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This book considers the cultural residue from pre-Christian Ireland in Synge’s plays and performances. By dramatising a residual culture in front of a predominantly modern and political Irish Catholic middle class audience, the book argues that Synge attempted to offer an alternative understanding of what it meant to be “modern” at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book draws extensively on Synge’s archive to demonstrate how pre-Christian residual culture informed not just how he wrote and staged pre-Christian beliefs, but also how he thought about an older, almost forgotten culture that Catholic Ireland desperately wanted to forget. Each of Synge’s plays is considered in an individual chapter, and they identify how Synge’s dramaturgy was informed by pre-Christian beliefs of animism, pantheism, folklore, superstition and magical ritual.
Irish women writers have a large following, and their works are attracting large amounts of scholarly and critical attention. Through roughly 75 alphabetically arranged entries written by more than 35 expert contributors, this reference overviews the lives and works of Irish women writers active in a range of genres and periods. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes, a survey of the writer's critical reception, and a list of works by and about the author. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography. Ireland has an especially lively literary tradition, and works by Irish writers have long been recognized as interesting and influential. While...
This book offers an original interdisciplinary analysis of the relations between myth, identity and social reality, involving elements of narratology theory, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and social theory, harnessed to support an argument firmly located in the area of literary criticism. This analysis yields a fairly extensive reinterpretation of the concept of myth, which is applied to the examination of the relationship between narrative and social reality as represented in texts by contemporary Scottish and Irish women writers. The main theoretical sources are Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of heteroglossia, Jacques Derrida’s theories of citationality and Judith Butler’s theori...
Women’s cultural and political engagement with oral tales and traditions in European peripheries With Seekers of Wonder, Elena Sottilotta offers the first comparative study of women’s manifold roles in the collection of Italian and Irish folklore and fairy tales between 1870 and 1920. Sottilotta views the often-overlooked work of these women from an interdisciplinary perspective, considering both the politics and poetics of seeking wonder. In so doing, she centers women’s influence on the preservation and dissemination of oral traditions, bringing work that was once relegated to the margins into dialogue with work long regarded as canonical. After mapping sidelined, marginalized, and f...
In 1895 twenty-six-year-old Bridget Cleary disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary. At first, some said that the fairies had taken her into their stronghold in a nearby hill, from where she would emerge, riding a white horse. But then her badly burned body was found in a shallow grave. Her husband, father, aunt and four cousins were arrested and charged, while newspapers in nearby Clonmel, and then in Dublin, Cork, London and further afield attempted to make sense of what had happened. In this lurid and fascinating episode, set in the last decade of the nineteenth century, we witness the collision of town and country, of storytelling and science, of old and new. The torture and burning of Bridget Cleary caused a sensation in 1895 which continues to reverberate more than a hundred years later. Winner of the Irish Times Prize for Non-Fiction
Bourke's stories have been published in Ireland and the U. S. She writes with great delicacy and skill, and won the Frank O'Connnor Award for Short Fiction in 1992. In this memorable collection the salt wateris not only the sea, but tears, sweat, a
Accompanying DVD is a videorecording of the television program produced by Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Paul Wagner Productions in association with Radio Telefís Éireann, and originally broadcast in 2004.
Focusing on the lineage of pivotal African American and Irish women writers, Jacqueline Fulmer argues that these authors often employ strategies of indirection, via folkloric expression, when exploring unpopular topics. This strategy holds the attention of readers who would otherwise reject the subject matter. Fulmer traces the line of descent from Mary Lavin to Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and from Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison, showing how obstacles to free expression, though varying from those Lavin and Hurston faced, are still encountered by Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne. The basis for comparing these authors lies in the strategies of indirection they use, as influenced by folklore. The folklo...
"Explores Seamus Heaney's adaptation of the Celtic ritual known as the Feis of Tara, demonstrates the sovereignty motif's continued relevance in works by Irish poets Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Eavan Boland, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and refutes criticism that charges sexism and overemphasizes sacrifice in Heaney's poetry"--Provided by publisher.