Search results for ""Cork University Press""

This collection of essays, written by many of the foremost McGahern scholars, provides solid reasons for why the Leitrim writer has assumed canonical status since his premature death in 2006, an event which sparked something akin to a period of national mourning in Ireland. The reason why so many people felt his loss so keenly is probably due to the fact that McGahern's attention to detail, his feel for landscape, his understanding of the Irish psyche, his carefully chiselled prose, his love of social and religious rituals, all contributed to his remarkable evocation of what it was like to live in Ireland at a specific time in its evolution - that is to say, from the time of independence up to the beginning of the new millennium. This is a multidisciplinary collection which situates McGahern in his literary context and explains the ingredients that make him such a revered writer, one who had his finger firmly on the pulse of the nation. Violence, love and desire, ecology, memory, friendship, photography, rage, sin, are examined with a view to assessing how they are pertinent to McGahern's work and the extent to which they contribute to his literary legacy. Declan Kiberd speaks from personal experience of the young writer who taught in Belgrove National School and was fascinated with cricket, whereas Donal Ryan describes how reading McGahern almost caused him to abandon his literary vocation because of his belief that he could never write like this master of prose. There is something in this book for both the specialist and non-specialist alike and it is essential reading for anyone with even a passing interest in McGahern the man and writer. Derek Hand is Head of the School of English at Dublin City University and Eamon Maher is a Lecturer in Technological University Dublin

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Joanne Hayes, at 24 years of age, concealed the birth and death of her baby in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1984. Subsequently she confessed to the murder, by stabbing, of another baby. All of the scientific evidence showed that she could not have had this second baby. The police nevertheless, insisted on charging her and, after the charges were dropped, continued to insist that she had given birth to twins conceived of two different men. A public tribunal of inquiry was called to examine the behaviour of the police and their handling of the case. The police, in defence of themselves and in justification of confessions" obtained, called a succession of male experts on the medical, social and moral roman catholic fibre of Joanne Hayes. Her married lover detailed the times, places and manner of her love making. Using the twins' theory as a springboard, the question was posed and debated: Did she love this man or what was he and other men prepared to do with her? After six months of daily discussion among the men, the judge declared 'There were times when we all believed she had twins'. The treatment of Joanne Hayes, who stood accused of no crime, was a model for Irish male attitudes to woman. She was caught up in a time of rapid social change between two Irelands, an earlier Ireland in which the Catholic Church had held a moral monopoly and a new liberal and secular Ireland.

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Newgrange is simply the best example of a passage tomb in Western Europe and its solstice phenomenon, in particular, has made it famous throughout the world. It is also conveniently located only an hour from Dublin. While it is the best-known ancient site in Ireland, many aspects of Newgrange are not clearly understood, other aspects are just taken for granted. As two archaeologists with a lifetime of experience in the Boyne Valley we shared with most visitors the same uncertainties about the tomb; why is there a three metre high quartz wall around its entrance, how does the roof box work, what was the inspiration for its art and architecture? We chose to write this book in order to present our own personal interpretation of an intricate and often hotly debated story.The book is arranged in such a way as to replicate a visit to the site. It pauses over points of art and construction that the visitor will not have had time to examine in detail on a conventional guided tour. "Newgrange" is the synthesis of years of excavation and research at home and abroad; from the detailed reports stemming from the excavations of M. J. O'Kelly to current international debate about its construction and reconstruction. This is the first book on Newgrange to draw on O'Kelly's private papers and to incorporate the results of more recent and as yet unpublished excavations. This book will clarify many complex issues that have been addressed in widely scatted fora, using original illustrations to assist the reader. It places the monument in its broader cultural context. Our search for the origins of Newgrange took us to Brittany, Iberia (Spain and Portugal), Malta, the Orkney Islands and Wales and has enriched our understanding of its place in European prehistory.

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This book explores the Skelligs, Ireland's most dramatic and beautiful Atlantic islands, and focuses particularly on Skellig Michael, a famous UNESCO World Heritage Site. It considers why the construction of a remarkable monastic site near the peak of this island over a thousand years ago stands as one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of Christianity. The Book of the Skelligs combines different approaches to deepening our understanding of the islands, combining the perspectives of history, archaeology, cultural geography, oral tradition, literature and natural science. It interprets distinctive features, both physical and human, that shape the unique character of these islands while also exploring their geology, marine and terrestrial life as well as the historical background and cultural setting of Skellig Michael's monastic remains. It also considers the impact of the Vikings, and the construction of lighthouses a millennium later. Drawing on appropriate disciplines, the book reveals how a unique cultural landscape was generated by human activities over long periods of time. The editors and contributors have incorporated a wide range of illustrative material including maps, paintings, and photographs throughout the book, many of which have not been published before. It comprises over forty individual chapters and case studies in which the work of academics and independent scholars is combined with that of poets and artists to provide a wide range of perspectives on Skelligs' distinctive character - both natural and human - during different periods. The aim of the editors is to produce a well-informed, accessible, highly readable, and generously illustrated volume that succeeds in conveying a true sense of the cultural richness and complexity of these remarkable islands. The blend of text and images is an important part of the book, making it both suitable for the general reader and a wide range of teaching programmes.

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Billy Colfer's Wexford Castles expands the IRISH LANDSCAPES series by taking a thematic approach, while still staying loyal to the central landscape focus. Rather than adapting a narrowly architectural approach, he situates these buildings in a superbly reconstructed historical, social, and cultural milieu. County Wexford has three strikingly different regions - the Anglo-Norman south, the hybridised middle and the Gaelic north - which render it a remarkable version in parvo of the wider island. Colfer's wide-angle lens takes in so much than the castles themselves, as he ranges widely and deeply in reading these striking buildings as texts, revealing the cultural assumptions and historical circumstances which shaped them. In this most cosmopolitan of counties, we range far and wide in search of the wide-spreading roots of its cultural landscape - from the Crusades and the Mani peninsula in Greece to the Bristol Channel, from Crac des Chevaliers to Westminster, from the Viking north and the cold Atlantic to the warm Mediterranean south. The book breaks new ground in exploring the long-run cultural shadow cast by the Anglo-Normans and their castles, as this appears in the Gothic Revival, in the poetry of Yeats and in the surprisingly profuse crop of Wexford historians and writers. While most books on a single architectural form can end up visually monotonous, creativity has been lavished on this volume in terms of keeping the images varied, fresh and constantly appealing. The result is a sympathetic and innovative treatment of the castles, understood not just as a mere architectural form, but as keys to unlocking the mentalite of those who lived in them. Wexford Castles: landscape, context and settlement is a worthy conclusion of Billy's Colfer's superb trilogy of landscape studies.

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The novelist J.G. Farrell - known to his friends as Jim - was drowned on August 11, 1979 when he was swept off rocks by a sudden storm while fishing in the West of Ireland. He was in his early forties. Had he not sadly died so young,A" remarked Salman Rushdie in 2008, there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary.A" The Siege of Krishnapur, the second of Farrell's Empire Trilogy, won the Booker Prize in 1973, and it was selected as one of only six previous winners to compete in the 2008 international 'Best of Booker' competition. The strength of American interest in Farrell's books is underlined by the inclusion of all three Trilogy novels in the Classics imprint of the New York Review of Books. Troubles won the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. Many of these selected letters are written to women whom Jim Farrell loved and whom he inadvertently hurt. His ambition to be a great writer in an age of minimal author's earnings ruled out the expense of marriage and fatherhood, so self-sufficiency was his answer. Books Ireland has astutely portrayed him as 'a mystery wrapped in an enigma, a man who wanted solitude and yet did not want it, wanted love but feared commitment, reached out again and again but, possibly through fear of rejection, was always the first to cut the cord.' But Farrell's kindness, deft humour and gift for friendship reached across rejection, which must account for why so many such letters were kept. Funny, teasing, anxious and ambitious, these previously unpublished letters to a wide range of friends give the reader a glimpse of this private man. Ranging from childhood to the day before his death, Farrell's distinctive letters have the impact of autobiography.

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The Great Famine is possibly the most pivotal event/experience in modern Irish history. Its global reach and implications cannot be underestimated. In terms of mortality, it is now widely accepted that over a million people perished between the years 1845-1852 and at least one million and a quarter fled the country, the great majority to North America, some to Australia and a significant minority ((0.3 million) to British cities. Ireland had been afflicted by famine before the events of the 1840s; however the Great Famine is marked by both its absolute scale and its longevity. It is also better remembered because it was the most recent and best documented famine. This atlas comprising over fifty individual chapters and case studies will provide readers with a broad range of perspectives and relevant insights into this tragic event. The atlas begins by acknowledging the impossibility of adequately representing the Great Famine or any major world famine. Yet by exploring a number of themes from a reconstruction of pre-Famine Ireland onwards to an exploration of present-day modes of remembering; by the use of over 150 highly original computer generated parish maps of population decline, social transformation and other key themes between the census years 1841 and 1851: and through the use of poetry, contemporary paintings and accounts, illustrations and modern photography, what this atlas seeks to a achieve is a greater understanding of the event and its impact and legacy. This atlas seeks to try and bear witness to the thousands and thousands of people who died and are buried in mass Famine pits or in fields and ditches, with little or nothing to remind us of their going. The centrality of the Famine workhouse as a place of destitution is also examined in depth. Likewise the atlas seeks to represent and understand the conditions and experiences of the many thousands who emigrated from Ireland in those desperate years. Included are case studies of famine emigrants in cities such as Liverpool, Glasgow, New York and Toronto. A central concern of the atlas is to seek to understand why a famine of this scale should occur in a nineteenth-century European country, albeit a country which was subject to imperial rule. In addition, it seeks to reveal in detail the working-out and varying consequences of the Famine across the island. To this end, apart from presenting an overall island-wide picture, Famine experiences and patterns will be presented separately for the four provinces. These provincial explorations will be accompanied by intimate case studies of conditions in particular localities across the provinces. The atlas also seeks to situate the Great Irish Famine in the context of a number of world famines. To achieve these goals and understandings, the atlas includes contributions from a wide range of scholars who are experts in their fields - from the arts, folklore, geography, history, archaeology, Irish and English languages and literatures.

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This book explores the rich seam in Finnegans Wake of references to Ulster, to its geography, myth and history: a subject which has received relatively little attention in Joyce studies. Joyce portrays Ulster as sharing a complex relationship with the rest of Ireland, one which combines difference with inclusion. He makes many references in the Wake to the historical factors, from the sixteenth-century plantations to the Anglo-Irish War, which contributed to the gradual estrangement of the province (at least its majority population) from the rest of Ireland. Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake between 1923 and 1939. He was, therefore, ideally placed to interrogate the trauma of partition and the growing pains of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. He sketches these historical moments and times satirically, and with disappointment and heartfelt regret. A century after partition, borders are again prominent physical and symbolic markers of difference, of exclusion of the outsider, not just in Ireland and Britain, but across the world. Joyce's satirical assault on intolerance, national and global, is as pertinent today as it was when he embarked on Finnegans Wake a century ago.

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Rewriting Our Stories: Education, empowerment and well-being harnesses the therapeutic power of storytelling to convert feelings of fear and powerlessness into affirmative life narratives. Rather than seeing fear as an outcome, we can view it as a feeling in the moment largely governed by narratives. Many of our fears are stories we tell ourselves, even if they are largely fictional and rooted in sociocultural belief systems. The result is that we often feel helpless in the face of those fears. This transformational book considers a potent antidote: by recognising our recurring negative stories, we can rewrite and transform them to achieve greater empowerment and well-being in our lives. Storytelling is an antidote to fear. Throughout human existence, no matter where our place of origin or when in history, storytelling shapes our societies, influencing personal, sociocultural, educational, and public discourses that impact how we live. Creating and communicating the language of stories - to ourselves and others - enhances our innate voices and can empower us to engage in greater empathy, compassion, and possibility. Intended for educators, leaders, therapists, mental health professionals, change management, or youth organisations, as well as the general public, Derek Gladwin offers practical and positive tools for everyone to re-author their lives.

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The Coastal Atlas of Ireland is a celebration of Ireland's coastal and marine spaces. Drawing on written contributions from over 100 authors from across the island of Ireland and beyond, the Atlas takes an explicitly all-island approach; though the work has a much wider relevance and potential reader interest. It is organised into six sections, comprising a total of 33 chapters, that take the reader from the distant geological past, by way of the prehistoric era and a focus on the island's physical environments, through time and the human colonisation of Ireland, to the complex cultural and economic landscapes of the near past and the present day. It concludes with an assessment of the importance of coastal and marine environments in understanding the island's past, appreciating the present, and contemplating future opportunities and challenges. Although not claiming to be encyclopaedic, when read in its entirety the Atlas will provide readers with a fascinating and comprehensive excursion through time and space along Ireland's coastline. The Atlas is equally suited to being read in progression or, if preferred, can be dipped into and navigated according to the specific interests of the reader. Within each chapter, in addition to the core text, a series of featured subjects and case studies provide greater-depth explorations of particular topics or examples related to the central theme. In addition, the maps, photos and other illustrations that accompany the text have been provided with self-contained captions that may also be browsed before a more immersive reading is undertaken. Ireland has often emerged as a global leader in its many engagements with the sea, including in marine and coastal science, the pursuit of a 'blue' (and green) economy, the championing of conservation goals, and in the development of sustainable marine renewable-energy resources. In the middle of the current "UN Decade for Ocean Science"(UNESCO), the Atlas celebrates these achievements, while pointing the way for future research and explorations that build on these foundations. The complex of physical and human themes developed in this Atlas has international relevance for coastal communities worldwide, and especially those located in mid-latitudes. Nowhere else in the world has such an all-embracing and multifaceted exploration of a nation's, or an island's, coast been undertaken.

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Dublin's Natural History Museum is a uniquely preserved sliver of the past, an intact example of a nineteenth-century natural science collection. While its polished cases and stuffed animals show us what the museum looked like in its heyday, this book is the first detailed exploration of its early history, showing how and why it came into being, and what it meant in nineteenth-century Irish culture. From its earliest days as a small collection at the Royal Dublin Society to the gala inauguration of its new home on Merrion Square in 1857, everyone had an idea about what it was for, and how natural science would benefit Ireland. It was the first public museum in Ireland, a project of the RDS that was supported by central government as an educational venue, and was frequented by ordinary citizens and visitors as well as leading lights of natural science. Its history offers a view of science in Ireland showing that the museum was built over time by donations from citizens and scientific amateurs as well as professionals, and that Irish men of science shaped new knowledge from the raw material in the collections. Far from the aura of genteel nostalgia that continues to attract visitors today, the Natural History Museum of the nineteenth century was an active scientific institution with strong connections to the wider sphere of European science, and shows how participation in natural science was a form cultural activity for the people who engaged with the museum.

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The Atlas of the Irish Revolution is a landmark publication that presents scholarship on the revolutionary period in a uniquely accessible manner. Featuring over 200 original maps and 300 images, the Atlas includes 120 contributions by leading scholars from a range of disciplines. They offer multiple perspectives on the pivotal years from the 1912 Home Rule crisis to the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923. Using extensive original data (much of it generated from newly-released archival material), researchers have mapped social and demographic change, political and cultural activity, state and non-state violence and economic impacts. The maps also portray underlying trends in the decades before the revolution and capture key aspects of the revolutionary aftermath. They show that while the Irish revolution was a 'national' event, it contained important local and regional variations that were vital to its outcomes. The representation of island-wide trends stand alongside street-level, parish, county and provincial studies that uncover the multi-faceted dynamics at play.The Atlas also captures the international dimensions of a revolution that occurred amidst the First World War and its tumultuous aftermath. Revolutionary events in Ireland received global attention because they profoundly challenged the British imperial project. Key revolutionaries operated transnationally before, during and after the conflict, while the Irish diaspora provided crucial support networks. The often neglected roles of women and workers are illuminated, while commentators consider the legacies of the revolution, including collective memories, cultural representations and historical interpretations. The Atlas of the Irish Revolution brings history to life for general readers and students, as well as academics. It represents a ground-breaking contribution to the historical geography of these compelling years of conflict, continuity and change.

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The book analyses the relationship between crime and conflict in Northern Ireland since the establishment of the Northern Irish state in 1921. Despite the vast research literature that focuses on Northern Ireland's political divisions and the violence of the 'Troubles', the relationship between these issues and crime has received much less attention.

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When Patrick Pearse founded an Irish language school for boys in 1908 his aim was to create a modern, Irish male citizen from the ancient models of masculinity. Pearse's Patriots explores how the idea of a modern Irish boyhood was created at St. Enda's through Christian iconography and mythology as well as a modern preoccupation with patriotism, Gaelic games, theatre and juvenile literature

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Of War and War's Alarms is a unique study of war and revolution and their impact on the writing lives of Irish poets and novelists from WW1 and the Easter Rising through the War of Independence to the Spanish Civil War, WWII and the Northern 'Troubles'.These timely reflections on literature in wartime include such figures as W B Yeats, Thomas MacGreevy, Seamus Heaney along with Francis Ledwidge, Charles Donnelly and Padraic Fiacc, Benedict Kiely, William Trevor, John Hewitt and Christabel Bielenberg. Of War and War's Alarms is a fascinating narrative that builds upon Gerald Dawe's achievement in his original ground-breaking anthology of Irish war poems, Earth Voices Whispering.

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This powerful analysis of the 'wise women healer' from the oral traditions of Ireland's rural communities, is unique in its depth and perspective. Stories, told and retold, embedded in the texture of culture and community, collected and studied for many decades, are here translated and made available to the general reader for the first time. The figure of the 'wise woman', the 'hag', the Cailleach, or the 'Red Woman' are part of an oral tradition which has its roots in pre-Christian Ireland. In the hands of Gearoid O Crualaich, these figures are subtly explored to reveal how they offered a complex understanding of the world, of human psychology and its predicaments. The thematic structure of the book brings to the fore universal themes such as death, marriage, childbirth and healing, and invites the reader to see the contemporary relevance of the stories for themselves.

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The collection of 28 Ogam stones at UCC represents the largest collection of Ogam inscriptions on open display in Ireland. In this guide Damian McManus places the stones in their literary, linguistic and archaeological context, and discusses the origins of Ogam, its distribution, execution and significance. The origins of the UCC collection are discussed, the provenance of each stone outlined and each inscription is described and carefully considered. The last detailed study of this collection, The Ogham Stones, University College, Cork by Rev. Patrick Power was published in 1932. Damian McManus now presents a new reading of the inscriptions in light of the research conducted in the intervening years. The Ogam Stones at University College Cork will be an invaluable guide for students, scholars and all those interested in Irish heritage.

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This book focuses on the teaching of English in post-primary classrooms. Each chapter approaches an element of the teaching of English from theoretical and practical perspectives where the reader gets an opportunity to reflect upon practice through theoretically-informed lenses.The book assists teachers in knitting together theory and practice in the English classroom. Many of the books available to teachers of English either provide a list of useful strategies or else they provide rich theoretical underpinnings to the pedagogy of English. We bring these worlds together in one volume that will act as a guide to practicing teachers of English throughout the continuum of teacher education, from initial teacher education, through induction, whilst also serving as a resource to maturing professionals in the classroom.

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In 1989 Edna Longley remarked that if Catholics were born Irish, Protestants had to 'work their passage to Irishness'. With eighteen essays by scholars with individual perspectives on Irish Protestant history, this book explores a number of those passages. Some were dead ends. Some led nowhere in particular. But others allowed southern Irish Protestants - those living in the Irish Free State and Republic - to make meaningful journeys through their own sense of Irishness. Through the lives and work, rest and play of Protestant participants in the new Ireland - sportsmen, academics, students, working class Protestants, revolutionaries, rural women, landlords, clerics - these essays offer refreshing interpretations as to what it meant to be Protestant and Irish in the changed political dispensation after Irish independence in 1922. While acknowledging that Protestant reactions were complex, ranging from 'keeping the head down' in a ghetto, through a sort of low-level loyalism, to out-and-out active republicanism, this book takes a fresh look at the positive contribution that many Protestants made to an Ireland that was their home and where they wanted to live. It wasn't always easy, and the very Catholic ethos of the State was often jarring and uncomfortable - but by and large Protestants reached an equitable accommodation with independent Ireland. The proof of that lies in a continued community vibrancy - in Bishop Hodges of Limerick's words in 1944, more than ever able 'to express a method of living valuable to the State'.

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Between the fifth century and the ninth, several thousand churches were founded in Ireland, a greater density than most other regions of Europe. This period saw fundamental changes in settlement patterns, agriculture, social organisation, rituals and beliefs, and churches are an important part of that story. The premise of this book is that landscape archaeology is one of the most fruitful ways to study them. By looking at where they were placed in relation to pagan ritual and royal sites, burial grounds, and settlements, and how they fared over the centuries, we can map the shifting strategies of kings, clerics and ordinary people. The result is a fascinating new perspective on this formative period, with wider implications for the study of social power and religious change elsewhere in Europe. The earliest churches, founded at a time of religious diversity (400-550), were often within royal landscapes, showing that some sections of the elite chose to make space for the new religion. These often lost out to new monasteries positioned at a remove from core royal land, making it possible to grant them the great estates on which their wealth was based (550-800). Now, however, founding churches was no longer a prerogative of kings for we see numerous lesser churches outside these estates. In this way middle-ranking people helped transform the landscape and shape religious cultures in which rituals and beliefs of local origin co-existed alongside Christianity. Finally, in the Viking Age (800-1100), some lesser churches were abandoned while community churches began to exert more of a gravitational pull, foreshadowing the later medieval parish system.

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There was no native tradition of theatre in Irish. Thus, language revivalists were forced to develop the genre ex nihilo if there was to be a Gaelic drama that was not entirely made up of translations. The earliest efforts to do so at the beginning of the 20th century were predictably clumsy at best, and truly dreadful at worst. Yet by the 1950s, a handful of Gaelic playwrights were producing plays in Irish worthy of comparison not only with those by their Irish contemporaries working in English but also with drama being produced elsewhere in Europe as well as in North America. Obviously, Gaelic drama transitioned with surprising speed from what one early critic called 'the Ralph Royster Doyster Stage' to this new level of sophistication. This book argues that this transition was facilitated by the achievements of a handful of playwrights - Piaras Beaslai, Gearoid O Lochlainn, Leon O Broin, Seamus de Bhilmot, and Walter Macken - who between 1910 and 1950 wrote worthwhile new plays that dealt with subjects and themes of contemporary interest to Irish-speaking audiences, in the process challenging their fellow dramatists, introducing Gaelic actors to new developments and styles in world theatre, and educating Gaelic audiences to demand more from theatre in Irish than a night out or a chance to demonstrate their loyalty to the revivalist cause. This book, which discusses in some detail all of the extant plays by these five transitional playwrights, fills a gap in our knowledge of theatre in Irish (and indeed of theatre in Ireland in general), in the process providing clearer context for the appreciation of the work of their successors, playwrights who continue to produce first-rate work in Irish right to the present day.

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In 1983 Gerry Kennedy set off on a tour through Russia, China, Japan and the USA to visit others involved in the global anti-war movement. Only dimly aware of his Victorian ancestors: George Boole, forefather of the digital revolution and James Hinton, eccentric philosopher and advocate of polygamy, he had directly followed in the footsteps of two dynasties of radical thinkers and doers.Their notable achievements, in which the women were particularly prominent, involved many spheres. Boole's wife, Mary Everest, niece of George Everest, surveyor of the eponymous mountain, was an early advocate of hands-on education. Of the five talented Boole daughters, Ethel Voynich, wife of the discoverer of the enigmatic, still unexplained Voynich Manuscript, campaigned with Russian anarchists to overthrow the Tsar. Her 1897 novel The Gadfly, filmed later with music by Shostakovich, sold in millions behind the Iron Curtain. She was rumoured to have had an affair with the notorious 'Ace of Spies', Sidney Reilly. One of Ethel's sisters married Charles Howard Hinton: a leading exponent of the esoteric realm of the fourth dimension and inventor of the gunpowder baseball-pitcher.Of their descendants, Carmelita Hinton also pioneered progressive education in the USA at her school in Putney, Vermont. Her children dedicated their lives to Mao's China. Appalled by the dropping on Japan of the atomic bomb that she had helped design, Joan Hinton defected to China and actively engaged in the Cultural Revolution. William Hinton wrote the influential documentary Fanshen based on his experience in 1948 of revolutionary change in a Shanxi village. Other members of the clan became renowned in their fields of physics, entomology and botany. Their combined legacy of independent and constructive thinking is perhaps typified by the invention of the Jungle Gym: the climbing-frame now used by children the world over. In The Booles and the Hintons the author embarks on a quest to reveal the stories behind their remarkable lives.

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The remarkable story of the money sent by the Choctaw to the Irish in 1847 is one that is often told and remembered by people in both nations. This gift was sent to the Irish from the Choctaw at the height of the Great Irish Famine, just sixteen years after the Choctaw began their march on the Trail of Tears toward the areas west of the Mississippi River. Famine Pots honours that extraordinary gift and provides further context about and consideration of this powerful symbol of cross-cultural synergy through a collection of essays and poems that speak volumes of the empathy and connectivity between the two communities. As well as signalling patterns of movement and exchange, this study of the gift exchange invites reflection on processes of cultural formation within Choctaw and Irish society alike, and sheds light on long-time concerns surrounding spiritual and social identities. This volume aims to facilitate a fuller understanding of the historical complexities that surrounded migration and movement in the colonial world, which in turn will help lead to a more constructive consideration of the ways in which Irish and Native American Studies might be drawn together today.

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The book argues that trade unionism must break into the new worlds of work by radically transforming contemporary trade union structures and culture which renders the movement largely alien to younger workers employed in the gig and digital economies.

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This book argues that we have got it wrong in the West with our belief in a 'self' that is autonomous and separate from others, exemplified by the entrepreneurial self: always on, always positive and always self-improving. This is the neoliberal self, a particular creature of late capitalism. However, as argued here, this view is harmful to us. It is the source of much of our suffering. Proposing as an antidote a Zen Buddhist account of the self, the book points to the possibility of true human liberation and a kinder world for all. In Zen, the self is not separate from others and our individual and collective suffering is intimately bound together. The author, a social scientist and long-standing Zen practitioner, draws on both personal experience and scholarly insight to make her case. No prior knowledge of Buddhism or of neoliberal thought is required of the reader - just a willingness to let go of some preconceived ideas and a curiosity about a different way of being.

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The Irish composer, Ina Boyle (1889-1967), was born in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, where she enjoyed a sheltered childhood as a member of an Anglo-Irish family with roots in the medical, military and diplomatic professions. Her first music teacher was her clergyman father, who made violins for a hobby. She started to compose from an early age and soon found a passion for music that lasted a lifetime, spanning two world wars, the 1916 rebellion, the war of independence, the civil war and the economic war.Ina Boyle studied privately in Dublin with C.H. Kitson and Percy Buck, she had her first success in 1919 when her orchestral rhapsody, `The magic harp', which was selected for publication by the prestigious Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Adrian Boult. From 1923, realising the need to expand her musical horizons, she visited London for composition lessons with Ralph Vaughan Williams whenever family duties allowed, until her travels were curtailed by the outbreak of the Second World War. Vaughan Williams thought highly of her works but, despite her best efforts to promote them, few were performed in public. During the 1940s some of her orchestral music was broadcast on Radio Eireann in a series of programmes on Irish composers. After the death of her father in 1951, she was again free to travel to London while devoting the rest of her life to composition. As one of twentieth-century Ireland's most prolific composers and the first Irishwoman to undertake a symphony, a concerto and a ballet, this first book on the life and music of Ina Boyle is long overdue.

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Situating Walter Macken in the literary and cultural contexts of his time, this collection of essays provides introductions to the different aspects of the author's multifaceted oeuvre, sets out to explain his enormous success on the stage and as a writer of fiction, and comments on how Macken contributed to shaping an image of the young Republic of Ireland for his national and international audience. Drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches from historical criticism, to narrative theory and gender studies, the overview articles as well as the in-depth analyses and interpretations assembled in this volume address issues that are of particular relevance to Irish literary and cultural studies today. They shed light on the historicity of some and the topicality of other aspects of Macken's ideas about community life, the promises and pitfalls of 20th- century capitalism, sex, gender and sexuality (with a special emphasis on Macken's construction of masculinity), generational conflicts, emigration and questions of ethnicity. They also evaluate Macken's 'sensational' realist aesthetics and their ideological implications. In an interview with the editors, Macken's sons share personal memories revolving around issues such as their father's writing routines in the family home in Oughterard or the author's marriage to Peggy Macken.

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This is the first English translation of an important 17th century contention between two Irish clerics. The detail uncovered reveals much about Gaelic Irish culture and society at this turbulent period in Irish history. The two clerics, Antonius Bruodinus and Thomas Carve, present an image of Ireland that was split between native Gaelic and Old English culture and the influence of these two cultures on competing views about Ireland's past. The seventeenth century was a period of turmoil and upheaval in Ireland. The politics of religious identity were visceral, giving rise to controversies and bitter clashes. In 1671 the Irish Franciscan, Antonius Bruodinus (Antoin Mac Bruideadha; b. 1625, Clare - 7 May 1680 ?Prague), a former pupil of Luke Wadding in Rome, published Anatomicum Examen Enchiridii Apologetici, refuting the slanderous statements made by Fr Thomas Carve ('Carew', b. Tipperary, 1590; d.c. 1672), from a family of Old-English allegiance whose other work contains much of value on the Thirty Years War, he having been chaplain to Irish regiments in Europe. The intense exchange of views went to the core of many of the vexed controversies regarding identity, authority and legitimacy which characterised the debates of the time. This is the first time that one of the main works has been translated into English and treated to a detailed examination. In Culture, Contention and Identity in seventeenth century Ireland, the editors provide a helpful apparatus to guide the modern reader through a myriad of arguments and retorts by the two protagonists, which reveal much information about life and politics in seventeenth-century Ireland. The book, which provides a critical edition of the text with facing translation, sheds new light on the viewpoints of Gaelic-Irish and Old-English alike, as well as the impact of the Cromwellian invasion on the country. In translating this heated exchange between the two clerics we come closer to grasping some of the pressing issues troubling Ireland's population at the time. Much new detail can be harvested concerning the activities of learned Gaelic families, Irish marriage customs, place names and much else besides in seventeenth-century Ireland. The writings of these two clerics also provide a fascinating portrait of Irish clerics and their emigre networks at a time when the two traditions, which each claimed to represent - Gaelic-Irish and Old-English - were being supplanted by a different elite in Ireland, the New English.

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This volume takes inspiration from Professor Catherine Shannon's scholarship on Modern Irish and Irish American history and her advocacy for peace in Northern Ireland and features original research by distinguished scholars and social-justice activists on both sides of the Atlantic. The essays illuminate the historical relationship between Ireland and North America over past centuries. They offer new readings of the transatlantic crosscurrents that shape our understanding of Irish emigration and North American settlement, and constructions of ethnic Irish identities. This collection brings together respected Irish, British, American, and Canadian historians, literary scholars, and social-justice activists to address the following thematic approaches to the Irish and Irish American historical experience: Famine impact and legacy; Boston Irish political culture; Irish Revolution-era nationalist activism; Northern Ireland conflict. Considered from a range of historical, literary, political, and cultural perspectives, the essays collected here examine crucial forces connecting the ancestral home and the adopted homeland over centuries of Irish migration and North American settlement. They revise traditional depictions of ethnic Irishness in explorations of the Famine's consequence, ethnic Irish prominence in Boston, the 1916-era watershed, and Northern Ireland's troubled political and cultural landscape--lenses that expose crucial historical navigations across the Irish Atlantic. These new readings of the evolution of the ethnic identity collectively generate a major contribution to modern Irish and Irish American historical scholarship.

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This book addresses perceived lacunae in the historiography of the Land War in late nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly deficiencies or omissions relating to the themes of the title: famine, humanitarianism, and the activities of agrarian secret societies, commonly referred to as Moonlighting. The famine that afflicted the country in 1879-80, one generation removed from the catastrophic Great Famine of the 1840s, prompted different social responses. The wealthier sectors of society, their consciousness and humanitarianism awakened, provided the bulk of the financial and administrative support for the famine-stricken peasantry. Others, drawn from the same broad social stratum as the latter, vented their anger and frustration on the government and the landlords, whom they blamed for the crisis. The concern of marginal men and women for the welfare of their less fortunate brethren was not so much the antithesis of altruism, as a different, more rudimentary way of expressing it.The volume's opening chapter introduces the famine that tormented Ireland's Atlantic seaboard counties in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The four chapters that follow develop the famine theme, concentrating on the role of civic and religious relief agencies, and the local and international humanitarian response to appeals for assistance. The 1879-80 famine kindled benevolence among the diasporic Irish and the charitable worldwide, but it also provoked a more primal reaction, and the book's two closing chapters are devoted to the activities of secret societies. The first features the incongruously named Royal Irish Republic, a neo-Fenian combination in north-west County Cork. The volume's concluding essay links history and literature, positing a connection between agrarian secret society activity during the Land War years and the Kerry playwright George Fitzmaurice's neglected 1914 drama The Moonlighter. This original and engaging work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of modern Irish history and literature.

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The book narrates the story of three generations of the Wise family as they became Cork-based merchant princes. It is also the story of their North Mall distillery, the then largest in Cork city, which even rivalled the great distilling houses of Dublin.

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On the hundredth anniversary of the production of Sean O'Casey's Dublin plays at the Abbey Theatre, this timely book, Sean O'Casey: Political activist and writer situates O'Casey in the literary and political context of his time. It is written in an accessible style that will appeal to both a general and an academic readership. O'Casey has been widely acknowledged as one of Ireland's foremost dramatists. Drawing on archival material as well as a close reading of his drama, O'Brien examines the influence of the Young Ireland writers, Charles Stewart Parnell, The Gaelic League, and especially the Irish labour leader James Larkin on his development as a writer and a political activist. This book places O'Casey at the centre of Ireland's cultural and political history, charting his involvement in the shaping of modern Ireland, which is interwoven with a political and dramatic critique of post-independent Ireland and the wider world.O'Casey was one of the most political writers of his generation, constantly exploring the frontiers between literature and politics. Like his friend Bernard Shaw, he wrote for a purpose. His life reflects the history of the early twentieth century, a period shaped by two great ideas: nationalism and socialism. History and politics are woven into the fabric of his life and his drama.This book is an engaging and highly original account of one of the finest dramatists of the twentieth century, with a focus on the social and political movements that inspired his writing across the entire span of his career, challenging traditional interpretations that have focused almost exclusively on the three Dublin plays and the dramatic aspect of his life. By placing the working-class at the centre of his drama O'Casey gave a voice to those who are rarely heard: the poor, the dispossessed and the tenement-dweller, whose lives he shaped into works of art.

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To date there have been four film versions of "The Informer". The hardman and the gunman have provided dramatists and film-makers with a compelling way of staging political conflict. This is a study of the film.

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Ivor Browne is Professor Emeritus, University College, Dublin and retired as Chief Psychiatrist of the then Eastern Health Board in 1994. This book, through his writings, charts the growth of one man's journey in relation to psychiatry and human development. Ivor Browne has been a central and controversial figure in Irish life up until he retired

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Hailed in the Irish Times as a 'great Irish novelist', Neil Jordan is, in the words of Fintan O'Toole, 'a peculiarly emblematic figure of cultural change'. Yet, extraordinarily, such critical acclaim has come about without detailed scholarly engagement with Jordan's most sustained interrogation of Ireland and notions of Irishness: his fiction. Neil Jordan: Works for the Page fills this gap in contemporary Irish literary criticism, and, while Jordan's filmmaking is often discussed, the focus here is on his published work: his early volume of short fiction, his many novels, and several of his uncollected stories. The result is a work which will enhance understanding of contemporary Irish cultural studies while also suggesting future directions for the criticism of other artists operating in multiple creative disciplines. The significance of this book lies in its discussion of what kind of artist Neil Jordan really is, which is not necessarily the kind of artist that Irish Studies currently perceives him to be. He is neither just an Oscar-winning filmmaker nor a European novelist of the first rank, he is both, and the comprehensive introduction to the literary author provided by Neil Jordan: Works for the Page has been carefully structured to appeal to those familiar with only the filmmaker. This engaging study examines how, in a forty-year writing career, Jordan has engaged with and expanded upon many core concerns of Irish literature: the struggle to define oneself against the weight of history, both political and artistic; the quest to understand the nation's violent efforts to transcend and process its colonial past.

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The series, and inaugural volume, uniquely celebrates what is by now a substantial corpus of academic work on a field of practice that has been thriving for several decades -- in spite of the many challenges that music educators in Ireland continue to face. Its various chapters engage with arts and education policies, with international developments and comparative educational systems and, crucially, with the concerns of teachers, students, musicians, schools, higher education institutions, music development agencies and broader communities of practice.

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This compendium gathers together his published work and films produced over the last forty years. This material is refashioned for a contemporary readership and supplemented with a number of original essays that enable the reader to cross-reference the critical and creative themes covered in his oeuvre

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John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952) is the most popular cinematic representation of Ireland, and one of Hollywood's classic romantic comedies. For some viewers and critics the film is a powerful evocation of romantic Ireland and the search for home. This book contains new and original information and photographs about the film The Quiet Man. Des MacHale has found a range of unexpected new information about the film. The book opens with the letters of John Ford’s secretary, Meta Sterne, giving authentic information and commentary about what went on behind the scenes on location in Ireland. There were many rumours of a sequel to The Quiet Man but they never came off. However, a belated sequel Only the Lonely starring Maureen O’Hara was produced in 1991 and it is described and analysed. The emergence of the screenplay of The Quiet Man is a long and complicated saga. The book examines the initial rejected screenplay by the Welsh novelist Richard Llewellyn which contained much of the inspiration for the final cut of the movie. The memoirs of Maureen Coyne—Cashman, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, are published here for the first time. She is one of the few surviving bit players and she describes her experiences on set with Wayne, O’Hara, and Ford. The real-life incidents on which the ecumenical scenes in the film are based are discussed. The final part of the book covers more recent events including the Quiet Man conference held in Galway in 2004 and the opening of Pat Cohan’s bar in 2008 which featured in the film as a real bar. The book also contains dozens of previously unseen stills from the movie and many unseen photographs of locations and personalities.

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