You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book offers a new perspective on the "otherworlds" of medieval literature. These fantastical realms are among the most memorable places in medieval writing, by turns beautiful and monstrous, alluring and terrifying. Passing over a river or sea, or entering into a hollow hill, heroes come upon strange and magical realms. These places are often very beautiful, filled with sweet music, and adorned with precious stones and rich materials. There is often no darkness, time may pass at a different pace, and the people who dwell there are usually supernatural. Sometimes such a place is exactly what it appears to be--the land of heart's desire--but, the otherworld can also have a sinister side, ...
"Each of the translations in this book can be read for its own sake or as part of a triptych. By setting excerpts of Brian Merriman's Cuirt an Mhean Oiche within the acoustic of a classical myth (the story of Orpheus and Eurydice), Seamus Heaney provides a new and illuminating context for the eighteenth century Irish poem. For this paperback reissue, the poet has made some revisions in the text of the original Gallery Press edition."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Despite the best efforts of the English government, Elizabethan Ireland remained resolutely Catholic. Hutchinson examines this ‘failure’ of the Protestant Reformation. He argues that the emerging political concept of the absolutist state forms a crucial link between English policy in Ireland and the aims of the Calvinist reformers.
The first in a brand new trilogy from Sunday Times bestseller Nora Roberts, The Awakening is a story of adventure, magic and finding your home Mists, shimmering silver fingers, rose over the pale green water of the lake. They twined and twisted toward a sky quietly gray, while in the east, over the hills, a pink blush waited, like a held breath, to waken. Breen Kelly had always been a rule follower. So, when her father left when she was twelve years old, promising to return, she waited. Now, more than a decade later, she's working at a job she hates and is tired of the life that playing by the rules has dealt her. It's time to make a change. Breen makes a leap into the unknown with a summer trip to Ireland - her father's homeland. Little does she know how much of a leap until a walk in the woods leads her through a portal into another world - Talamh - where Breen will find magic, family and a destiny she could never have dreamed of 'If you're after the perfect pick-me-up, take-me-away-from-the-world read, then she's your woman' The Guardian 'Nora Roberts is, quite simply, a one-woman phenomenon' Heat 'I love Nora Roberts' Stephen King
A revelatory portrait of Britain through its islands, The Britannias weaves history, myth, and travelogue to rewrite the story of this “island nation.” From Neolithic Orkney, Viking Shetland, and Druidical Anglesey to the joys and strangeness of modern Thanet, The Britannias explores the farthest reaches of Britain’s island topography, once known by the collective term “Britanniae” (the Britains). This expansive journey demonstrates how the smaller islands have wielded disproportionate influence on the mainland, becoming the fertile ground of political, cultural, and technological innovations that shaped history throughout the archipelago. In an act of feminist inquiry, personal ad...
"Paradoxes of Social Capital" critically examines the robustness of social capital theory as an analytical tool in explaining the various 'integration' patterns amongst Moroccans in London. The book also considers how structural factors impact on the ways in which Moroccans - across generations - sustain, access and use social capital at the levels of family, ethnic community, migrant associations and schools. Furthermore, this research elaborates on how social capital serves as an identity (re)source that is continuously negotiated and redefined through (in)active group (family, ethnic, religious and national) memberships. An original model of studying the second-generation processes of adaptation - viewed as 'transversal adaptation'- is also introduced, shifting the focus from predetermined 'integration' patterns to a circular and a longitudinal approach to 'integration', where new opportunities and constraints emerge, structured by the temporal flow of life trajectories.
For the past seventy years the discipline of film studies has widely invoked the term national cinema. Such a concept suggests a unified identity with distinct cultural narratives. As the current debate over the meaning of nation and nationalism has made thoughtful readers question the term, its application to the field of film studies has become the subject of recent interrogation. In The Myth of an Irish Cinema, Michael Patrick Gillespie presents a groundbreaking challenge to the traditional view of filmmaking, contesting the existence of an Irish national cinema. Given the social, economic, and cultural complexity of contemporary Irish identity, Gillespie argues, filmmakers can no longer ...
While much has been written about Irish culture’s apparent obsession with the past and with representing childhood, few critics have explored in detail the position of children’s fiction within such discourses. This book serves to redress these imbalances, illuminating both the manner in which children’s texts engage with complex cultural discourses in contemporary Ireland and the significant contribution that children’s novels and films can make to broader debates concerning Irish identity at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Through close analysis of specific books and films published or produced since 1990, Irish Childhoods offers an insight into contrasting approaches to the representation of Irish history and childhood in recent children’s fiction. Each chapter interrogates the unique manner in which an author or filmmaker engages with twentieth century Irish history from a contemporary perspective, and reveals that constructions of childhood in Irish children’s fiction are often used to explore aspects of Ireland’s past and present.