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War and Peace
Ireland since the 1960s
Christine Kinealy
Reaktion Books, 2010

In War and Peace:Ireland Since 1960, Christine Kinealy explores the political triumphs and travails in Ireland over the last five decades. War and Peace provides a thorough and up-to-date account of the unfolding of “The Troubles,” the three decades of violence and social unrest between the Catholic nationalists and the Protestant unionists. In addition, Kinealy examines the Republic of Ireland’s entry into the European Union in 1973, its often contentious relationship with England, and the changes in emigration during the period. Of additional interest to Kinealy is the effect of the women’s movement, which has given rise to the election of two female presidents, proving Ireland’s ability to accept and internalize change.

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Whitman and the Irish
Joann P. Krieg
University of Iowa Press, 2000

Though Walt Whitman created no Irish characters in his early works of fiction, he did include the Irish as part of the democratic portrait of America that he drew in Leaves of Grass. He could hardly have done otherwise. In 1855, when the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published, the Irish made up one of the largest immigrant populations in New York City and, as such, maintained a cultural identity of their own. All of this “Irishness” swirled about Whitman as he trod the streets of his Mannahatta, ultimately becoming part of him and his poetry. As members of the working class, famous authors, or close friends, the Irish left their mark on Whitman the man and poet. In Whitman and the Irish, Joann Krieg convincingly establishes their importance within the larger framework of Whitman studies.

Focusing on geography rather than biography, Krieg traces Whitman's encounters with cities where the Irish formed a large portion of the population—New York City, Boston, Camden, and Dublin—or where, as in the case of Washington, D.C., he had exceptionally close Irish friends. She also provides a brief yet important historical summary of Ireland and its relationship with America.

Whitman and the Irish does more than examine Whitman's Irish friends and acquaintances: it adds a valuable dimension to our understanding of his personal world and explores a number of vital questions in social and cultural history. Krieg places Whitman in relation to the emerging labor culture of ante-bellum New York, reveals the relationship between Whitman's cultural nationalism and the Irish nationalism of the late nineteenth century, and reflects upon Whitman's involvement with the Union cause and that of Irish American soldiers.

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Wild Colonial Girl
Essays on Edna O'Brien
Edited by Lisa Colletta and Maureen O'Connor
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
    Since the 1960 publication of her first novel, The Country Girls, award-winning Irish writer Edna O'Brien has been both celebrated and maligned. Praised for her lyrical prose and vivid female characters and attacked for her frank treatment of sexuality and alleged sensationalism, O'Brien and her work seem always to spawn controversy, including the past banning in Ireland of several of her works. O'Brien's attention to "women's" concerns such as sex, romance, marriage, and childbirth has often relegated her to critical neglect at best and, at worst, outright contempt. This essay collection promises to be a long overdue critical reevaluation and exciting rediscovery of her oeuvre.
    Wild Colonial Girl situates O'Brien in Irish contexts that allow for an appraisal of her significant contribution to a specifically Irish women's literary tradition while attesting to the potency of writing against patriarchal conventions. Each chapter's clear and detailed readings of O'Brien's fiction build a convincing case for her literary, political, and cultural importance, providing an invaluable critical guide for an enriched appreciation of O'Brien and her work.
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Wood Quay
The Clash over Dublin's Viking Past
By Thomas F. Heffernan
University of Texas Press, 1988

An urban archaeologist working anywhere in the world can imagine this scenario: armed with a small digging tool and a soft brush, the archaeologist stands at a freshly cut trench facing off a construction crew driving bulldozers. At stake is the past—the discovery and preservation of our history. Across the gap is the future—progress and new buildings for a modern world. A battle ensues. It happened in Dublin in the early 1960s.

While investigating and salvage-excavating the site for a new municipal office complex, archaeologists made one of the most important and exciting discoveries in Ireland’s history. Buried beneath the present-day city of Dublin was the original Viking settlement from the ninth or tenth century, in an extraordinary state of preservation: houses, undecayed wood, domestic furniture, jewelry, toys, tools, works of art, coins, plots, paths, a veritable map of the medieval town. Because of its impressive size and state of preservation, the site known as Wood Quay was not an “ordinary” kind of archaeological discovery, nor was the battle that followed typical.

What made Wood Quay unique was that its defender was not the archaeological authority—the National Museum of Ireland—as is usually the case, but rather a spontaneously formed movement of thousands of Dubliners. While the museum was ready to turn the site over to the city’s developers after routine salvage work had been done, a group of prominent literary and political figures seized Wood Quay, holding it for almost a month and preventing bulldozers from moving in. Realizing the significance of the find, the people of Dublin took charge and kept the builders at bay for eight years. At the same time, they were able to press the museum to return to its archaeological work there. Archaeologists ultimately were able to complete good maps of a large portion of the site and recover between one and two million artifacts.

Today, the completed Dublin civic office complex stands on the Wood Quay site, fully landscaped and without a trace of the archaeological gold mine that once lay buried below. What does remain, however, is the memory of the powerful impact the citizens of Dublin had in demanding and establishing the connection through Wood Quay to their medieval roots.

Of interest to archaeologists, historic preservationists, and city planners alike, this fascinating and beautifully written account will also engage the general reader.

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World Film Locations
Dublin
Edited by Jez Conolly and Caroline Whelan
Intellect Books, 2011
With its rich political and literary history, Dublin is a sought after destination for cinematographers who have made use of the city’s urban streetscapes and lush pastoral settings in many memorable films—among them Braveheart, The Italian Job, and the 2006 musical drama Once. World Film Locations: Dublin offers an engaging look at the many incarnations of the city onscreen through fifty synopses of the key scenes—either shot or set in Dublin—accompanied by a generous selection of full-color film stills.
 
Throughout the book, a series of essays by leading film scholars spotlight familiar actors, producers, and directors as well as some of the themes common to films shot in Dublin, including literature, politics, the city’s thriving music scene, and its long history of organized crime. Also included is a look at the representations of Dublin before, during, and after the Celtic Tiger era. Sophisticated yet accessible, this volume will undoubtedly take its place on the shelves of film buffs and those interested in Irish culture.
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Woven Shades of Green
An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature
Tim Wenzell
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature by authors who focus on the natural world and the beauty of Ireland. It begins with the Irish monks and their largely anonymous nature poetry, written at a time when Ireland was heavily forested. A section follows devoted to the changing Irish landscape, through both deforestation and famine, including the nature poetry of William Allingham, and James Clarence Mangan, essays from Thomas Gainford and William Thackerary, and novel excerpts from William Carleton and Emily Lawless. The anthology then turns to the nature literature of the Irish Literary Revival, including Yeats and Synge, and an excerpt from George Moore’s novel The Lake. Part four shifts to modern Irish nature poetry, beginning with Patrick Kavanaugh, and continuing with the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and others. Finally, the anthology concludes with a section on various Irish naturalist writers, and the unique prose and philosophical nature writing of John Moriarty, followed by a comprehensive list of environmental organizations in Ireland, which seek to preserve the natural beauty of this unique country.    

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Writing Against the Family
Gender in Lawrence and Joyce
Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

This first feminist book-length comparison of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce offers striking new readings of a number of the novelists’ most important works, including Lawrence’s Man Who Died and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson argues that a feminist reader must necessarily read with and against theories of psychoanalysis to examine the assumptions about gender embedded within family relations and psychologies of gender found in the two authors’ works. She challenges the belief that Lawrence and Joyce are opposites, inhabiting contrary modernist camps; instead they are on a continuum, with both engaged in a reimagination of gender relations.

Lewiecki-Wilson demonstrates that both Lawrence and Joyce write against a background of family material using family plots and family settings. While previous discussions of family relations in literature have not questioned assumptions about the family and about sex roles within it, Lewiecki-Wilson submits the systems of meaning by which gender is construed to a feminist analysis. She reexamines Lawrence and Joyce from the point of view of feminist psychoanalysis, which, she argues, is not a set of beliefs or a single theory but a feminist practice that analyzes how systems of meaning construe gender and produce a psychology of gender.

Lewiecki-Wilson argues against a theory of representation based on gender, however, concluding that Lawrence’s and Joyce’s texts, in different ways, test the idea of a female aesthetic. She analyzes Lawrence’s portrait of family relations in Sonsand Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love and compares Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with Lawrence’s autobiographical text. She then shows that Portrait begins a deconstruction of systems of meaning that continues and increases in Joyce’s later work, including Ulysses.

Lewiecki-Wilson concludes by showing that Lawrence, Joyce, and Freud relate family material to Egyptian myth in their writings. She identifies Freud’s essay "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of Childhood" as an important source for Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which portrays beneath the gendered individual a root androgyny and asserts an unfixed, evolutionary view of family relations.

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