Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 28: 2008


Book Description

This volume includes: "The Influence of 19th century Anthologies of Celtic Music in Redefining Celtic Nationalism" by Graham Aubrey; "A Reactionary Dimension in Progressive Revolutionary Theories?" by Olivier Coquelin; "The Spiteful Tongue: Breton Song Practices and the Art of the Insult" by Natalie Franz; "Celtic Democracy" by D. Blair Gibson; "Pendragon's Ancestors" by Natalie Ginoux; "When Historians Study Breton Oral Ballads: A Cultural Approach" by Eva Guillorel; "The British Tristan Tradition" by Sabine Heinz; "Time and the Translation of the Breton Laws" by Heather Laird; "Judas, His Sister, and the Miraculous Cock in the Middle Irish poem Cr st ro crochadh" by Christopher Leydon; "Se principen nominat: Rhetorical Self-Fashioning and Epistolary Style in the Letters of Owain Gwynedd" by Patricia Malone; and "Abduction, Swordplay, Monsters and Mistrust: Findabair, Gwenhwyfa and the Restoration of Honour" by Sharon Paice MacLeod.




Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 29: 2009


Book Description

This volume includes "Nations in Tune: the Influence of Irish music on the Breton Musical Record" by Yann Bevant; "Ethnicity, Geography, and the Passage of Dominion in the Mabinogi and Brut Y Brenhinedd" by Christina Chance; "Rejecting Mother's Blessing: the Absence of the Fairy in the Welsh Search for National Identity" by Adam Coward; "Gwalarn: An Attempt to Renew Breton literature" by Gwendal Denez; "At the Crossroads: World War One and the Shifting Roles of Men and Women in Breton Ballad Song Practice" by Natalie Franz; "Apocryphal Sanctity in the Lives of Irish Saints" by Maire Johnson; " 'An Dialog wtre Arzur Roe d'an Bretounet ha Guynglaff' and Its Connections with the Arthurian tradition" by Herve Le Bihan; "A Walk on the Wild Side: Women, Men and Madness" by Edyta Lehmann; "The Early Establishment of Celtic Studies in North American Universities" by Michael Linkletter; " 'The Marshalled Fence of Battle of All the Men of Earth' A Reading of C Chulainn's First Recension r astrad" by Elizabeth Moore; "Dreams of Medieval Scottish Nationhood: The Epic Case of William Wallace" by Kylie Murray; " 'Some of You Will Curse Her' Women's Fiction During the Irish-language Revival" by Riona Nic Congail; "Dating Peredur: New Light on Old Problems" by Natalia I. Petrovskaia; " 'From the Shame You Have Done' Comparing the stories of Blodeuedd and Bl thnait" by Sarah Pfannenschmidt; " 'And There was a Fourth son Llefelys' Narrative Structure and Variation in Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys" by Kelly Ann Randell; and "Fabricating Celts: How Iron Age Iberians became Indo-Europeanized during the Franco Regime" by Aaron Alzola Romero and Eduardo Sanchez-Moreno.




From Chiefdom to State in Early Ireland


Book Description

This book tracks the development of social complexity in Ireland from the late prehistoric period on into the Middle Ages. Using a range of methods and techniques, particularly data from settlement patterns, Blair Gibson demonstrates how Ireland evolved from constellations of chiefdoms into a political entity bearing the characteristics of a rudimentary state. This book argues that early medieval Ireland's highly complex political systems should be viewed as amalgams of chiefdoms with democratic procedures for choosing leaders rather than kingdoms. Gibson explores how these chiefdom confederacies eventually transformed into recognizable states over a period of 1,400 years.







In Search of the Irish Dreamtime: Archaeology and Early Irish Literature


Book Description

Ireland's oldest traditions excavated via archaeological, genetic, and linguistic research, culminating in atruly groundbreaking publication Following his account of Irish origins drawing on archaeology, genetics, and linguistics, J. P. Mallory returns to the subject to investigate what he calls the Irish Dreamtime: the native Irish retelling of their own origins, as related by medieval manuscripts. He explores the historical backbone of this version of the earliest history of Ireland, which places apparently mythological events on a concrete timeline of invasions, colonization, and royal reigns that extends even further back in time than the history of classical Greece. The juxtaposition of traditional Dreamtime tales and scientific facts expands on what we already know about the way of life in Iron Age Ireland. By comparing the world depicted in the earliest Irish literary tradition with the archaeological evidence available on the ground, Mallory explores Ireland’s rich mythological tradition and tests its claims to represent reality.




Celtic Cosmology and the Otherworld


Book Description

The early medieval manuscripts of Ireland and Britain contain tantalizing clues about the cosmology, religion and mythology of native Celtic cultures, despite censorship and revision by Christian redactors. Focusing on the latest research and translations, the author provides fresh insight into the beliefs and practices of the Iron Age inhabitants of Ireland, Britain and Gaul. Chapters cover creation and cosmogony, the deities of the Gaels, feminine power in narrative sources, druidic belief, priestesses and magical rites.




The Tragic Imagination in Shakespeare and Emerson


Book Description

What is the “tragic imagination”? And what role does it play in the works of William Shakespeare and Ralph Waldo Emerson? Explaining the tragic imagination as a creative faculty employed to answer the perennial Riddle of the Sphinx – a theory of the world that advances human freedom and dignity in the face of historical injustice, cruelty and violence – Andy Amato seeks to recover and rehabilitate this concept by revealing its significance to both key works of philosophy and literature and our contemporary world. This book begins with a close and careful reading of Emerson's first major work, Nature, in conversation with nineteenth and 20thcentury continental philosophy, critical theory and post-structuralism. Uncovering neglected elements of Emerson's philosophy, beyond his reputation as the philosopher of 'cheer', this book explores how Emersonian transcendentalism affirms rather than denies the tragic sense of life – “tragic idealism” – and makes a substantial contribution to philosophy's perpetual endeavour to solve the Riddle. In the second part of the book, Amato then employs Emerson's theoretical lens to interpret Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear. In doing so, he innovatively reframes the central themes of suffering, vision, nature, nothing, foolishness and silence toward achieving liberation. By pairing these two giants of literature and philosophy, The Tragic Imagination in Shakespeare and Emerson not only offers fresh interpretations of Nature and King Lear, but also makes the case for the renewed deployment of tragic imagination, in creative redress, to our current social-political situation.




Elemental Ecocriticism


Book Description

For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world. The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation). Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.




Gerald of Wales


Book Description

Gerald of Wales (c.1146–c.1223), widely recognized for his innovative ethnographic studies of Ireland and Wales, was in fact the author of some twenty-three works which touch upon many aspects of twelfth-century life. Despite their valuable insights, these works have been vastly understudied. This collection of essays reassesses Gerald’s importance as a medieval Latin writer and rhetorician by focusing on his lesser-known works and providing a fuller context for his more popular writings. This broader view of his corpus brings to light new evidence for his rhetorical strategies, political positioning and usage of source material, and attests to the breadth and depth of his collected works.




Gender and History


Book Description

This book provides an overview of Irish gender history from the end of the Great Famine in 1852 until the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922. It builds on the work that scholars of women’s history pioneered and brings together internationally regarded experts to offer a synthesis of the current historiography and existing debates within the field. The authors place emphasis on highlighting new and exciting sources, methodologies, and suggested areas for future research. They address a variety of critical themes such as the family, reproduction and sexuality, the medical and prison systems, masculinities and femininities, institutions, charity, the missions, migration, ‘elite women’, and the involvement of women in the Irish nationalist/revolutionary period. Envisioned to be both thematic and chronological, the book provides insight into the comparative, transnational, and connected histories of Ireland, India, and the British empire. An important contribution to the study of Irish gender history, the volume offers opportunities for students and researchers to learn from the methods and historiography of Irish studies. It will be useful for scholars and teachers of history, gender studies, colonialism, post-colonialism, European history, Irish history, Irish studies, and political history. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.