21.6 x 13.8 cm.     viii, 291 pp.  2006    
   Ulster Editions & Monographs Series (ISSN 0954-3392) volume 14

Ever since his student efforts thrilled Seamus Heaney in the early 1970s, Paul Muldoon has written poetry acclaimed for its brilliance and originality, its mischievousness, wit and complex artifice. Today, Muldoon is widely considered to be the greatest poet of his generation, not just in Ireland, but throughout the English-speaking world.

The twelve essays collected here chart the development of this unpredictable, innovative and challenging talent over the last thirty years. They offer a kaleidoscopic examination of Muldoon’s writings in the three genres of poetry, prose and drama, from a variety of perspectives, and without any polemical intention beyond that of celebrating his achievement.

Taken together, these essays attempt to map the continuity of Muldoon’s diverse and substantial oeuvre, but also to highlight its constant experimentalism; they demonstrate how difficult it is for us to know how seriously we should take anything Muldoon says, but alert us to the ways in which the playfulness and cleverness contribute to a profound ethical seriousness; they explore his complexly deconstructive technique to show how it represents a constant renewal of the self and of form; they show how the momentum for escape from the past is always contained within the recognition of the impossibility of escape; they examine the work as a means of both evasive self-protection from the world and self-expression of an intense emotional life; they calculate the ratios of scepticism and passion, unknowing and knowingness, which give the work its uniquely compelling power; they orientate the reader towards the Muldoonian home as always being located where it is not; they help us to see the way the writing folds back or feeds upon itself, and upon others’ writings, yet yearns for freedom and transcendence. They are confirmation of the validity of Heaney’s comment of nearly thirty years ago, when he said that Muldoon was the kind of writer who doesn’t offer us answers, but keep us alive in the middle of the question.

The contributors are (in order of the essays) Peter Denman, Richard York, Kathleen McCracken, Tim Kendall, Tim Hancock, Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Stan Smith, Ivan Phillips, Clair Wills, Heather O’Donoghue, Guinn Batten, and Jerzy Jarniewicz. A number of these essays were originally delivered as lectures at the fifth Ulster Symposium at the University of Ulster at Coleraine in 2000. Also included is a transcript of the symposium interview that Neil Corcoran conducted with the poet.

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).

21.4 x 13.6 cm.      xiv, 248 pp.   1993   Irish Literary Studies Series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 45

A Small Nation’s Contribution to the World contains a selection from the papers given at the 1989 conference of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature, with Professor Robert Welch as Chairman. The conference, the first ever held in Eastern-Central Europe, convened in Debrecen, Hungary, chaired by Professor Istvan Palffy. This selection is broadly representative of the truly international nature of the conference – whose delegates came from every continent – and of the study of Irish literature today. It includes essays on Beckett, Joyce, Friel, Yeats, O'Casey, Parker, Clarke, Kinsella, Muldoon, Mahon, Banville, Brian Moore, Edna O'Brien, Swift and Edgeworth as well as on critical issues, such as: the uses of the fantastic in prose and drama, modernism and romanticism, Irish semiotics, social criticism in contemporary Irish poetry and. especially appropriate for the occasion, the relationship and influence of Hungary and Ireland on one another's literature.

Contributors to this volume are Csilla Ber­tha, Eoin Bourke, Patrick Burke, Martin J. Croghan, Ruth Fleischmann, Maurice Har­mon, Werner Huber. Thomas Kabdebo, Ve­ronika Kniezsa, Mária Kurdi, Donald E. Morse, Ruth Neil, István Rácz, Marius Byron Raizis, Aladár Sarbu, Bernice Schrank, Jo­seph Swann and András Ungar.

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With an Introduction by Richard Allen Cave

21.6 x 13.8 cm.      xxxiv, 225 pp.   1903, and revised by Moore in 1926, and 1931.
This edition first published in 2000

Bubbling with enthusiasm for the revival of Gaelic in Ireland, George Moore suggested to the Gaelic League that it should publish a translation of a modern work that children might study in school and that artists might imitate and so begin a new tradition of Gaelic Literature. It was a sensible idea that was delayed at first for want of agreement within the League over a suitable text. Spurred on by his friends, Moore himself then set about writing some tales of Irish life for this end. They were translated by Taidgh O’Donohue and published in 1902 in the New Ireland Review. Later a collection of these and more stories appeared under the title An T-Úr-Gort, Sgéalta; a version of this, reworked by Moore in English as The Untilled Field, followed in 1903. It proved subsequently the one of his works that pleased Moore best for its affectionate portraits of Irish rural life.

Though modelled initially on Turgenev’s Tales of a Sportsman, the stories soon became original inspirations woven out of Moore’s memories of the peasants who lived and worked on his family estate in Mayo. Moore took as his theme the pathos of their existence: the bleakness; the imaginative, cultural and emotional austerity that compelled many, often whole parishes, to emigrate and leave their homes in ruins; the indefatigable resilience of those who stayed and endured; and the fragile consolations offered by their religion. The painfulness of his subjects he offset by the gentle humour of his treatment. Moore’s antipathy to the Catholic clergy was soon to become notorious but the tragi-comic plight of the parish priest who finds his power and moral authority undermined by the poverty of his parishioners and the cunning they develop in order to survive provokes in these tales some barbed satire but much compassion and amusement. The delicacy of discrimination, the emotional control that reveals Moore’s understanding and pity through a technique of powerful understatement is unusual in his work and unusual too in the tradition of Irish fiction.

Moore once wrote of The Untilled Field: ‘It is a dry book and does not claim the affections at once.’ But Moore was wrong: level and dispassionate in tone it may be, but the book is one of the richest and most perfectly written of his works and the depth of feeling that went into its composition is evident throughout.

This new printing of the text of the 1931 edition also contains the texts of ‘In the Clay’ and ‘The Way Back’ which Moore omitted from that edition. It has an Introduction by Richard Allen Cave.

Chosen and Introduced by David B. Eakin and Michael Case

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

Hardcover ISBN:0-86140-144-1 / 978-0-86140-144-4 £35.00
Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-145-X / 978-0-86140-145-1 £9.95

21.6 x 13.8  cm.

Contains:  George Moore's The Strike at Arlingford, The Bending of the Bough, The Coming of Gabrielle, The Passing of the Essenes; and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field, Maeve, The Tale of a Town, bibliographical checklist.

GEORGE MOORE is best known as a master of English prose, but he also wrote plays, usually in collaboration with other authors, and occasionally based on or on the precursors of his own novels, the best known of which are probably Diarmuid and Grania (with W.B.Yeats), The Strike at Arlingford, and The Bending of the Bough (based on Edward Martyn's The Tale of a Town). Apart from the last two, this selection also contains Moore's The Coming of Gabrielle and The Passing of the Essenes.

EDWARD MARTYN was, with W.B.Yeats and Lady Gregory, a founder of the Irish Literary Theatre, the second production of which, opening on 9 May 1899, the day after Yeats's The Countess Cathleen, was his The Heather Field. Apart from this play, the present volume also contains Maeve and The Tale of a Town.

As well as the introduction by David B. Eakin and Michael Case, there are also bibliographical checklists of Moore's and Martyn's works.

With an Afterword by Richard Allen Cave
ISBN: 978-0-901072-82-5
21.6 x 13.8 cm.     xii,  274 pp.   1980

The Lake is George Moore’s most poetic and perfectly crafted novel. It tells of a priest’s loss not of faith, but of commitment to the principles fostered in him during his training and his discovery of a more fulfilling religion that celebrates instinct as being, if rightly understood, man’s true mode of communion with his soul. Father Gogarty’s parish is in a remote district of Mayo beside Lough Carra and his new philosophy is worked out during his long walks and rides round the lake where he learns how the changing quality of his perceptions of the landscape about him can reveal the fluctuating moods of that ‘underlife’ of his psyche that shapes his being.

The Lake is a novel about self-discovery through guilt (Gogarty fears he has brought about the death of a parishioner through vigorously denouncing her way of life from the altar) and atonement in renouncing a creed which demands that a man continually repress his capacity for joy. But it is also a novel about the satisfactions of living close to nature in Ireland; the atmosphere of the Mayo countryside, the play of light on mountain, wood and lake, the rich historical associations in every church, castle or abbey ruin and farmstead are evoked with a rare skill, subtly illuminating the relationship that Moore takes as his theme between place and the Irish personality. If in studying the motives that compel his priest to the decision, ‘Non Serviam’, Moore is establishing a pattern in Irish fiction that Joyce will elaborate with his Portrait of an Artist, then in his poetic rendering of consciousness as the sum of a character’s perceptions, Moore is anticipating the technique of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen.

Published in 1905, The Lake underwent considerable revision in two further editions before Moore was satisfied with its complex form and the disciplined style that form exacted. (The present edition reprints the last revised text of 1921.) In an Afterword, Professor Richard Allen Cave of Royal Holloway, University of London, examines the nature of this discipline, the influence of Zola and of Dujardin on Moore’s choice of a structure: and the ways first the composition and later the revision of The Lake were made easier by the writing of the stories in The Untilled Field (1903) and the autobiography, Hail and Farewell! (1911-1914). Significantly, all three works – each a masterpiece of its kind and, viewed together, the triumph of Moore’s career – were the product of the novelist’s return to his native land to champion the cause of the Irish renaissance. With them Moore gave to Irish fiction a new method and a new voice and, before Joyce and Beckett, set exacting standards of scruple and dedication in the pursuit of a finished artistry in prose.

Richard Allen Cave, Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Royal Holloway in the University of London, has published extensively in the fields of renaissance drama (Jonson, Webster, Brome), modern English and Irish theatre (Wilde, Yeats, Pinter, Beckett, Friel, Mc Guinness), dance (Ninette de Valois, Robert Helpmann), stage design (Charles Ricketts, Robert Gregory) and direction (Terence Gray). Most recently, he devised and was General Editor of an AHRC-funded project to create an online edition of The Collected Plays of Richard Brome (2010), and published the monograph, Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and William Butler Yeats (2011). The Collected Brome is soon to be published in a more traditional book-format by Oxford University Press (2020). He has also edited the plays of Wilde, Yeats and T.C. Murray; and the manuscript versions of Yeats’s The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March. Professor Cave is a trained Feldenkrais practitioner who works on vocal techniques with professional actors and on extending movement skills with performers in physical theatre.

22.9 x 15.3 cm.  304 pp.  2006

H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier, the first book-length study of H.R.H.'s African fiction, revises the image of Rider Haggard (1856–1925) as a mere writer of adventure stories, a brassy propagandist for British imperialism. Professor Monsman places Haggard’s imaginative works both in the context of colonial fiction writing and in the framework of subsequent postcolonial debates about history and its representation.

Like Olive Schreiner, Haggard was an Anglo-African writer straddling the moral divide of mixed allegiances—one empathetically African, the other quite English. The context for such Haggard tales as King Solomon’s Mines and She was a triad of extraordinary nineteenth-century cultures in conflict—British, Boer, and Zulu. Haggard mined his characters both from the ore of real-life Africa and from the depths of his subconscious, giving expression to feelings of cultural conflict, probing and subverting the dominant economic and social forces of imperialism. Monsman argues that Haggard endorses native religious powers as superior to the European empirical paradigm, celebrates autonomous female figures who defy patriarchal control, and covertly supports racial mixing. These social and political elements are integral to his thrilling story lines charged with an exoticism of lived nightmares and extraordinary ordeals.

H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier will be of interest to readers of imperial history and biography, “lost race” and supernatural literature, tales of terror, and heroic fantasies. The book’s unsettling relevance to contemporary issues will engage a wide audience, and the groundbreaking biographical account of Haggard’s close contemporary Bertram Mitford in the appendix will add appeal to specialists.

Chosen and Introduced by Robert O'Driscoll

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

Paperback ISBN; 0-86140-149-2 / 978-86140-149-9  10.50

21.6 x 13.8 cm.

Contains: The King of Friday's Men, The Paddy Pedlar, The Wood of the Whispering, Daughter from over the Water, Petticoat Loose and the previously unpublished The Bachelor's Daughter, bibliographical checklist.

Michael Joseph Molloy (1917-1994) was born and died in Milltown, Co. Galway. Originally intending to enter the priesthood, this was prevented by his being struck down by tuberculosis, and it was during the long periods he spent in hospital that he started writing plays, having been inspired by a childhood visit to the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. His first play, Old Road, was produced at the Abbey in 1943, as was The Visiting House in 1946, and The King of Friday’s Men in 1948. When the old theatre burned down and the company moved to the Queen’s Theatre his The Wood of the Whispering and The Paddy Pedlar were produced there in 1953, followed by The Will and the Way in 1955, The Right Rose Tree in 1958, and The Wooing of Duvesa in 1964.

After the company’s return to the rebuilt Theatre in 1966 his plays – with their romantic plots and Syngean dialogue – did not find favour with the new Abbey, and with the exception of Petticoat Loose in 1979, none of his later works were performed professionally.  By the late 1980s he had come to believe – as he wrote in one letter to the publisher of this selection – that the Abbey  no longer even read plays by authors based in the provinces until they had been produced elsewhere (here he cited himself and John B.Keane as examples), and that his works scared the ‘actor Artistic Directors who know nothing about provincial Ireland and nothing about the rules of playwriting’.  He feared his plays might be the last full-length folk plays written in Ireland.

Robert O'Driscoll, an authority on Samuel Ferguson and on the early works of W. B. Yeats, was Professor of English Literature at St Michael's College, University of Toronto, until his retirememt. He died in 1996.

Modernist scholars have written a handful of comparative studies on Peter and Joyce. This work is the first book-length exploration into the aesthetic development of these writers that underscores the importance of Pater's work in Joyce's works. Much of Pater's and Joyce's aesthetics evolves from the dialectical tension between the sensual and the spiritual. The Paterian-Joycean syntheses of basic antinomies - religion and sensuality, empiricism and idealism, Aristotelian mimesis and aestheticism - result in kindred theories of art.

Moliterno's highly readable account of the intellectual affinity between the two authors searches their relationship and Joyce's potential debt to Pater. In four main chapters Moliterno discusses the transition of Pater and Joyce from priests to artist and the parallel ways they portray this process in fiction: traces the Paterian elements of the aesthetics of Stephen Dedalus and of the mature Joyce; compares Pater's epiphanies with Joyce's to reveal how Pater helped shape the Joycean epiphany; and analyses the similar epistemologies behind the development of Pater's and Joyce's aesthetics.

To some they may seem an odd match. Joyce, who sought to mirror the everyday lives of Dubliners through revolutionary literary techniques, appears to have little in common in Pater, the precious "father of aestheticism", precursor of Wilde and other aesthete who detested the mimesis Joyce championed. As Moliterno's book reveals, Pater has more in common with Joyce in this regard than with the aesthetes of the fin de siècle.

The Dialectics of Sense and Spirit in Pater and Joyce carefully discriminates connections between one of the late nineteenth century's most influential writers and the early twentieth century's master novelist.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.    xiv, 263 pp. +  12pp. colour  and b/w illus. 
Ulster Editions & Monographs series (ISSN 0954-3392) volume 12

Frank McGuinness and His Theatre of Paradox is a critical study of one of the most important contemporary Irish dramatists. It offers an overview of the McGuinness’s drama from his early plays right up to the recent, Dolly West's Kitchen. The author has chosen to treat the plays thematically, rather than chronologically, which highlights the playwright's major preoccupations in the contexts of modern and contemporary Ireland. She positions McGuinness exactly as a representative of a dynamic creative intelligence fully alive to the various factors, undercurrents, issues, problems, and tensions that are being lived through in present-day Irish society, North and South.

Contents:

1. Folk Memory as Lethal Cultural Weapon: Protestant Ireland vs. Catholic Ireland (Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, and Carthaginians);
2. Visualising McGuinness’s Verbal Theatre: Interpretation of Caravaggio’s Theatricality (Innocence);
3. ‘An Unhappy Marriage between Ireland and England’: A Post-Colonial Gaze at Ireland’s Past (Mary and Lizzie, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, and Mutabilitie);
4. ‘The Voices of the Voiceless’: Representation of Irish Women (The Factory Girls, Baglady, and The Hen House);
5. Families at War: McGuinness’s Irish Bad Comedy of Manners (The Bird Sanctuary, and Dolly West’s Kitchen);
Catalogue of the Tilling Archive of McGuinness material in the the Library at the University of Ulster, Coleraine.

Hiroko Mikami is Professor of English at Waseda University, Tokyo. She was a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Irish Literature and Bibliography, University of Ulster and obtained her Ph.D. on Frank McGuinness from University of Ulster where some of his typescripts and secondary materials are located in the Tilling Archive. She has translated many contemporary Irish plays into Japanese: Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire, A Thief of Christmas; Brian Friel's Freedom of the City, Making History; Thomas Kilroy's Double Cross, and Frank McGuinness's Innocence and Mutabilitie.

Chosen and Introduced by Wolfgang Zach

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

Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-293-6 / 978-0-86140-293-9 £8.95

21.6 x 13.8 cm

Contains: The Turn of the Road, The Drone, Red Turf, The Troth, Phantoms, Bridgehead and Peter, bibliographical checklist.
Note. Although the two articles ‘The Ulster Literary Theatre’ and ‘Meet Rutherford Mayne’ were announced as being part of this volume they were, for reasons the publisher is unable to explain, omitted from the published book. They can now be read  HERE

Samuel John Waddell (1878-1967), who took on the stage-name Rutherford Mayne when he embarked on a theatrical career, was the most prolific, versatile, and successful playwright that the Irish Literary Revival in Ulster brought forth. In the course of his career as a dramatist, from 1906 to 1934, he wrote thirteen plays – ten plays for the Ulster Literary Theatre, one for the Dublin-based Theatre of Ireland, and two for the Abbey Theatre. Especially his early realistic Ulster 'peasant plays' were very successful, among them The Drone (1908), the most popular Irish folk comedy of the first half of the twentieth century. He also acted a great number of main parts in plays of his own and of other writers, to great acclaim, mainly in Belfast and Dublin but also on tours to England and Scotland, from 1904 onwards until late in his life. His plays disappeared from the stage in the 1950s and when he died at the age of 89, in 1967, his artistic achievements were almost forgotten.

In this selection of Rutherford Mayne's plays, seven of his eight published plays – his most important ones – have been included, The Turn of the Road, The Drone , The Troth, Red Turf, Phantoms, Peter and Bridge Head. Two important prose pieces (one of Mayne's essays and an interview), have been added to the plays as they provide direct insight into his personality, views, and career.

Wolfgang Zach’s introduction shows why the plays should be remembered today, providing a lengthy survey of Mayne's life and works, with particular emphasis on a discussion of all his plays, their critical reception, stage history, and specific features.

Wolfgang Zach was Professor of English (Chair) at the University of Innsbruck and Head of its English Department. Before his appointment to this present position in 1994/95, he taught at the University of Graz and also was a Visiting Professor at a great number of universities in each continent. From his Ph.D. thesis on Oliver Goldsmith (1969) onwards he has published widely in the field of Irish literature and was a Vice-President of IASIL (the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures). He hosted an IASIL-Conference and edited its proceedings (with H. Kosok) on Literary Interrelations. Ireland, England and the World, 3 vols. (Tubingen: Narr, 1987), his most recent volume (ed. with R. Freiburg and A. Löffler) is on Swift: The Enigmatic Dean (Tübingen:Stauffenburg, 1998), and for many years he has been active as European Continental Editor of the Irish Literary Supplement.

ISBN: 978-0-900675-68-3
23.4 x  15.5 cm.    iv, 192 pp. + 15 colour illus, and  24pp. b/w illus. 

Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807) was considered by her contemporaries to be one of the greatest and most influential artists of her time, but since then her reputation has fluctuated. With the present revival of interest in the neo-classical era, Angelica is now regaining her true position in the opinions of the critics and art historians. This fact was underlined by the great exhibition of her work at Bregenz in 1968 and by the appearance of several of her works in the 1972 Burlington House exhibition which has the neo-classical as its theme. As one of the foremost writers in the Bregenz catalogue, Anthony M. Clarke, has written to the author of this work, ‘Angelica Kauffmann’s best paintings are of a lasting greatness and value’.

Dorothy Moulton Mayer’s previous biographies of Louise of Savoy and Marie Antoinette have well fitted her to write about this artist. Only a woman can really appreciate the difficulties under which Angelica laboured, in spite of her success, and the author has written a biography which shows her to
be in full sympathy with her subject.

Angelica Kauffmann destroyed most of her papers before she died and relatively little is known about her, but Lady Mayer has successfully recreated the atmosphere and background in which Angelica lived. She takes us through the years from Angelica’s birth from her journey to and success in England, her tragic first marriage and her happier second one, her move to Rome, her friendship with Goethe and her experiences during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars during which she died in 1807.

This new biography, with many pages of illustrations in colour and black and white, is a timely reminder of Angelica Kauffmann’s greatness and her extremely important position in the neo-classical era.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.     x, 426 pp.  1996      Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 47

This volume publishes the papers given at the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature's 1993 conference, hosted by the Ain Shams University, Cairo.

 It was the first conference to be held with this theme, which covers Ireland's literary relationships with middle and far-eastern countries, and shows the similarities and differences between literary traditions in different countries as well as the influence of history – for example, both Ireland and Egypt had to extract themselves from British political domination, and both had to take extreme actions to succeed.

The contributions cover the themes of 'Irishness and Egyptianness', 'Myth, Fable and Folklore', 'Regionalism and Cultural Politics', 'Colonialism' and 'The 'Urban and the Rural', with keynote papers by Professors Maureen Murphy ('Folk Narrative Motifs in Egyptian, Irish and Native American Folklore and Literature'), Terry Eagleton ('Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel'), Declan Kiberd ('Yeats and the National Longing for Form') and Richard Allen Cave ('The City versus the Village') with other papers covering Irish authors – Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, Sir William and Lady Gregory, Lafcadio Hearn, Jennifer Johnston, James Joyce, Brendan Kennelly, Thomas Kinsella, Edward Martyn, C.R.Maturin, George Moore and Thomas Moore, Thomas Murphy, Flann O'Brien, Sean O'Faolain, Eugene O'Neill, Bernard Shaw, James Stephens, Jonathan Swift (compared with Conrad), Honor Tracy, Oscar Wilde, W.B.Yeats – Egyptian, South African and Eastern authors – Abdel Rahman Al-Sharqawi, Mahmoud Diab, Tawfik Elhakim, Yusuf Idris, Goha, Naguib Mahfouz, Yukio Mishima, Etedal Othman, Karel Schoeman – contemporary poetry of Northern Ireland, Egyptian and Irish film, and the literary parallels between 18th century Anglo-Irish and 20th century Egyptian literature.

Edited and Introduced by Peter Bander van Duren

A historical walk with the Prefect of the Pontifical Household through the treasures of papal heraldry
ISBN: 978-0-905715-25-4

24.8 x 18.8 cm.      285 pp.   + nearly 400 b/w illus. with the text and 24 pp. with 54 colour illus.
Captions to all illustrations are in English, Italian and German

In the late 1960s Cardinal Martin conceived the idea of having an authoritative heraldic guide for the Vatican where hundreds of coats of arms date back to Pope Eugene IV (1431-1447) the earliest armorial bearings of popes who resided in the Vatican. When Pope Paul VI had consecrated him Bishop of Neapolis in Palaestina during the papal visit to the Holy Land in 1964 and appointed him the first Prefect of the Pontifical Court, Monsignor Martin spent his free time writing profusely illustrated articles for the Holy See's Sunday newspaper L'Osservatore della Domenica on heraldry in the Vatican.

At that time he already had lived in the Vatican for over thirty years. When Pope John Paul II ascended the See of St. Peter in 1978 and, like his immediate predecessor, John Paul I, appointed him Prefect of the Papal Household and the Pontifical Court, Monsignor Martin had himself become a unique figure in the history of heraldry. He was the first Prelate of the Roman Church who was able to impale his personal coat of arms with that of the three Popes under whom he had served as Prefect of the Pontifical Court.

When Mons. Martin approached me in 1983 about the possibility of producing a book on heraldry in the Vatican, he had lived over fifty years in the Vatican. His knowledge about the Vatican and the people who had lived there was phenomenal. After the book had been published, several prominent members of the Roman Curia suggested that the book's title was in many respects a misnomer. All the Popes and other famous residents of the Apostolic Palace were profusely represented with their armorial bearings, but Monsignor Martin, who personally had served six Popes, added countless anecdotes and curiosities about people and places inside the Vatican. The book reminds one of the succinct and sometimes hilarious accounts in Aubrey's Brief Lives. For example, he recalls his first years in the Vatican when he worked in the Papal Secretariat of State of Pope Pius XI, under whom the present Vatican City State came into existence. Pope Pius XI checked the signatures of all the members in his Secretariat, and anybody whose signature he considered illegible was dismissed from service in the Secretariat of State.

The idiosyncrasies of many popes and cardinals resident in the Vatican during the last 550 years were often expressed in heraldic ornaments, on ceilings, walls and fountains. Bernini placed statues of 140 Popes, Cardinals and Bishops who had lived in the Vatican on his colonnades of St. Peter's Square. Monsignor Martin knew who everyone was, their life stories and why Bernini had chosen them to be immortalised.

We worked on his book for four years. I have never ceased to be amazed by Cardinal Martin's phenomenal memory. As Prefect of the Pontifical Household, he was always at the Pope's side. Sometimes I was privileged to be present when he introduced visitors to the Pope; he had this charming way of briefing the Holy Father not only on who the person was, but always with personal information about the visitor. Everybody was astonished at the ease with which the Pope walked among the many visitors and seemed to know everybody personally. Few realised that the Pope's Prefect was that walking encyclopedia on which not only the Pope but countless Cardinals and members of the Curia could rely to provide accurate and detailed information. As far as the Vatican Palaces were concerned, he knew of rooms and entire suites nobody but he had entered since the days of Pope Pius IX (1846-1878). He found heraldic curiosities nobody had seen for hundreds of years. Cardinal Martin, more than any prelate who had lived in the Vatican has enriched the wealth of human knowledge of heraldry in the Vatican.

Without fear of contradiction I can say that Cardinal Jacques Martin was one of the most loved men in the Vatican, and the warmth of his love and care for others permeated the Apostolic palace for many decades. Cardinal Martin's love and devotion to the successors of St. Peter was unparalleled. His sense of humour was infectious, and he could speak about the follies of some illustrious residents over the last 550 years without malice. Coats of Arms came to life and spoke to those who were fortunate to be guided by him.

HERALDRY IN THE VATICAN is in a manner of speaking a legacy Cardinal Martin left behind when he died in 1992. It is far more than a guide to the hundreds of heraldic emblems in the Vatican or a history of their bearers. It brings alive 500 years of one of the most fascinating places on earth. The author himself had become part of the rich tapestry of the Vatican.

This is not just a book for any serious scholar of heraldry or Vatican history; it is an indispensable companion for anybody fortunate enough to visit Rome and the Vatican, and it will compensate those who cannot do so.

Peter Bander van Duren

19.0 x 13.0 cm.    viii, 151 pp.  [1983]     1990

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) published his first volume of poetry in 1889. Deeply influenced by Spiritualism and Celtic mythology, he was a crucial figure in the Irish cultural revival of the 1890s. Under the influence of Maud Gonne he became involved in nationalist politics, but the Philistinism of the emerging Ireland repelled him, and he gradually drew back from public affairs. He had been a co-founder, with J.M.Synge and Lady Gregory, of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, and remained a director until the end of his life. His increasingly sceptical and pessimistic views on Ireland were temporarily reversed by the 1916 Rising. Out of the confusion and tensions of the following decade his greatest poetry developed: almost uniquely among major poets, his outstanding work was written in the second half of his life. In 1917 he had married George Hyde-Lees; they had two children. He died in the South of France, and in 1948 his body was brought back to Ireland and re-interred in Drumcliffe Churchyard, Co.Sligo.

This is a revised and enlarged edition of the work first published in 1983. On its first appearance it received exceptional reviews:

'Perceptive, honest and stimulating, subtly educating the uninformed reader in the best ways to approach a study of Yeats's verse, plays and letters.'
Richard Allen Cave in British Book News

'A remarkable achievement. He has succeeded in presenting a rational, sensitive account of the life of Ireland's most famous poet....Well worth reading by the scholar and the general reader.'
Ireland of the Welcomes

'A tour de force. Lucid and incisive, it gives us a convincing picture of Yeats's life in all its complexities, and it does so with insight and sympathy.'
A. Norman Jeffares in The Yorkshire Post

`A remarkable synthesis of a huge topic, written with enthusiasm and flair and ending with a splendid essay on the poet's "close companions", his great capacity for friendship and for converting the experience into poetry.'
Thomas Kilroy in The Irish Times

22.8 x 15.2 cm.   xxvi, 440 pp.       1989

Sir James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) is cherished interna­tionally for his delightful children’s tale Peter Pan, reprised in numer­ous forms as play, musical, and animated film.

Yet Barrie’s contribution to English literature carries far beyond his Immortal Peter Pan. He estab­lished a following as an essayist, achieved great success as a novelist, then turned from the novel to even greater successes in the theatre. There, decades later, works such as The Admirable Crichton and What Every Woman Knows were still being applauded in London’s West End and on Broadway, subse­quently pleasing even larger audi­ences in their film and television versions.

As a successful playwright, Barrie Joined his efforts with those of Bernard Shaw and Harley Granville Barker in helping to establish the ‘theatre of the play­wright’, a movement which revo­lutionised theatrical production by effectively breaking the strangle­hold grip of the old ‘star system’ and revitalised the British theatre during the first decade of this century.

Professor Markgraf has assidu­ously compiled and annotated over 5,000 items relevant to Barrie’s life and work. For decades to come this bibliography will be an essential source of research, not only for scholars who pursue Barrie’s career but for those interested in the era in which he worked.

ISBN: 978-82-90601-09-1
20.8 x  13.8 cm.     80 pp.     1995

This is a book about Healing. Not ‘Faith Healing’, as Matthew refuses to call it that. As he writes, ‘The idea that healing only works if you believe in it is simply not true! Healing can work on a sceptical person yet sometimes fail to help a believer. Healing also works in test-tubes in laboratories, as well as on animals and brain-damaged children. It cannot be said that these results are brought about by psychological factors, faith or placebo. There is no faith required.’

Contents: Introduction – Healing in the Laboratory – The Healing Experience – Healing Ourselves.

We distribute this book in Britain for Eikstein Publishers, of Øyslebø, Norway.

ISBN: 978-0-86140-387-5

21.6 x 13.8 cm.    viii, 176 pp.  illus.    Our 1995 pbk of the 1978 edition published by W.H.Allen

The Strangers is an enthralling tale by Matthew Manning, a man of unique psychic abilities, and a famous healer.

In this book he describes the amazing and frightening poltergeist phenomena that took place at his home in the early 1970s, and the remarkable portrait of the life and times of a previous occupant of the house, Robert Webbe, that Matthew and his family were able to piece together, mainly through Matthew's automatic writing, and the amazing set of "halfe of a thousand" signatures that appeared on the walls of his father's study.

Starting through a major attack of poltergeist activity in the family home, in which furniture would be speedily moved about or balanced on top of each other, with things vanishing and reappearing, Matthew found he could reduce the happenings by automatic writing, and it was through the writing that messages came from Robert Webbe. At times Webbe could see his surroundings, sometimes apologising for frightening people, and at others he was very irritated with these people who were in his house, unaware that he was in another century and no longer owned it. He would remove items belonging to the Mannings which it was occasionally very difficult to get him to return, and sometimes give them presents in the form of "apports". On one memorable occasion Webbe appeared in solid form to Matthew who handed him a small wooden clog, which vanished with him. It is small wonder that many visitors, including researchers into the occult, were extremely frightened by what they saw; yet Matthew has recorded the events with understanding and humour.

The Strangers may be considered one of the outstanding works of its kind to have been written this century.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.        x, 361 pp.   1992    Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 41

This volume is based on the seventh triennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature, held in July 1988 at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, Co.Londonderry, Northern Ireland. The international reputation and appeal of Irish literature are reflected in the fact that the contributors are from all corners of the world, North America, Europe, Scandinavia, Africa and India.

The collection reveals the extraordinary influence that Ireland has had on world literature, especially as a model for colonial and nationalist cultures. A host of Irish writers, particularly dramatists, has been translated and adapted in countries attracted to the individuality as well as the universality of their themes. Very often, the outsiders' insight into Irish literature shows a directness and sensitivity which are most illuminating and instructive.

A revelation of this collection is the way so many Irish writers have embraced, and been deeply influenced by, the culture of other nations: important new documentary work on writers such as Maria Edgeworth, W.B.Yeats, George Russell and Derek Mahon are to be found here.

The collection is both a celebration of a truly internationalised field of study, and a tribute to a literature which has successfully emigrated throughout the world. These essays will interest all those, students and scholars alike, who recognise the value of culture and literary pluralism, and the importance of comparative studies.

For over forty years IASAIL, now the Interantional Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), has done pioneering work in this field. By now, it may be said, Ireland has taken its rightful place amongst the literatures of the world.

At the time of publication Joseph McMinn was Senior Lecturer in the English Department of the University of Ulster at Jordanstown, near Belfast. He has taught in American and Germany, and his publications include John Banville: A Critical Study, Jonathan Swift: A Literary Life and, as editor, Swift's Irish Pamphlets: An Introductory Selection, all three books being published in 1991. He is presently working on an illustrated documentary of Swift's travels around Ireland.

ISBN: 978.0.900675.82.9

21.6 x 13.0 cm.     191 pp. + 8 pp. illus.

"[Among the books I read at the Beaconsfield Public Library] I remember being impressed by Dermot MacManus' The Middle Kingdom, which had a great effect on me, and is probably one of the most influential books I've ever read", Terry Pratchett (in his 1999 talk to the Folklore Society)

'No matter what one doubts,' wrote W.B.Yeats, 'one never doubts the faeries for . . . they stand to reason.' The author, an intimate friend of Yeats and a friend too of the great folklorist Douglas Hyde and the myriad-minded mystic G.W.Russell ('A.E.'), was a staunch believer in 'the ancient and continuing spirit life of the countryside'.

Writing not as a folklorist but as a historian, Diarmuid MacManus records in factual detail many manifestations of the Irish faery world early in the twentieth century. He tells how the Thornhill fairy appeared to two sisters in their room, and the Mount Leinster fairy to a young woman as she was taking the cows home, and a young girl tried to pat the Wicklow pooka as it walked beside her, but her hand went right through it.

This is a strikingly persuasive book, tackling in a serious and intelligent manner a subject that has a strong romantic appeal. The author set out to write the book with certain principles in mind: first, that a central character in each incident was still alive at the time the book was first published (in 1959); second, that he could vouch for their reliability; and third, that each agreed to stand up, if asked, and vouch for the truth of the experience. Except in a few instances, those telling the stories had been friends of the author for many years.

Since its publication forty years ago it has retained its uniqueness as the only collection of true Irish fairy tales.

Chosen and Introduced by John Barrett

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

21.6 x 13.8 cm.

Hardcopy ISBN: 0-86140-154-9 / 978-0-86140-154-3 £30.00
Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-155-7 / 978-0-86140-155-0 £9.95

Contains: Where Stars Walk, Ill Met by Moonlight, The Mountains Look Different, The Liar, Prelude in Kasbek Street, selected writings on plays and players, bibliographical checklist.

When he died in 1978, Ireland mourned the passing of the most versatile man of the theatre she has ever known. His acting career started early as a child actor in London, but when he was fourteen he read a single passage of Yeats extolling Ireland's heritage and from then on he was to give himself to the Dublin stage, notably the Gate Theatre which he founded with his partner, Hilton Edwards. John Barrett has mapped out the influences and achievements of this extraordinary character in his introduction and selected five of Macliamm¢ir's most memorable works.

John Barrett taught English at University College, Dublin.