21.6 x 13.8 cm     xvi, 256 pp.   1983     Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X)  volume 17

Eighty years ago, in a letter to John Quinn, that benefactor in so many ways of the Irish Literary Revival, Yeats wrote that ‘if Finvara, that ancient God, now king of Faery’, were to offer him a gift, ‘I would say, “Let my plays be acted . . .” ’

In spite of, and perhaps because of, the recognition that Yeats has received as a major poet, his wish is still largely unrealised. Thus A. S. Knowland’s critical guide to those plays of Yeats that appear in Collected Plays does have an emphasis on their theatrical viability. He studies each play, dividing them between the lour stages in the playwright's development, Early Stages, Plays of Transition, The Central Achievement, and Last Stages, as well as adding an Epilogue, and including a postscript about one play not in Collected Plays, but which should fairly be discussed in a volume of this nature, Where There is Nothing.

Cyril Cusack has written a Preface in which he recalls performing in Yeats's plays at the Abbey and his reactions on meeting him.

`Deserves to take its place among the handful of recent studies that have taken the plays as plays...and explored them in terms of their theatre presentation.' Augustine Martin in The Irish Independent.

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See below for an Obituary of Josh Kirby

A limited edition portfolio of 1200 copies, signed by the artist. In a gold-blocked and sepia printed folder. Published in 1980 by Schanes & Schanes, San Diego. Containing six full-colour varnished plates depicting an interplanetary Messiah – 'Departure', 'Arrival of the Ark', 'Adoration of the Imag', 'Death of a Spaceman', 'Deposition', and 'Assension'. An extremely rare and sought after item £95.00

From The Independent of 5 November 2001

Josh Kirby27 November 1928 – 23 October 2001

The artist Josh Kirby was best known and appreciated for the lushly crowded cover paintings he created for Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, from The Colour of Magic in its 1985 paperback to this year's Thief of Time. Kirby's career as a professional artist began much earlier, though, as did his love of the fantastic.

Born in 1928 in Waterloo, Lancashire, he was christened Ronald William Kirby and acquired the nickname Josh while studying at the Liverpool City School of Art: "Some wag thought I painted like Sir Joshua Reynolds!" After a period of commercial work in film posters, he began selling book- and magazine-cover art in the mid-1950s. Fondly remembered early paintings include the jacket for the first Pan paperback of Ian Fleming's Moonraker in 1956, and a rousing space battle on a 1957 issue of Authentic SF magazine – illustrating a story by the up-and- coming science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss. "My first cover," Aldiss remembers. "It was a great event."

 Kirby's SF painting style tended to feature bulbous, organic-seeming machines and strange lines of force. His list of acknowledged book covers, published in his 1999 art book A Cosmic Cornucopia, meticulously includes every painting with a touch of the fantastic, futuristic or horrific, while omitting "categories like War, Cowboy, Adventure, Romance . . . they don't hold any delights for me. And were done under sufferance so I could survive and paint on a daily basis." Thus his painting for a novelisation of The Camp on Blood Island (1958), highly regarded by connoisseurs of paperback art and even included as a vignette on Hammer's film poster, remained unacknowledged. Nevertheless his official list runs to more than 400 cover paintings.

A generation of British science-fiction fans remembers the 1960s Kirby covers for Ray Bradbury's The Silver Locusts and others, includingThe Illustrated Man – whose framing device, a man with animated tattoos that tell stories, particularly fascinated the artist. His string of paintings for Alfred Hitchcock's (usually ghosted) horror/suspense anthologies rang the changes on the director's familiar, bulky appearance, often building up the face from suitable images of horror, somewhere between that tattooed man and an Arcimboldo figure. Later portraits of Pratchett likewise show him as an illustrated man, his features alive with Discworld characters.

 22.9 x 15.3 cm.         

Rudyard Kipling claimed that he never wrote 'the bland drivel of the globetrotter'. As a journalist for seven years in India, he watched tourists scurry across the land and then publish their superficial impressions. Ironically over the course of his life, Kipling too became a tourist, visiting and describing six continents.

Kipling was just twenty-three years old when he reached San Francisco in May 1889; he immediately began recording the sights and sounds of boom-town America. For four months he toured the United States, publishing accounts of his journey in the Pioneer, a major newspaper in western India. A few years later, when he lived in Vermont (1892-1896) with his American wife, Kipling wrote several syndicated articles published in both England and the U.S. Then in 1899 he revised and abridged the Pioneer versions and published them in From Sea to Sea. The second series of syndicated articles he collected in Letters of Travel (1920). Most of these travel writings are now out of print.

In Kipling's America, Professor D. H. Stewart brings all of these articles together and reproduces the original printed versions; he sets the context with an engaging introduction and helpful annotations. Readers are provided with the opportunity to hear again Kipling at his cocky and often opinionated best. From Kipling's perspective, America unleashed the chaotic energy latent in human beings, and he was uncertain whether this energy inevitably would be productive or destructive.

That some of his impressions were one-dimensional is undeniable, but equally undeniable is his gift of language—his access to a ready lexicon often composed of what he termed a 'perpetual Pentecost' to describe the 'talking in tongues' heard in British Overseas Clubs throughout the Empire. This hodgepodge of European languages (counter-pointed with pidgin English, Chinese, Hindi, American) produced a symphony (or cacophony) of bountiful word play deployed in his fiction and journalism. While some may see it as unsettling, a kind of 'Kiplingo', most will enjoy the virtuoso prose performances.

The accounts in Kipling’s America: Travel Letters, 1889-1895, reminiscent of a photograph album from a century past and shrewdly prophetic of today’s America, will intrigue Kipling scholars, students of American history and general readers alike.

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ISBN : 978-0-86140-451-3
With a foreword by Hugh Falkus and an introduction by Conrad Voss Bark

23.3 x 15.6 cm      xx, 225 pp. diagrams  + colour frontis. and 16 pp. with 28 illus.    enlarged edition 1979 [1st edition published 1960]

A Man May Fish by the late Mr Justice Kingsmill Moore (1893-1979), one of the most respected men in Ireland in the decades before his death, has become a fishing classic since its first publication in 1960. The work covers a lifetime of fishing in Ireland for trout, sea trout (white trout), and salmon. The author was a skilled and long-experienced anger with an enviable command of the English language, and his book is full of information on how to fish. Although it is often reminiscent, there are no idle memories; ever incident teaches something of value, so that A Man May Fish is a really, useful, practical book.

In his Introduction, Conrad Voss Bark writes that Kingsmill Moore ‘uses his subject as a key to open his readers’ minds to wider horizons. He has an astonishing ability too, to create living people.’

It is a book to enchant every angler for salmon and trout, whilst to the angling visitor to Irish waters, it must rate as essential reading.

For this second edition, first published in 1979, the author revised the book, adding two more chapters, on lost Irish fish and on Delphi, and an appendix on the effect of waves and deeply stained water on a fish’s vision of a fly.

In his Sea Trout Fishing (1975), Hugh Falkus (who has also written a Preface for this edition), placed A Man May Fish in his top-twenty best angling books – ‘a great man, a great book’.

Theodore Conyngham Kingsmill Moore was educated at Marlborough College and Trinity College Dublin, where he had a brilliant academic career and was Auditor of the College Historical Society. He served in the Royal Flying Corps 1917-18, and was called to the Irish Bar in 1918, to the Inner Bar in 1934, and became a bencher of King’s Inns in 1941. He was a representative of Dublin University in the Seanad Eireann 1944-47, became a judge of the High Court in 1947, and was a judge of the Supreme Court 1951-65. He was Vice-Chairman of the Irish section of Amnesty International, and of CONCERN. He received an Hon. LL.D. from Dublin University in 1947.

He married Beatrice Macnie in 1926 (she died in 1976) and had a son and daughter, who survive him.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.   viii, 361 pp.      2002     Ulster Editions and Monographs series (ISSN 0954-3392) Volume 11

As the first major book-length study of the poetry of Derek Mahon, this volume of fourteen essays represents a long overdue account and assessment of one of the foremost living English-language poets not only in Irish poetry but world-wide.

The essays demonstrate the variety and complexity of Mahon’s work. It is a poetry of the ‘ironic conscience’, sceptical, sophisticated, urbane; a poetry of transit between centres and margins. It breaks with a nationalist or regionalist thematics yet remains engaged with questions of identity, ‘belonging’, tradition and history. It identifies with outsiders, mavericks, ‘the unreconciled, in their metaphysical pain’. It includes some of the best poems of the Troubles, yet reflects a basically metaphysical, universal frame of reference. It ranges widely in time and space, yet excels in the minute particularising of human experience and the phenomenal world. We are in ‘one place only’ but ‘We might be anywhere’. The poet moves from the formal intensities of the ‘well-made’ poem to experiment with mixed styles and more open, confessional and epistolary-style forms which incorporate more of the detritus of everyday life.

In considering the central issues of Mahon’s poetry – the relation between poetry and politics, the conflicting claims of art and nature, the representation of gender, the importance of place, the poet’s response to violence, despair and decadence, his characteristic techniques of displacement, ambiguity and intertextuality – these essays also represent a variety of critical approaches to the poetry. Some of this criticism is rooted in Mahon’s own critical and aesthetic vocabulary, which is largely reflective of canonical values and the New Critical ideal of the ‘well-made poem’ – an orthodoxy which his recent poetry challenges and enlarges. Other essayists construct their own critical terms and read ‘against the grain’ of the poetry to expose new possibilities of meaning. Thus, the volume includes New Critical ‘close reading’ of individual poems, examination of social, historical and literary contexts, consideration of Mahon as a translator, and the mobilisation of new critical paradigms such as ‘Men’s Studies’ and post-modernism.

The contributors are (in the order of the essays) Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Edna Longley, Gerald Dawe, Bruce Stewart, Jerzy Jarniewicz, Eamonn Hughes, Michael Allen, Richard York, Hugh Haughton, Frank Sewell, John Goodby, Neil Corcoran, Stan Smith, and Patrick Crotty. A number of these essays were originally delivered as lectures at the fourth Ulster Symposium at the University of Ulster at Coleraine in 1998.

Elmer Kennedy-Andrews is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. His books include The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper (1988); (editor) Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays (1992); (editor) Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays (1992); The Art of Brian Friel: Neither Dreams nor Reality (1995); The Poetry of Seamus Heaney; Icon Critical Guides (1998), (editor) Irish Fiction Since 1960 (2004),  Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles: (De-) Constructing the North (2003), and Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland 1968-2008 (2009).

Front cover photograph: Derek Mahon, by John Minihan, courtesy of the photographer.

ISBN: 978-0-86140-284-7

19.7 x 12.9 cm.      [pbk edition of book first published in 1973]

Death has been the skeleton in the cupboard of organised religion for two millennia, and many churches have not been able to provide the comfort needed by the bereaved, or satisfactory answers to their questions.

While David Kennedy’s wife was still alive, they agreed that whoever died first would endeavour to prove that life after death was a fact. After her death, he showed his friends and associates in the academic world a written record of experiences that took place almost immediately after her passing: he wanted, initially, to be sure that his emotions had not clouded his reasoning. He was strongly advised that it should be published, and A Venture in Immortality was first published in 1973.

The story this book tells is simple: Ann is ‘alive’. Her survival has found expression, not just as a symbol of hope or as an endless prolongation of memory, but as a living, dynamic personality whose activities manifested themselves in such a way that the record of the following six months constitutes most powerful evidence for survival after death.

A Venture in Immortality is the result of David Kennedy’s endeavour to present his story and the evidence related to his Christian faith in such a way as to remove the fear of death from his readers. He does not minimise the agony of dying and the pain of parting from those we love, or the sense of physical absence, but he does not just give hope and promises as a palliative: he presents the simple and true facts of a life after death which we may not always understand, but which appears to be as real and as active an experience as anything we have known in this world.

To his narrative, the author added appendices on Prayers for the Dead; Mediumship in the Early Church; A Suggested Funeral Service; and Comments on and prints the Report of the Church of Scotland Committee on Supernormal Psychic Phenomena.

David Kennedy was a successful consulting engineer before he gave up his career and went back to university to study to become a minister in the Church of Scotland. Once he was ordained, his scientific background and logical mind, his deep sincerity and outstanding gift of oratory ensured that he became one of Scotland’s most widely known ministers.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.   xvi, 268 pp. 1988             Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 26

This is the first full-length critical examination of Sean O’Casey’s monumental six-volume autobiography. Beginning by tracing the extraordinary, twenty year evolution of the work’s composition, Professor Kenneally then makes some crucial distinctions between O’Casey’s unique self-portrait and related literary genres such as the memoir and the autobiographical novel. The study goes on to place O’Casey’s self-portrait in the context of autobiographical writing from St Augustine to George Moore.

With these critical perspectives estab­lished, the book examines O’Casey’s insistent experimentation with all aspects of autobiographical form: his blending of personal history with information on a host of secondary figures such as Parnell, Pearse, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Shaw; his various principles of selecting and arranging autobiographical materials; and, in particular, his innovative narrative strategies and changing stylistic modes of representation. O’Casey’s willingness to exploit the literary and artistic possibilities offered by the genre has produced multiple images of the self which provide insight into the complex nature of autobiographical identity. By pointing to the overall unity and governing vision of the work, Professor Kenneally confirms its stature as one of the century’s epic self-portraits in prose, a rich and challeng­ing literary creation that enhances our understanding of O’Casey the man and the writer.

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ISBN: 978-0-86140-310-3

21.6 x 13.8 cm       Studies in Contemporary Irish Literature volume 2    Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 43

This is the second of four collections of essays intended to be published under the general title Studies in Contemporary Irish Literature (only two were) which are devoted to critical analysis of Irish writing since the 1950s. When taken together, it is intended that the four volumes will provide a solid foundation for scholars and students interested in the extraordinary achievements of Irish writers over the past few decades. The first volume, Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature, also edited by Professor Kenneally and published in 1988, mapped out aspects of the cultural, social and political context of contemporary Irish writing and examined predominant concerns within a given literary genre.

Essays in the present collection establish some of the defining characteristics of contemporary Irish poetry, examine common features of several groups of poets and present focused analyses of twelve individual poets. The contributors are Elmer Andrews, Rand Brandes, Rory Brennan, Terence Brown, Richard Allen Cave, Tom Clyde, Gerald Dawe, Peter Denman, Maurice Elliott, Eamon Grennan, Edna Longley, Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, Kathleen McCracken, Peter McDonald, Ron Marken, Gerardine Meaney, Dennis O'Driscoll, Bernard O'Donoghue, Alan Peacock, Linda Revie, Robert Tracy, Stan Smith and Clair Wills.

Michael Kenneally, a native of Youghal, Co.Cork, received his post secondary edition in Canada. He is Professor of English at Marianopolis College, Montreal, and also teaches courses in Irish literature at Concordia University. He is author of Portraying the Self: Sean O'Casey and the Art of Auto-biography (1988) and edited Irish Literature and Culture (1992) as well as the first volume of the Studies in Contemporary Irish Literature series.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.     x, 196 pp.   1992     Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X)  volume 35

This volume deals with the illumination of literature through the study of other art forms. A diverse and absorbing variety of subjects are called in aid of literary analysis, including music, aesthetics, politics, rebellion, ritual, stage design, painting, sociology, cinema, and colonisation. The essays are adapted from papers given at the 1988 Conference of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies in Montreal, entitled `Cultural and Artistic Contexts of Irish Literature'.

Two essays, by Andrew Carpenter and Mary Helen Thuente, have been added to lend completeness to the collection. The other contributors are: Zack Bowen, Richard Allen Cave, Terry Egleton, John Wilson Foster, Richard Kearney, Declan Kiberd, Edna Longley, Patrick Rafroidi and Wolfgang Zach, with the conference opening address by Hiroshi Suzuki.

PREFACE. Michael Kenneally<br

OPENING ADDRESS. Hiroshi Suzuki<br

CHANGING VIEWS ON IRISH MUSICAL AND LITERARY CULTURE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE. Andrew Carpenter<br

AESTHETICS AND POLITICS In EDMUND BURKE. Terry Eagleton<br

THE LITERARY SIGNIFICANCE OF THE UNITED IRISHMEN. Mary Helen Thuente<br

THOMAS MOORE: TOWARDS A REASSESSMENT? Patrick Refroidi<br

MUSIC AND RITUAL IN ULYSSES. Zack Bowen<br

STAGE DESIGN AS A FORM OF DRAMATIC CRITICISM. Richard allen Cave<br

NO MORE POEMS ABOUT PAINTINGS? Edna Longley<br

CRITICISM, THEATRE AND POLITICS: BRIAN FRIEL'S THE FREEDOM OF THE CITY IN ITS EARLY RECEPTION. Wolfgang Zach<br

FATHERS AND SONS: IRISH STYLE. Declan Kiberd<br

MODERN IRISH CINEMA: RE-VIEWING TRADITIONS. Richard Kearney<br

CULTURE AND COLONIZATION: A NORTHERN PERSPECTIVE. John Wilson Foster<br

Notes<br

Notes on Contributors<br

Index

21.6 x 13.8 cm.     viii, 369 pp.   1988   Studies in Contemporary Irish Literature volume 1   Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 31

This is the first of four intended volumes (only two of which got published) devoted to critical analysis of Irish writing since the 1950s. Each was intended to present a collection of essays that, taken together, should provide a solid foundation for scholars and students interested in the extraordinary achievements of Irish writers in the last three decades.

The essays in this volume map out aspects of the cultural, social and political context of contemporary literature and predominant concerns within a given genre.

The contributors as Anthony Bradley, Terence Brown, Gerald Dawe, John Wilson Foster, Tamsin Hargreaves, Claudia Harris, Dillon Johnston, Colbert Kearney, Edna Longley, Arthur E. McGuinness, Christopher Murray, Fintan O’Toole, Andrew Parkin, Anthony Roche,  Michael Toolan,  and Walentina Witoszek and Patrick F. Sheeran.

The second volume in the series is Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature, edited by Michael Kenneally.

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22.9 x 15.3 cm.

In her novels and short stories, May Laffan Hartley (1849–1916) depicts the religious and political controversies of late nineteenth-century Ireland. Eire’s own Helena Kelleher Kahn reintroduces us to Laffan’s vivid, witty fiction, rich in political and social commentary. Laffan did not offer clear-cut approval to one side or the other of the social and religious divide but weighed both and often found them wanting. She adds a missing dimension to the Irish world of Wilde, Shaw, and Joyce.

A woman of the age subtly embroiders the acute challenges and divisions of middle-class Ireland. As Kahn says, “she chose to write about the alcoholic ex-student, the impecunious solicitor, the farmer or merchant turned politician, and their often resentful wives and children. On the whole her world view was pessimistic. Rural Ireland was a beautiful intellectual desert. Dublin was a place to leave, not to live in.” This account of her life and work will be of interest to students of Anglo-Irish literature and history, as well as women’s studies.

Kelleher Kahn "provides a socio-historical context for middle-class Irish life that clearly articulates the principal issues of this culturally and politically dynamic period to both novice and academic readers of Irish fiction. Extensively researched with abundant endnotes, this book should be compulsory reading for those studying the marginalized Irish women writers of the nineteenth century." ―Victorian Studies, 48.4 (2006)

"I had never heard of May Laffan Hartley. Having now read one of her novels (Hogan MP, available as a free e-book on the ELT Press website) and Helena Kelleher Kahn’s erudite study of Laffan Hartley’s works, I find I’ve been provided the “missing dimension to the Irish world of Shaw and Joyce” Kahn predicted.... I highly recommend this work to aficionados of Irish studies." ―ELT, 49.3 (2006)

21.6 x 13.8 cm.   xii, 260 pp.  1997   Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 50

In 1829 Mrs S.C.Hall, an Irishwoman living in England, published a book of sketches set mainly in her native Wexford. Sketches of Irish Life and Character was an immediate success both with literary critics and the general public. A second series of Sketches appeared in 1831 and established Mrs Hall's reputation in  England as an interpreter of Irish character. Her later works on Ireland – Lights and Shadows of Irish Life (1838), Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1840) and The Whiteboy (1845) – reinforced this view, and were very popular with her English and Scottish readers. She collaborated with her husband, the journalist Samuel Carter Hall, in the writing of a three-volume guide to Ireland, Halls' Ireland, its Scenery, Character, etc. (1841-43), and this too was accepted as an informed description of Irish life and character.

In fact, Mrs Hall wrote as an observer imbued with colonial attitudes who believed in the superiority of everything English. Out of a genuine love for Ireland, however, she wished to make the country better known and understood in England, and she hoped through her writings to cure the Irish people of their faults. What makes her work interesting is the fact that it displays a tolerance and a lack of bigotry that was unusual for its time, and that she is openly critical (especially in her novel The Whiteboy) of government mismanagement and misrule.

CONTENTS

1. Ireland – 'The Great Mart of Fiction'; 2. Mrs Hall – Marriage and Markets; 3. Teaching – The Taste of the Times; 4. Sketches of Irish Life – The Voice of the Colonist; 5. Lights and Shadows – a melancholy book; 6. Stories of the Irish Peasantry – Correcting the 'evil habits of poor Pat'; 7. Halls' Ireland – 'Guidance for those who design to visit Ireland; 8. The Whiteboy –' 'A truly national novel'; 9. Three novelists with a common cause; 10. Assessments – then and now; Index.

Maureen Keane was educated at Dominican College, Eccles Street, Dublin, and University College, Dublin. After graduating with an M.A. she worked for a time as a teacher and then took up a career in journalism, first as a freelance and then as an editor. Returning to academic life, she received her Ph.D. from Maynooth College for a study of didacticism in the works of William Carleton, Mrs S.C.Hall and Charles Lever. This is her first book.

Chosen and Introduced by Joseph Ronsley

The second volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

Hardcover ISBN: 0-86140-123-9 / 978-0-86140-123-9 £30.00
Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-086-0 / 978-0-86140-086-7 £9.95

21.6 x 13.8 cm.

Contains: The Old Lady Says 'No! (with Curtis Canfield's list of titles and authors of poems used in its Prologue)', The Moon in the Yellow River, The Golden Cuckoo, The Dreaming Dust, The Scythe and the Sunset, bibliographical checklist.

Denis Johnston's first play, The Old Lady Says 'No!', was produced in 1929, and immediately made his reputation as a very talented, innovative and deeply thoughtful playwright. This description was confirmed by his later plays, four of which, The Moon in the Yellow River, The Golden Cuckoo, The Dreaming Dust, and The Scythe and the Sunset, with The Old Lady, are printed in this volume. Written in widely varying styles, Johnston's work presents his audience with issues that initially seem clear-cut, but by the end of each play there have been thought through to such an extent that basic assumptions have been thoroughly reorganised and transformed.

At the time of publication of this selection in 1983 Denis Johnston (1901-84) was justly considered to be the doyen of Ireland's dramatists. Chosen and introduced by Joseph Ronsley, this selection is the ideal introduction to Johnston's work, for use by classes and performers alike.

Joseph Ronsley taught at McGill University, Montreal. He is author of Yeats's Autobiography: Life as Symbolic Pattern, and has edited Myth and Reality in Irish Literature, and Denis Johnston, a Retrospective. He is co-general editor of the Irish Drama Selections series, and has been a President of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies.

Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Christine St Peter

ISBN: 978-0-86140-357-8

21.6 x 13.8 cm.   xiv, 140 pp.   1992

This definitive edition is based on Johnston's final 1977 version published in the Dramatic Works, the product of fifty years of revisions, and situates the play in its historical, theatrical, and biographical contexts. It is the first edition to have reference to all private and archival materials and to have had the assistance of the playwright in the preparation of its critical apparatus, which includes comprehensive annotations and analyses of all substantive changes in the multiple manuscripts. It will be of enduring interest to scholars specializing in Irish and European theatre history, as well as to students of Anglo-Irish literature and theatre directors.

Co-published with the Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C.

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ISBN: 978-0-901072-53-5

21.6 x 13.8 cm.     iv, 404 pp.    1979      Volume 2 of the Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston

Contains: A Bride for the Unicorn, The Moon in the Yellow River, A Fourth for Bridge, The Golden Cuckoo, Nine Rivers from Jordan, The Tain (a pageant), and 'Introducing the enigmatic Dean Swift'.

21.6 x 13.8 cm    viii, 209 pp.   1982           Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 11

J. M. Synge’s plays have often been regarded as folk drama, but this study considers them from a new literary perspective. It stresses the importance of the playwright’s studies with two medievalists at the Sorbonne, Professors Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville and Louis Petit de Julleville, and makes, for the first time, a full examination of the various uses he made of medieval material. This is shown to contain grotesque motifs which accommodate both Synge’s inclusive anti­thetical vision and the Rabe­laisian note in Irish peasant life, as he perceived it. Toni O’Brien Johnson also shows that the use of Hiberno-English language structures reinforces the clash inherent in the grotesque in Synge’s plays.

This book shows the opera­tion of the dramatist’s dualist aesthetic through the co­presence in his work of what is repulsive and sublime, cruel and noble, violent and heroic, pitiless and beautiful. It also emphasises the prominent role played by bodily life and the degenerative aspects of old age, death, and decay in Synge’s work.

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23.6 x 15.6 cm.

William H. Gregory, to the extent that his name is familiar, is remembered merely as the husband of Lady Gregory, of Abbey Theatre and Irish Literary Revival fame. He contributed to this undeserved obscurity by failing to make the most of his undoubted abilities and by choosing as a bride a woman many years his junior who was to make the most of hers.

Yet in his lifetime he was a figure of sufficient prominence – politician, racing man, dilettante – to be included in the Vanity Fair series of portraits even before he went on to serve with great success as a colonial governor. Moreover, his career throws additional light on the problems of Irish landowners and MPs at a time when Ireland was again a central issue in British politics.

Author of the infamous ‘quarter-acre test' for relief during the famine, he paradox­ically established an enviable reputation as a humane and progressive landlord, only to find himself at the end of his life an alien in his native land.

Professor Brian Jenkins has written a lively and interesting biography, setting his subject in the context of his position at the centre of Victorian life in Britain, and establishing Sir William as very much a personality in his own right.

21.6 x 13.8 pp.    xvi, 340 pp.  1989      Princess Grace Irish Library series (ISSN 0269-2619)  volume 3

Contains the papers given at the 1987 conference held at the Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco, with contributions assessing Yeats's influence on European authors and how much the European mainland and its authors, artists and sculptors influenced him.

The papers in this volume are by Michael Alexander, Birgit Bramsbäck, Toni Cerutti, Denis Donoghue, Jacqueline Genet, Warwick Gould, Bernard Hickey, John Kelly, Heinz Kosok, Peter Kuch, Alasdair Macrae, William M.Murphy, Andrew Parkin, Patrick Rafroidi, Ann Saddlemyer, Ronald Schuchard, Masaru Sekine, Michael Sidnell, C.K.Stead, Helen Vendler and George Watson, with opening and closing addresses by A. Norman Jeffares.

21.6 x 13.8 pp.     x, 267 pp.   1980       Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 6

The twenty-first Yeats International Summer School was held in Sligo in 1980, and the Yeats Society, wishing to mark the school’s coming of age, asked Professor A. Norman Jeffares to edit a volume of essays specially com­missioned for the occasion. These essays are by Directors of the school and scholars who have lectured at it.

The essayists are Lester Conner, Denis Donoghue, Barbara Hardy, Seamus Heaney, T. R. Henn, John Holloway, A. Norman Jeffares, John Kelly, F. S. L. Lyons, Augustine Martin, D. E. S. Maxwell, William M. Murphy, Patrick Rafroidi, Ann Saddlemyer and Helen Vendler, together with a poem by Brendan Kennelly. OnIy one essay is not new, that by the late T. R. Henn; it was given as a lecture and included in his Last Essays: appositely it is on his native Sligo,

These essays show the breadth of Yeats studies, indicating eloquently the tremendous hold that Yeats exerts on scholar and general reader alike, stressing that he is the greatest poet Ireland and the twentieth century have produced.

'Remarkable for their vitality and freshness of interpretation.' ,i>Choice

CONTENTS<br

Acknowledgements <br

Introduction. A. Norman Jeffares<br

A MATTER OF CHARACTER: RED HANRAHAN AND CRAZY JANE.  Lester I.Conner<br

ROMANTIC IRELAND.  Denis Donoghue<br

THE WILDNESS OF CRAZY JANE.  Barbara Hardy<br

YEATS AS AN EXAMPLE?.  Seamus Heaney<br

THE PLACE OF SHELLS.  T.R.Henn<br

HOW GOES THE WEATHER?  John Holloway<br

YEATS AND THE WRONG LEVER.  A.Norman Jeffares<br

THE VISITOR. Brendan Kennelly<br

YEATS AND VICTORIAN IRELAND.  F.S.L.Lyons<br

HOUND VOICES WERE THEY ALL: AN EXPERIMENT IN YEATS CRITICISM. Augustine Martin<br

THE SHAPE-CHANGERS.  D.E.S.Maxwell<br

HOME LIFE AMONG THE YEATSES.  William M.Murphy<br

YEATS, NATURE AND THE SELF.  Patrick Rafroidi<br

THE 'DWARF DRAMAS' OF THE EARLY ABBEY THEATRE.  Ann Saddlemyer<br

FOUR ELEGIES.  Helen Vendler<br

BOOKS AND NUMBERLESS DREAMS: YEATS'S RELATIONS WITH HIS EARLY PUBLISHERS.  John S.Kelly<br

Notes on Contributors<br

Speakers at Sligo 1960-1980<br

Index

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ISBN: 978-0-86140-246-5

21.0 x 15.0 cm. 44 pp. 1986 Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures series (ISSN 0950-5121) volume 1

In this lecture, given at the Princess Grace Irish Library on 25 April 1986, Professor Jeffares surveys creative writing in Ireland from the earliest times to its flowering in the last centuries.

The list of great Irish writers is truly remarkable: not only does it include 20th century figures such as Beckett, Joyce, Moore, O'Casey, Shaw, Synge and Yeats, but equally famous names from the 19th century and earlier, including the Banims, Boucicault, Carleton, Congreve, Edgeworth, Farquhar, Le Fanu, Lever, Lover, Sheridan, Swift, Wilde, and many more. There are countless others who have suffered from the vagaries of fashion and the lack of modern critical appreciation.

Irish authors have had a very wide readership, not only in Ireland and Britain, but throughout the English-speaking world, particularly in the United States of America, where they have always been extremely popular.

Professor Jeffares also provides a list of writers of Irish literature in English, as well as important writers in the Irish language.