Broken Irish


Book Description

A passionate, heartbreaking story of authority and revenge, alcoholism and futile redemption set in south Boston in the late 1990s.




Irish/ness Is All Around Us


Book Description

Focusing on Irish speakers in Catholic West Belfast, this ethnography on Irish language and identity explores the complexities of changing, and contradictory, senses of Irishness and shifting practices of 'Irish culture' in the domains of language, music, dance and sports. The author’s theoretical approach to ethnicity and ethnic revivals presents an expanded explanatory framework for the social (re)production of ethnicity, theorizing the mutual interrelations between representations and cultural practices regarding their combined capacity to engender ethnic revivals. Relevant not only to readers with an interest in the intricacies of the Northern Irish situation, this book also appeals to a broader readership in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history and political science concerned with the mechanisms behind ethnonational conflict and the politics of culture and identity in general.




Burning Heresies


Book Description

In this remarkable sequel to his critically acclaimed memoir Watching the Door, Irish journalist Kevin Myers reflects on his roller-coaster career over three decades in the Irish media, from the European conflicts he reported from to the personal conflicts he fought. Fresh from the horrors of 1970s Belfast, Myers took a job in 1979 with The Irish Times, and brilliantly evokes the comical chaos of life in the smoky newsroom of Ireland’s paper-of-record. Having taken over An Irishman’s Diary, Myers single-handedly pioneered the campaign to rehabilitate the memory of the forgotten Irish soldiers of the Great War, and in the process fell foul of the paper’s editor, the legendary Douglas Gageby. His reward were plane tickets to more perilous assignments as Myers was back in the frontline of European warzones, as communism collapsed and civil wars emerged. While Myers is at his brilliant best dodging bullets on the battlefields of Tel Aviv, Beirut and Sarajevo, he also keenly and unapologetically participates in the many cultural conflicts erupting within a rapidly changing Ireland, as he opines on a broad spectrum of Irish life, covering history, politics, religion, economics, culture and society; all explored in his inimitable prose and sardonic wit. This courageously trenchant account of journalistic conflict and hubris also forensically examines his very public fall from grace in 2017, and his legal battle with RTÉ for a public apology. Burning Heresies is a candid and eye-opening must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in Irish life and current affairs.




Phases of Irish History


Book Description

The twelve chapters in Phases of Irish History were delivered as lectures before public audiences in Dublin. These chapters make no pretense of forming an entire course of Irish history for any period. Their objective was to update and augment. These chapters presume the reader's acquaintance with some general presentation of Irish history. The author of this work Eoin MacNeill (1867 –1945), was an Irish scholar, Irish language enthusiast, Gaelic revivalist, nationalist, and politician. A key figure of the Gaelic revival, MacNeill was a co-founder of the Gaelic League to preserve the Irish language and culture. He has been described as "the father of the modern study of early Irish medieval history". Content includes: The Ancient Irish a Celtic People The Celtic Colonisation of Ireland and Britain The Pre-Celtic Inhabitants of Ireland The Five Fifths of Ireland Greek and Latin Writers on Pre-Christian Ireland Introduction of Christianity and Letters The Irish Kingdom in Scotland Ireland's Golden Age The Struggle with the Norsemen Medieval Irish Institutions The Norman Conquest The Irish Rally




Irish Identity and the Literary Revival


Book Description

First published in 1979, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, through the works of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, J. M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey, documents the complex spectrum of political, social and other pressures that helped fashion modern Ireland. At least three sets of cultural assumptions coexisted in Ireland during the years between 1890 and 1930, -- English, Irish and Anglo-Irish, each united by a common language but divided by considerable tensions and strain. The question of Irish identity forms the central theme of the study, and illustrates how it was a major, even obsessive concern for these writers. Subsidiary and interwoven themes constantly recur. Themes such as the concepts of the peasant and the hero, political nationalism, the meaning of Ireland’s history and the validity of her cultural traditions. Rather than use the literature concerned as merely endorsing evidence for a sociological or political thesis, this study allows its major themes and issues to emerge and develop from direct and close study of the work of the writers. This book will be of interest to students of literature and history.




A Source Book for Irish English


Book Description

The current book intends to provide a flexible and comprehensive bibliographical tool to those scholars working or interested in Irish English. A whole range of references (approx. 2,500) relating to Irish English in all its aspects are gathered together here and in the majority of cases annotations are supplied. The book has a detailed introduction dealing the history of Irish English, the documentation available and contains an overview of the themes in Irish English which have occupied linguists working in the field. Various appendixes offer information on the history of Irish English studies and biographical notes on scholars from this area. All the bibliographical material is contained on the accompanying CD-ROM along with appropriate software (Windows, PC) for processing the databases and texts. The databases are fully searchable, information can be exported at will and customised extracts can be created by users from within an intuitive software interface. This bibliography is part of a larger project, called the Irish English Resource Centre. Additions and updates to the bibliography can be found on the centre’s website.




Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590–1620


Book Description

Though representations of alien languages on the early modern stage have usually been read as mocking, xenophobic, or at the very least extremely anxious, listening closely to these languages in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Marianne Montgomery discerns a more complex reality. She argues instead that the drama of the early modern period holds up linguistic variety as a source of strength and offers playgoers a cosmopolitan engagement with the foreign that, while still sometimes anxious, complicates easy national distinctions. The study surveys six of the European languages heard on London's commercial stages during the three decades between 1590 and 1620-Welsh, French, Dutch, Spanish, Irish and Latin-and the distinct sets of cultural issues that they made audible. Exploring issues of culture and performance raised by representations of European languages on the stage, this book joins and advances two critical conversations on early modern drama. It both works to recover English relations with alien cultures in the period by looking at how such encounters were staged, and treats sound and performance as essential to understanding what Europe's languages meant in the theater. Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 contributes to our emerging sense of how local identities and global knowledge in early modern England were necessarily shaped by encounters with nearby lands, particularly encounters staged for aural consumption.




The Shakespearean International Yearbook


Book Description

Honoring Shakespearean scholar Michael Neill, this eleventh issue of The Shakespearean International Yearbook brings together essays by a diverse group of writers, to examine Neill's extraordinary body of work, employing his many analyses of place as points of departure for new critical investigations of Shakespeare and Renaissance culture. It also challenges us to think about the conception of place implicit in the "International" of the Yearbook's title: the violence as well as calmness, the settling and unsettling, that has worked to produce—and still works to produce—the "global." Many of the essays move out of early modern England, whether spatially (journeying to Ireland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Sudan, and New Zealand) or temporally (traveling to 20th- and 21st-century reproductions, rewritings, or reappropriations of Shakespeare and other texts). The volume concludes with an Afterword by Michael Neill. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies across the world. Among the contributors to this volume are Shakespearean scholars from Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, UK, and the US.




Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy


Book Description

Includes also Minutes of [the] Proceedings, and Report of [the] President and Council for the year (beginning 1965/66 called Annual report).




Shakespeare's Histories


Book Description

This Guide steers students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare’s history plays, enhancing their enjoyment and broadening their critical repertoire. Guides students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare’s history plays. Covers both significant early views and recent critical interventions. Substantial editorial material links the articles and places them in context. Annotated suggestions for further reading allow students to investigate further.