flourish. According to Oser, the radical middle was and remains a site of cultural originality, as expressed through mimetic works of art intended for a catholic (small “c”) audience. It describes the conceptual space where Shakespeare was free to engage theological questions, and where his Christian skepticism could serve his literary purposes. Oser reviews the rival cases for a Protestant Shakespeare and for a Catholic Shakespeare, but leaves the issue open, focusing, instead, on how Shakespeare exploits artistic resources that are specific to Christianity, including the classical-Christian rhetorical tradition. The scope of the book ranges from an introductory survey of the critical field as it now stands, to individual chapters on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, the Henriad, Hamlet, and King Lear. Writing with a deep sense of literary history, Oser holds that mainstream literary criticism has created a false picture of Shakespeare by secularizing him and misconstruing the nature of his art. Through careful study of the plays, Oser recovers a Shakespeare who is less vulnerable to the winds of academic and political fashion, and who is a friend to the enduring project of humanistic education. Christian Humanism in Shakespeare: A Study in Religion and Literature is both eminently readable and a work of consequence.
At the heart of Tolkienian fantasy is "recovery," a "cleaning of the windows" of our perception that we may learn to see the world again in all its strange and bewildering beauty. And, for Tolkien, to recover the world anew is to recover a sense of the world as a meaningful act of creation by a living and loving Creator. How does Tolkien accomplish this? Through "sub-creation" or mythopoeia, the "fashioning of myth." For it is in creating an imaginary world ourselves through poetry, fairy-story and myth that we come to "see" our "primary world" as itself an act of creation. In short, mythopoetic creation, far from being "lies breathed through silver," uncovers for us the truth of our world as a story of creation. This book is the first sustained attempt to show not only the centrality of recovery to Tolkien's fantasy but the way in which his fantasy affects that primal recovery in every reader. In doing so, this book not only reveals the marvelous philosophical and theological riches that underlie Tolkien's fantasy but shows how his mythopoetic fiction allows the recovery and enactment of these riches in our own lives. In these pages we learn how Tolkien's fantasy addresses fundamental problems such as the relation of language to reality, the nature of evil, the distinction between time and eternity and its relation to death and immortality, the paradox of necessity and free will in human action and the grounds for providential hope in a "happy ending." Indeed, The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien shows how for Tolkien fantasy has within itself a healing power through which intellectual, moral and existential paradoxes are resolved and our intellectual and perceptual faculties are made whole again so that they may participate with renewed vigor in the life-giving work of creation of every sort.
This book explores the intricate interplay between physical spaces and psychological landscapes in the works of Irish-American author Maeve Brennan. Brennan’s writing is now classed amongst the most important of twentieth-century Irish women’s fiction, having undergone a significant reclamation and reappraisal in the 30 years since her death. Single and childfree for most of her life, Brennan eschewed the securities of family and home, experiencing an "otherness" that she shared with her fellow New Yorkers, many of them left, she wrote, hanging on to a city half-capsized––“most of them still able to laugh as they cling to the island that is their life’s predicament.” It is a suitably ambiguous expression for a writer who cultivated an interstitial existence, whose stories inhere within a dream cycle of reiterative pasts, and whose works augment and elevate the canon of radical Irish fiction.
An examination of the dual life of Harold Frederic (1856-1898) as well as of his writing, which includes The Damnation of Theron Ware. The complexity of his life as an American living in London echoes his ambivalence about his double career in journalism and fiction writing.
Second edition (first, 1977) of a book offering practical guidelines and techniques for those wishing to effectively practice or develop this ancient skill. Seventeen short stories by well-known authors such as Mary Lavin, Edna O'Brien and Julia O'Faolain, and new writers such as Clare Boylan, Rita Kelly and Una Woods. With an introduction by the editors that examines the role of women writers in Irish literature. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Imprisonment is a central trope of Irish nationalism, often deployed to portray the injustice of an Ireland occupied by foreign rule. Irish nationalism celebrates people jailed for resistance to British forces. While such a celebratory history resists colonialist images of Irish brutality, it also generates nationalist amnesia and nostalgia. Rethinking Occupied Ireland takes this history as its point of departure, arguing that the potent visual language generated to represent national heroes facilitates a narrow conceptualization of “occupation” and “resistance.” Irish cinema has long offered a double critique—against both colonialist and nationalist historiography. Through a study of incarceration in film, Scarlata critiques state-of-emergency discourses and reveals the global relevance of Irish history to questions of terrorism, security, and sexual and gender transgression in an ever-lengthening list of crimes against the nation. The films included in this book, ranging from 1980 to 2010, explore Irish history from the perspective of those marginalized within or ejected from Irish and British national narratives, providing an ideal occasion to interrogate the legacy of colonialism and post/anticolonial nationalism. Examining Ireland’s past in relation to its present, these films become a mode of postcolonial historiography, and, Scarlata argues, they are an important component in the reevaluation of what constitutes political cinema and political resistance.
