Böcker i Irish Studies-serien

Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle's centenary adaption of J. M. Synge's classic The Playboy of the Western World had a sold-out run when it was produced at Dublin's Abbey Theater in 2007 and was brought back by popular demand in 2009. The new version is set in a contemporary Dublin pub and features the character of a Nigerian asylum-seeker in the lead role. Under the coauthorship of Bisi Adigun, artistic director of Arambe Productions-Ireland's first African theater company-and best-selling, Booker Prize-winning novelist Roddy Doyle, the play engages with issues of race and immigration in modern Ireland and aims to be a model for intercultural collaboration.This critical edition features the full text of the play, published for the first time, along with a collection of essays exploring the play's themes, cultural significance, critical reception, and the legal case that cut short its successful production run. Though the play was first produced over a decade ago, the topic of migration has only increased in its global importance over that time, and this adaptation of Playboy remains a popular touchstone among scholars of Irish theater and immigration.

Here is one of the classics of modern Gaelic literature-the autobiography of Peig Sayers, a remarkable woman who lived forty years at the edge of survival on barren Great Blasket Island, and who came to be recognized as one of the last of Ireland's traditional storytellers.Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. It reveals with fidelity, humor, and poignancy a woman's life in a bleak world where survival itself was a triumph and death as familiar as life. Peig said of her son Tomás, who was killed in a fall from a clifftop: "Instead of his body being out in the broad ocean, there he was on the smooth detached stone. . . . laid out as expertly and as calmly as if twelve women had tended him." Her own farewell to life had the same clear-eyed simplicity: "People will yet walk into the graveyard where I'll be lying; I'll be stretched out quietly and the old world will have vanished."Peig died in 1958, when she was 85. She is buried a short distance from the townland where she was born, above the sea on the Dingle Peninsula, within sight of the Great Blasket Island.Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. As Eoin McKiernan, President of the Irish American Cultural Institute, notes in his introduction, Peig has the "quality of honesty and sincerity, of life lived at the bone." Long loved in Ireland, this autobiography will now be seen for what it truly is-one of the great heart-cries of the Irish people.

Provides a richly detailed exploration of how modern Irish poetry has been shaped by, and responded to, the laws, judgments, and constitutions of both of the island's jurisdictions. This volume is the first in the growing field of law and literature to monograph exclusively on modern Ireland.

Focuses on the impact of the Famine and the Troubles on the formation and study of Irish cultural memory. Topics considered include hunger strikes, monuments to the Famine, trauma and the politics of memory in the Irish peace process, and Ulster Loyalist battles in the twenty-first century. Gathering the work of leading scholars this collection is an essential contribution to the field of Irish studies.

With its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, this book retrieves the remarkable travel accounts of Kathleen M. Murphy from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.

With its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, this book retrieves the remarkable travel accounts of Kathleen M. Murphy from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.

Investigates why writers during the long eighteenth-century so often turned to the rogue narrative to discuss Ireland. With consideration for themes of conflict, migration, religion, and gender, Lines offers up a compelling connection between the rogue themselves and the ever-popular rogue narrative in this early period of Irish writing.

In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheal mac Liammoir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate became a site of avant-garde nationalism in the Ireland's tumultuous first post-independence decades.

Ireland is a country which has come to be defined in part by an ideology which conflates nationalism with the land. In this book, Wright considers this fraught relationship between land and national identity in Irish literature. In doing so, she presents a new vision of the Irish national landscape as one that is vitally connected to larger geographical spheres.

Movies from and about Ireland have attracted huge audiences, capturing top international prizes (""The Crying Game"") and an Academy Award (""My Left Foot""). In this text, contributors take a variety of approaches to the treatment of films and film makers.

The story of Frank O'Connor is that of a shy child from a Cork slum who becomes aware that there is something beyond the confines of his life and the lives around him, something grander. And with resolve and labour, he makes his way toward it.

The first book of its kind, Literary Drowning explores depictions of the drowned body in twentieth-century Irish and Caribbean postcolonial literature, uncovering a complex transatlantic conversation that reconsiders memory, forgetfulness, and the role that each plays in the making of the postcolonial subject and nation.

Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Philip Roth and Edna O'Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In this book Dan O'Brien investigates these shared concerns of the two authors.

An accomplished novelist, short story writer, and playwright, Richard Power (1928-1970) was most well-known for his 1969 novel The Hungry Grass. Gathered together for the first time, Power's subtle and poignant stories capture the daily lives of urban and rural dwellers in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century.

Explores the contributions of a small group of Irish American women in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era who emerged as leaders, organisers, and activists. Profiles of these women suggest not only that Irish American women had a political tradition of their own but also that the diversity of the Irish American community fostered a range of priorities and approaches to activism.

Considers the ways in which the Irish canon not only represents an ongoing awareness of trauma as a literary and cultural force, but also how this representation has shifted since the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century.

Sheds new light on death and dying in twentieth- and twenty-first century Irish literature. The author examines the ways that Irish wake and funeral rituals shape novelistic discourse. She argues that the treatment of death in Irish novels offers a way of making sense of mortality and provides insight into Ireland's cultural and historical experience of death.

Between the late 1890s and the early 1900s, the young Irish writer John Millington Synge journeyed across his home country, documenting his travels intermittently for ten years. This is the first comprehensive study of Synge's travel writing about Ireland, compiled during the zeitgeist of the preindependence Revival movement.

One of the most important Irish novelists of the twentieth century, Kate O'Brien (1897-1974) was also a pioneer of women's writing. In this highly original approach to O'Brien's work, Davison traces the influence of three leading Spanish writers - Jacinto Benavente, Miguel de Cervantes, and Teresa of Avila - on O'Brien's work.

In the early twentieth century, publicly staged productions of significant historical, political, and religious events became increasingly popular - and increasingly grand - in Ireland. Dean explores the historical significance of these pageants, explaining how their popularity correlated to political or religious imperatives in twentieth-century Ireland.

In Irish fiction, the most famous example of the embrace of damnation in order to gain freedom is Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. His "non serviam," though, is not just the profound rebellion of one frustrated young man, but, as Brivic demonstrates in this sweeping account of twentieth-century Irish fiction, the emblematic and necessary standpoint for any artist wishing to envision something truly new.

Seamus Heaney's death in August 2013 brought to completion his body of work, and scholars are only now coming to understand the full scale and importance of his career. Much of the scholarship to date on Heaney has focused on his poetry. O'Brien's new work, however, focuses on Heaney's essays, book chapters, and lectures as it seeks to understand how Heaney explored the poet's role in the world.

In 1890, The Snake's Pass was published in serialized form in the periodical The People. As Bram Stoker's first full-length novel, The Snake's Pass is a heady blend of romance, travel narrative, adventure tale, folk tradition, and national tale. In this critical edition, Buchelt offers detailed and studied insight into both the novel and Stoker's life.

Drawing on both canonical and little-known texts of the Literary Revival, Bender highlights the centrality of Exodus in Ireland. In doing so, she recuperates the history of a liberation narrative that was occluded by the aesthetic of 1916, when the Christ story replaced Exodus as a model for revolution and liberation.

A story of a woman finding her way in the disorienting 1960s after a girlhood tutored by nuns and inspired by the Holy Ghost, but on a deeper level, this is a story of a woman who has suffered unimaginable loss and attempts to make sense of that loss by re-imagining her past and her own heritage.