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This book explores the wilful self-destruction of Ireland since the mid-1990s. It proposes that a Celtic confederation should co-exist with the UK in IONA. The high resource, low population density countries of Ireland and Scotland should reach out to their peers in Wales and England with an offer of belonging. An immense and beautiful new possibility is proposed to replace the current illegal congeries.
From the softest caress to the harshest blow, touch lies at the heart of our experience of the world. Now, for the first time, this deepest of senses is the subject of an extensive historical exploration. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch fleshes out our understanding of the past with explorations of lived experiences of embodiment from the middle ages to modernity. This intimate and sensuous approach to history makes it possible to foreground the tactile foundations of Western culture--the ways in which feelings shaped society. Constance Classen explores a variety of tactile realms including the feel of the medieval city; the tactile appeal of relics; the social histories of pa...
Breaking with a powerful tradition among scholars that insists that Beckett’s Irishness is no more than an accident of birth, Harrington provides compelling evidence to the ways in which many of Beckett’s best-known texts are deeply involved in Irish issues and situations. Providing new readings of such works as More Pricks Than Kicks, Murphy, Watt, Mercier and Camier, Waiting for Godot, and Endgame, Harrington provides an understanding of Beckett’s work in its representation of Ireland, of Irish history, and of Irish literary traditions.
These short stories invite the reader to see Ireland afresh. Included are works by well-known authors such as Mary Lavin, Edna O'Brien, and Julia O'Faolain; the collection also showcases new writers such as Clare Boylan, Rita Kelly, and Una Woods. Repeatedly, the stories bring us up against the inherent contradiction of provincial Ireland and Ireland as a modern European state, and the complexities of women's lives in both. Helen Lucy Burke writes tellingly of an older, devout Irish Catholic woman as she encounters the startling realities of Italian Catholic Rome. Other stories also dwell on traditional Irish themes and situations through refreshingly varied voices. Ita Daly movingly portray...
Seamus Heaney, widely considered the most gifted living poet in Ireland and Britain, is the first Irish poet since Yeats to gain an international reputation. In this remarkable study, henry Hart discusses Heaney's poems, his creative and personal situations, and his assimilation of contemporary literary theory. From Heaney's Ulster background to poetic influences as diverse as Dante and Wordsworth, Yeats and Bly, Hart offers sophisticated, lucid insights. Hart argues that the best way into Heaney's poetic world is in seeking to understand him—as with Blake and Yeats—in terms of oppositions and conflicts, progressions and syntheses. At the root of all his work is a multifaceted argument w...
Moore's work exhibits a profound recognition of the forces of heredity, gender, culture, and history while simultaneously declaring his belief in an autogenous self. In early novels like A Drama in Muslin and Esther Waters, there is a notable conflict between his postulation of the pure, instinctive individual and the emphasis upon the shaping power of heredity and economics inherent in the traditions of social realism that he adopts. In The Untilled Field, The Lake, and later works, Moore perfects a narrative technique that in highlighting the power of subjective memory, allows his characters to work out a new relation with the forces of history.
Elaborate analogies between Irish and Jewish history, between Irish and Jewish subjectivities, occur with surprising frequency throughout American literature. They recall James Joyce's Leopold Bloom and episodes of Ulysses, Douglas Hyde's analogies during the Celtic Revival between learning Hebrew and learning Irish, and a myriad of claims of an unusual relationship between these peoples that goes beyond comparisons of their respective diasporic histories. But how does one describe this uncanny relationship, one often marked by hostility, affinity, and ambivalence, without essentializing people whose origins, class affiliation, educations, life experiences, and so on are enormously different...
"The Detective and the Cowboy," "Wondering Where All the Dust Comes From," "Ejaculations and Silence," and "Where the Corkscrew Was" these are Garry Leonard's chapter titles for his readings of four of the stories, "An Encounter," "Eveline," "The Boarding House," and "Clay." The titles convey the freshness and thoughtfulness that are indicative of all of Leonard's new readings of these fifteen often-read stories. Leonard begins with an excellent overview of Lacan and proceeds to examine each story in a separate chapter. Lacan's rethinking of human subjectivity plays throughout the book and ultimately unites it. Not only does Leonard's work preserve the complex interplay between Lacanian theo...