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Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

The Best of Myles (Irish Literature Series)

The Best of Myles (Irish Literature Series) Review


"The best comic writer I can think of."—S.J. Perelman

The great Irish humorist and writer Flann O'Brien, aka Brian O'Nolan, aka Myles na Gopaleen, also wrote a newspaper column called "Cruiskeen Lawn." The Best of Myles collects the best and funniest, covering such subjects as plumbers, the justice system, and improbable inventions. Read more...


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Friday, August 31, 2012

The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism

The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism Review


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. Read more...


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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Imagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W. B. Yeats: Nation, Class, and State (New Directions in Irish & Irish American Literature)

Imagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W. B. Yeats: Nation, Class, and State (New Directions in Irish & Irish American Literature) Review


An essential part of the Irish national imaginary, the poems and plays of W. B. Yeats have helped to create the nation of Ireland, while critiquing the modern state that emerged from the country’s revolutionary period.  Yeats’s mastery and extension of the traditional forms of verse, from ballad and sonnet to modernist sequence or constellation, gives aesthetic shape to Irish political and cultural preoccupations.This study offers a lucid and comprehensive account of Yeats’s poetry and drama that makes illuminating connections with contemporary theories of nationalism and modernism.

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Monday, May 28, 2012

The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature (Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature)

The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature (Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature) Review


This book examines the development of literary constructions of Irish-American identity from the mid-nineteenth century arrival of the Famine generation through the Great Depression. It goes beyond an analysis of negative Irish stereotypes and shows how Irish characters became the site of intense cultural debate regarding American identity, with some writers imagining Irishness to be the antithesis of Americanness, but others suggesting Irishness to be a path to Americanization.

This study emphasizes the importance of considering how a sense of Irishness was imagined by both Irish-American writers conscious of the process of self-definition as well as non-Irish writers responsive to shifting cultural concerns regarding ethnic others. It analyzes specific iconic Irish-American characters including Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlet O’Hara, as well as lesser-known Irish monsters who lurked in the American imagination such as T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney and Frank Norris’ McTeague.

As Dowd argues, in contemporary American society, Irishness has been largely absorbed into a homogenous white culture, and as a result, it has become a largely invisible ethnicity to many modern literary critics. Too often, they simply do not see Irishness or do not think it relevant, and as a result, many Irish-American characters have been de-ethnicized in the critical literature of the past century. This volume reestablishes the importance of Irish ethnicity to many characters that have come to be misread as generically white and shows how Irishness is integral to their stories.

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Saturday, May 5, 2012

There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History

There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History Review


Thomas Flanagan became famous as the author of a trilogy of novels, starting with The Year of the French, about Ireland from the rebellion of 1798 to the civil war of the 1920s. But the novelist who began by reimagining the mental and physical world of eighteenth-century County Mayo had long been immersing himself, as a scholar, essayist, and reviewer, in the literature and history of his ancestral land.

In the nonfiction writings collected here, many of them unpublished in his lifetime, Flanagan brings what Christopher Cahill calls his "keen eye and strong gaze and sharp tongue" to reassessments of key figures of Irish culture. They range from Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, through W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Collins, to contemporaries and friends like Brian Moore and Frank O'Connor, and American Irish like the Molly Maguires and the director John Ford.

Flanagan probes the tragically intertwined origins of celebrity and literary modernism in the careers of Irish-American writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill, and John O'Hara. He reflects on what his own novels have taught him about the possibilities of historical fiction. And his thoughts on Irish-American identity sum up the long-pondered mixture of experience and scrutiny he brought to his heritage.

Witty, lively, and learned, this collection reveals that Thomas Flanagan was not only as a master of the historical novel but a writer who meditated broadly and deeply on the Ireland he once described as "a complex, profound, historical society, woven of many strands, some bright and some dark." Read more...


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Saturday, March 10, 2012

Scenes from a Receding Past (Irish Literature Series)

Scenes from a Receding Past (Irish Literature Series) Review


Opening with a quote from Richard Brautigan--"I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning."--Scenes from a Receding Past constructs the adolescence and early adulthood of Dan Ruttle out of a variety of scenes and reminiscences about his life in Ireland, his time in a Catholic school, his first experiences with his sexuality, and his brother's mental breakdown. The second half of the book centers around his relationship with his future wife Olivia, her past, and her former lovers. Calling to mind Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for Dan Ruttle's love-hate relationship with Ireland, and the stylistic innovations employed by Higgins, Scenes from a Receding Past is a masterpiece from one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers. Read more...


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Friday, February 24, 2012

ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners (Irish Literature, History, and Culture)

ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners (Irish Literature, History, and Culture) Review


"In this volume, the contributors -- a veritable Who's Who of Joyce specialists -- provide an excellent introduction to the central issues of contemporary Joyce criticism."

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