Samuel Beckett referred to Brendan Behan as “the new O’Casey” and yet, despite all of his international success, despite his enduring popularity, and perhaps because of his fame (and indeed, notoriety), Behan remains a neglected figure in literary criticism today.
This is the first full-length critical study of author, critic, and translator Hannah Lynch. It explores her writing and her life, in doing so shedding new light on women’s cultural and political networks in Ireland and beyond. Never one to
Richard Murphy’s poetry is central to the evolution of Irish poetry since 1950. These original essays offer new insights into Murphy’s poetic preoccupations – love and loss, nature and solitude, history and inheritance – showing how Richard Murphy’s life and
This book provides a detailed analysis of the decline of Catholicism and the almost simultaneous surge of new religious movements in Ireland during the second half of the twentieth century. After chronicling the sudden emergence of these new religious movements,
Since W. B. Yeats wrote in 1890 that “the man of science is too often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula,” the anti-scientific bent of Irish literature has often been taken as a given. Science, Technology,
Gaelic games have repeatedly provided filmmakers and producers with a resonant motif through which they have represented perceived aspects of Irish identity, perceived as this representation has been neither straightforward nor unproblematic: in international productions in particular, Gaelic games have
The influence of revivalism is writ large in the history of modern Ireland, particularly as we commemorate a ‘decade of centenaries’. Yet, whether in Ireland or elsewhere, no study of revivalism as a critical cultural practice exists, rather one tends
Thomas Kilroy, Ireland’s leading intellectual playwright, has, over the span of a fifty-year career, consistently resisted fixed categories and boundaries in both his stagecraft and the themes of his plays. In a close consideration of ten of his major works
An accessible, comprehensive overview of contemporary Irish cinema, this book is intended for use as a third-level textbook and is designed to appeal to academics in the areas of film studies and Irish studies. Responding to changes in the Irish
History weaves in and out of the literary criticism that is at the heart of All on Show – not just the history of the circus itself, but also the history of Ireland from the late eighteenth century to the