Literature In Ireland

Richard Tillinghast writes vividly and evocatively about the land and people of his adopted home, its culture, its literature, and its long, complex history.

Ireland is home to one of the world's great literary and artistic traditions. This book reads Irish literature and art in context of the island's coastal and maritime cultures, setting a diverse range of writing and visual art in a fluid panorama of liquid associations that connect Irish literature to an archipelago of other times and places.

A discussion of the rich written heritage of the Old and Middle Irish period, 600-1200. Chapters deal with such topics as druids, monks, poets, the beginnings of writing manuscripts, saga cycles, and stories about kings, kingship and sovereignty goddesses.

This book addresses both the dissemination and increased understanding of the specificity of Irish literature in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. This period was a crucial time of nation-building for both countries. Antonio Bibbò illustrates the various images of Ireland that circulated in Italy, focusing on political and cultural discourses and examines the laborious formation of an Irish literary canon in Italy. The center of this analysis relies on books and articles on Irish politics, culture, and literature produced in Italy, including pamplets, anthologies, literary histories, and propaganda; translations of texts by Irish writers; and archival material produced by writers, publishers, and cultural and political institutions. Bibbò argues that the construction of different and often conflicting ideas of Ireland in Italy as well as the wavering understanding of the distinctiveness of Irish culture, substantially affected the Italian responses to Irish writers and their presence within the Italian publishing field. This book contributes to the discussion on transnational aspects of canon formation, reception studies, and Italian cultural studies.

From Gaelic annals and medieval poetry to contemporary Irish literature, A History of Irish Literature and the Environment examines the connections between the Irish environment and Irish literary culture. Themes such as Ireland's island ecology, the ecological history of colonial-era plantation and deforestation, the Great Famine, cultural attitudes towards animals and towards the land, the postcolonial politics of food and energy generation, and the Covid-19 pandemic - this book shows how these factors determine not only a history of the Irish environment but also provide fresh perspectives from which to understand and analyze Irish literature. An international team of contributors provides a comprehensive analysis of Irish literature to show how the literary has always been deeply engaged with environmental questions in Ireland, a crucial new perspective in an age of climate crisis. A History of Irish Literature and the Environment reveals the socio-cultural, racial, and gendered aspects embedded in questions of the Irish environment.

What constitutes a ‘national literature’ is rarely straightforward, and it is especially complex when discussing writing for young people in an Irish context. Until recently, there was only a slight body of work that could be classified as ‘Irish children’s literature’ (whatever the parameters) in comparison with Ireland’s contribution to adult literature in the twentieth century. This volume looks critically at Irish writing for children from the 1980s to the present, examining the work of many writers and illustrators and engaging with all the major forms and genres. Topics include the gothic, the speculative, picturebooks, poetry, post-colonial discourse, identity and ethnicity, and globalization. Modern Irish children’s literature is also contextualized in relation to Irish mythology and earlier writings, thereby demonstrating the complexity of this fascinating area. The contributors, who are leading experts in their fields, examine a range of texts in relation to contemporary literary and cultural theory, and also in relation to writing for adults, thereby inviting a consideration of how well writing for a young audience can compare with writing for an adult one. This groundbreaking work is essential reading for all interested in Irish literature, childhood, and children’s literature.

This book elucidates the ways the pained and suffering body has been registered and mobilized in specifically Irish contexts across more than four hundred years of literature and culture. There is no singular approach to what pain means: the material addressed in this collection covers diverse cultural forms, from reports of battles and executions to stage and screen representations of sexual violence, produced in response to different historical circumstances in terms that confirm our understanding of how pain – whether endured or inflicted, witnessed or remediated – is culturally coded. Pain is as open to ongoing redefinition as the Ireland that features in all of the essays gathered here. This collection offers new paradigms for understanding Ireland’s literary and cultural history.

One of Ireland's foremost literary and cultural historians, Terence Brown's command of the intellectual and cultural currents running through the Irish literary canon is second to none, and he has been enormously influential in shaping the field of Irish studies. These essays reflect the key themes of Brown's distinguished career, most crucially his critical engagement with the post-colonial model of Irish cultural and literary history currently dominant in Irish Studies. With essays on major figures such as Yeats, MacNeice, Joyce and Beckett, as well as contemporary authors including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Brian Friel, this volume is a major contribution to scholarship, directing scholars and students to new approaches to twentieth-century Irish cultural and literary history.