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7 books match the query 'Irish Literature'

cover of Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature

Decolonisation and Criticism

The Construction of Irish Literature

Gerry Smyth

Pluto Press, 1998

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cover of Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature

Diaphanous Bodies

Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature

Jessica Colangelo

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature examines ability, as a category of embodiment and embodied experience, and in the process opens up a new area of inquiry in the growing field of literary disability studies. It argues that the construction of ability arises through a process of exclusion and forgetting, in which the depiction of sensory information and epistemological judgment subtly (or sometimes un-subtly) elide the fact of embodied subjectivity. The result is what Colangelo calls “the myth of the diaphanous abled body,” a fiction that holds that an abled body is one which does not participate in or situate experience.  The diaphanous abled body underwrites the myth that abled and disabled constitute two distinct categories of being rather than points on a constantly shifting continuum.

In any system of marginalization, the dominant identity always sets itself up as epistemologically and experientially superior to whichever group it separates itself from. Indeed, the norm is always most powerful when it is understood as an empty category or a view from nowhere. Diaphanous Bodies explores the phantom body that underwrites the artificial dichotomy between abled and disabled upon which the representation of embodied experience depends.

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cover of Emergency Writing: Irish Literature, Neutrality, and the Second World War

Emergency Writing

Irish Literature, Neutrality, and the Second World War

Anna Teekell

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Taking seriously Ireland’s euphemism for World War II, “the Emergency,” Anna Teekell’s Emergency Writing asks both what happens to literature written during a state of emergency and what it means for writing to be a response to an emergency.
 
Anchored in close textual analysis of works by Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, Louis MacNeice, Denis Devlin, and Patrick Kavanagh, and supported by archival material and historical research, Emergency Writing shows how Irish late modernism was a response to the sociopolitical conditions of a newly independent Irish Free State and to a fully emerged modernism in literature and art. What emerges in Irish writing in the wake of Independence, of the Gaelic Revival, of Yeats and of Joyce, is a body of work that invokes modernism as a set of discursive practices with which to counter the Free State’s political pieties.
 
Emergency Writing provides a new approach to literary modernism and to the literature of conflict, considering the ethical dilemma of performing neutrality—emotionally, politically, and rhetorically—in a world at war.

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cover of England, Ireland, and the Insular World: Textual and Material Connections in the Early Middle Ages

England, Ireland, and the Insular World

Textual and Material Connections in the Early Middle Ages

Mary Clayton

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017

ISAS Dublin 2013. England, Ireland and the Insular World: Textual and Material Connections in the Early Middle Ages is a collection of twelve essays related to the theme of the 2013 conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, ‘Insular Cultures’. Contributors cover a broad range of topics, from early medieval agriculture in Ireland and England, to sculpture, manuscript illumination and script, homilies, hagiography, aristocratic gift-giving, relics, calendars, Beowulf, and Anglo-Saxon perceptions of the Celtic peoples, considering connections, parallels and differences between Anglo-Saxon England and its insular neighbors. The volume will be of interest to all those working on Early Medieval history, literature, archaeology, liturgy, art, and manuscripts.

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cover of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland

Anthony Bradley

University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

This collection of stimulating essays focuses on issues of gender and sexuality in Irish history, biography, language, literature, and drama. While the contributors employ a variety of methodological and critical perspectives, they share the conviction that the gendering of Ireland--not only of the nation, but of actual Irish men and women--is a construction of culture and ideology and not simply one of nature.
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cover of Selected Writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America

Selected Writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America

John V. Kelleher. Edited by Charles Fanning

Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

A collection of eighteen critical essays and twenty-six translations spanning the career of one of the found­ing intellects of Irish Studies, the Selected Writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America consists of five accessible sections. The first gathers Kelleher’s essays on the most widely known Irish cultural phe­nomenon—the literary renaissance of the early twentieth century. Part two contains his judicious assessments of Irish literature in its post-Revolutionary phase. The third section includes Kelleher’s in­sightful essays on the experience of the Irish in America. The fourth section contains essays that ex­amine early Irish literature and culture, opening with a benchmark essay for Irish Studies, “Early Irish His­tory and Pseudo-History,” which was read at the inau­gural meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies in 1961. The collection concludes with Kelleher’s translations and adaptations of poems in Old, Middle, and Modern Irish, illustrating his com­mand of the language at every stage.

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cover of The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880-1922

The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880-1922

Joseph Valente

University of Illinois Press, 2011

This study aims to supply the first contextually precise account of the male gender anxieties and ambivalences haunting the culture of Irish nationalism in the period between the Act of Union and the founding of the Irish Free State. To this end, Joseph Valente focuses upon the Victorian ethos of manliness or manhood, the specific moral and political logic of which proved crucial to both the translation of British rule into British hegemony and the expression of Irish rebellion as Irish psychomachia. The influential operation of this ideological construct is traced through a wide variety of contexts, including the career of Ireland's dominant Parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell; the institutions of Irish Revivalism--cultural, educational, journalistic, and literary; the writings of both canonical authors (Yeats, Synge, Gregory, and Joyce) and subcanonical authors (James Stephens, Patrick Pearse, Lennox Robinson); and major political movements of the time, including suffragism, Sinn Fein, Na Fianna E Éireann, and the Volunteers.
 
The construct of manliness remains very much alive today, underpinning the neo-imperialist marriage of ruthless aggression and the sanctities of duty, honor, and sacrifice. Mapping its earlier colonial and postcolonial formations can help us to understand its continuing geopolitical appeal and danger.
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