ISBN: 978-0-86140-008-9
21.6 x 13.8 cm.    x, 257 pp. 1981   Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume  7

This volume was created to mark the centenary of the birth of Sean O’Casey. It covers every aspect of his life and work, with essays from leading scholars in the field of O’Casey studies: Ronald Ayling, Bernard Benstock, Mary FitzGerald, David Krause, Robert G. Lowery, William J. Maroldo, Alan Simp­son and Stanley Weintraub, to­gether with a Chronology and a list of productions of O’Casey’s plays, both by Robert G. Lowery. The subjects covered include O’Casey’s relations with the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats, and Bernard Shaw together with assessments of the influence that James Joyce, politics, religion and Ireland had on the play­wright and his plays.

CONTENTS<br

SEAN O'CASEY: A CHRONOLOGY.  Robert G.Lowery<br

SEAN O'CASEY AND THE ABBEY THEATRE, DUBLIN.  Ronald Ayling<br

SEAN O'CASEY AND/OR JAMES JOYCE.  Bernard Benstock<br

SEAN O'CASEY AND LADY GREGORY: THE RECORD OF A FRIENDSHIP.  Mary FitzGerald<br

THE DRUIDIC AFFINITIES OF O'CASEY AND YEATS.  David Krause<br

SEAN O'CASEY: ART AND POLITICS.  Robert G.Lowery<br

EARLIEST YOUTH: PRISTINE CATHOLICISM AND GREEN PATRIOTISM IN O'CASEY'S IRISH BOOKS.  William J.Maroldo<br

THE UNHOLY TRINITY: A SIMPLE GUIDE TO HOLY IRELAND c. 1880-1980.  Alan Simpson<br

SHAW'S OTHER KEEGAN: O'CASEY AND G.B.S.  Stanley Weintraub<br

SEAN O'CASEY AND THE ABBEY THEATRE.  Robert G.Lowery<br

Index

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21.6 x 13.8 cm.     Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 19

O’Casey, the Dramatist is the first study to analyse each of Sean O’Casey’s plays in the context of the whole body of his work. His first plays were performed by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin until it refused The Silver Tassie, a rejection that brought about a most acrimonious debate, broke up friendships, and caused O’Casey to sever his links with the Abbey. Its directors were unable to understand the first of his experimental plays, and could not appreciate its true quality. Thence­forth O'Casey’s writing developed along new lines, mostly away from his Irish roots.

In popular estimation his best plays are those of the Dublin years – The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars – but many of his later works are greatly undervalued; indeed The Silver Tassie, Within the Gates, Purple Dust, Red Roses for Me, Hall of Healing, Cock-a-doodle Dandy and The Bishop's Bonfire are all masterpieces of modern drama, as this study shows.

Professor Kosok considers all the twenty-three extant plays, tracing O'Casey's development as a playwright through a chronological study and show­ing that his work can be divided into five periods, which are considered in this volume under the headings ‘Dublin as a Mirror of the World’, 'Experiments’, ‘Ideology and Drama', ‘Ireland as a Microcosm', and ‘Bitterness and Recon­ciliation’. He ends this study with a section headed ‘Continuity and Originality' in which he briefly summarises the findings of previous scholarship, suggests some additional answers to general problems, and indicates some avenues for future research.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.     viii, 350 pp.   1990   Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 36   IASAIL-Japan Series (ISSN 0267-6079) volume 3

This collection of essays looks at a variety of responses by writers to the problems of their motherland. Includes essays on Swift, Burke, Ferguson, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Joyce, Shaw, O'Casey, Parker and Egan, as well as Northern Irish poets and playwrights. Essayists include Vivian Mercier, A. Norman Jeffares, Lorna Reynolds, Maurice Harmon, John S. Kelly, Declan Kiberd, Christopher Murray, Brian Arkins, and Augustine Martin.

CONTENTS<br

INTRODUCTION. Masaru Sekine<br

ENGLISH READERS: THREE HISTORICAL 'MOMENTS'. Vivian Mercier<br

SWIFT: ANATOMY OF AN ANTI-COLONIALIST. A. Norman Jeffares<br

EDMUND BURKE: A VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS. Lorna Reynolds<br

THE ENIGMA OF SAMUEL FERGUSON. Maurice Harmon<br

W. B. YEATS: POLITICS AND HISTORY. Donna Gerstenberger<br

ASCENDANCY NATIONALISM, FEMINIST NATIONALISM AND STAGECRAFT IN LADY GREGORY'S REVISION OF KINCORA. Maureen S.G. Hawkins<br

THE FIFTH BELL: RACE AND CLASS IN YEATS'S POLITICAL THOUGHT. John S. Kelly<br

KINESIS STASIS, REVOLUTION IN YEATSEAN DRAMA. Augustine Martin<br

JAMES JOYCE AND POLITICS. Heather Cook Callow<br

SAINT JOAN: FABIAN FEMINIST AND PROTESTANT MYSTIC. Declan Kiberd<br

THE 'MIGHT OF DESIGN' IN THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS. Christopher Murray<br

THE WILL TO FREEDOM: POLITICS AND PLAY IN THE THEATRE OF STEWART PARKER. Elmer Andrews<br

TOO LITTLE PEACE: THE POLITICAL POETRY OF DESMOND EGAN. Brian Arkins<br

WHO WE ARE: PROTESTANTS AND POETRY IN THE NORTH OF IRELAND. David Burleigh<br

THEATRE WITH ITS SLEEVES ROLLED UP. Emelie Fitzgibbon<br

Notes<br

Notes on Contributors<br

Index

21.6 x 13.8 cm.   200 pp.   1984   Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 20

The Double Perspective of Yeats’s Aes­thetic offers penetrating insights into the poet’s aesthetic principles. These are characterised, Professor Komesu demon­strates, by a polarity of perspective. He argues that Yeats envisaged life as both unity and conflict, and regarded art as an embodiment of both experience and knowledge. The peculiar nature of this Yeatsian polarity is that the conflicting perspectives are not irreconcilably at war, but exist in a complementary relationship, in which one lives the other’s death, and dies the other’s life. This polarity sometimes led the poet into a logical impasse out of which he tried to struggle in vain. But from it, nonetheless, he gained the dramatic force and tension which enabled him to create a world of poetic vision and experience, one with a magnitude which is all its own. Professor Komesu finds this polarised perspective inherent in the literary theory of the West, constituting a discernible tradition that shapes such divergent artistic movements as Classicism and Romanticism. He contends that Yeats’s place must be found within this tradition.

CONTENTS<br

Preface

PART I<br

1. Introduction<br

2. Knowledge or Experience<br

3. The Saint or the Artist

PART II <br

4. Brahman or Daimon<br

5. The Flower or the Gyre<br

6. The Flower That Never Bloomed<br

7. Conclusion<br

Notes <br

Index

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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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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.

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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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.

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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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.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.     xii, 351 pp.    1996   Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 46

In this collection of twenty-two essays written over the last two decades, Professor Jeffares looks at the work of many of the most famous 17th to 20th century Irish writers - from Swift and Farquhar to Joyce, Yeats, Moore and Somerville & Ross, via Goldsmith, Lady Morgan, Lever, and Maturin, as well branching out with essays on Maud Gonne, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Sir Robert Richard Torrens.

The titles of the essays are
'Swift and the Ireland of his Day',
'Swift: The Practical Poet',
'Aspects of Swift as a Letter Writer',
'Farquhar's Final Comedies',
'Goodnatured Goldsmith',
'The Vicar of Wakefield',
'The Wild Irish Girl', Lady Morgan's O'Donnel',
'Maturin the Innovator',
'Reading Lever',
'Yeats and the Wrong Lever',
'Lord Kilgobbin',
'Torrens: Irishman in South Australia',
'George Moore: Portrait for Radio',
'Somerville and Ross: an Introduction',
'Yeats's Great Black Ragged Bird',
'Memories of Maud Gonne',
'The Fortunes of Richard Mahony: An Anglo-Irishman reconsidered',
'Blunt: Almost an Honorary Irishman',
'Joyce's Precursors',
'Joyce's "Done Half by Design"', and
'The Realistic Novel in Ireland 1900-1945'.

Together, they provide scholar and general reader alike with an important and stimulating overview of major authors and aspects of Irish literature, some of which deserve much more study than they presently receive.

A. Norman Jeffares (1920-2005) was the author of W.B.Yeats: Man and Poet (1949; 1962) and W.B.Yeats: A New Biography (1988), he has edited Yeats's Poems (1989), A Vision (1990) and various other books of Yeats as well as writing a Commentary (1968) and a New Commentary (1984) on Yeats's poems and, with A.S.Knowland, a Commentary on the plays. His co-edited books include The Scientific Background, with M. Bryn Davies, and Irish Childhoods, with Anthony Kamm. In addition to A History of Anglo-Irish Literature and various editions of and writings on English, Irish and American authors, he has edited twenty-four Restoration comedies for the Folio Society. As Derry Jeffares, he has written two books of poems: Brought Up in Dublin and Brought Up to Leave.  His recent work includes The Selected Poems of Swift; The Gonne-Yeats Letters, with Anna MacBride White; Joycechoyce, with Brendan Kennelly; Ireland's Women, with Katie Donovan and Brendan Kennelly, the Collins Dictionary of Quotations with Martin Gray.  He has also edited The Poems and Plays of Oliver St John Gogarty (2001) and wrote an extensive Introduction to The Poems of James Stephens (2006), both published by Colin Smythe Ltd.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.    262 pp. 2003
ISBN: 978-0-86140-453-7

It is well known that through their plays and lecture tours the dramatists of the Irish Literary Revival influenced and inspired those of America and elsewhere to set up their own national theatres and theatre movements, but most students of the Revival are unaware of just how far this influence extended. It would surely have surprised the founders and early playwrights of the Abbey Theatre to learn that their plays were not only being published in Japan (which they knew), but were also influencing translators, playwrights, critics and theatre associations in Korea – though it is hardly surprising that with little knowledge of Irish culture the translators often misinterpreted the plays and gave them political or social slants entirely lacking in the originals.

In the present work, Won-Jae Jang describes the development of Korean theatre societies such as the Theatre Arts Association, the Earth Moon Society, and the Theatre Arts Research Association during the first quarter of the 20^th century, how plays by Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge, Lord Dunsany, Sean O’Casey and T.C. Murray were interpreted – or misinterpreted – by Korean translators, and then describes their impact on Korean dramatists, showing in particular how the work of Synge and O’Casey influenced Chi-Jin Yoo (translations of three of whose plays – The Cow, The Mud Hut and The Donkey – are published in a companion volume, ISBN 978-0-86140-452-0), and Murray influenced Se-Deok Ham. This work therefore opens up Irish Drama’s hitherto little-known influences on a region of the Eastern hemisphere.

Won-Jae Jang was born in Seoul, graduated from Korea University (BA), and Goldsmiths College, University of London (MA), and was granted his PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2000. He is now working for Soongsil University as a Junior Professor.

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22.9 x 15.3 cm.

Henry Newbolt (1862-1938) was a celebrated man of letters at the turn of the century: poet, essayist, historian. But his popularity ebbed after the Great War, and since then the man and his poetry have received more than their share of hostile criticism. Even today critics oversimplify Newbolt. Most often he is typecast as the leading jingoist of the Edwardian age, not unlike Rudyard Kipling was until recently.

In The Poetry of Henry Newbolt, Vanessa Furse Jackson gives us a fresh look at the man, his poetry and their historical context. Her discussions of his heroic and lyric poems are framed by a close examination of the institutionalised values that lay behind Newbolt’s popularity. She looks at the intimate ties between his life-code and his education, particularly his public school education, and at the pervasive concepts of heroism, chivalry and patriotism inherited by the younger generation of the 1870s. She later examines how traditional Victorian and Edwardian attitudes, not just the general public’s but Newbolt’s as well, were irrevocably altered by the gruesome events of World War I.

Jackson provides nuance and perspective to show that Newbolt was not simply the blind patriot described by many literary historians. What he represents, she says, ‘is something much more interesting, and, in a complete history of the period, both more important and more complex.’ In addition to revealing much about the concepts, ideals and aspirations of the Victorian middle class in which he grew up, Newbolt ‘represents one of the last movements in poetry to occur in the fin-de-siècle anticipation and anxiety of the 1890s. [He] is a minor figure who represents major Victorian values and attitudes.’

In The Poetry of Henry Newbolt, Professor Jackson reconnects the poems to their context and offers new insights into Henry Newbolt, his work, and the Transi¬tion era itself.

VANESSA FURSE JACKSON, a great-granddaughter of Henry Newbolt, spent ten years in theatre in England before returning to college in 1981 and completing a BA (hons) in Related Arts at the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education. After graduating in 1984, she came to the United States and received an MFA in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State Uni¬versity in 1986. She completed her Ph.D. at Bowling Green in 1990. Professor Jackson spent her time teaching at Texas A & M University – Corpus Christi, before returning to live in England.

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Chosen and Introduced by Janet Egleson Dunleavy and Gareth Dunleavy

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

Hardcover ISBN: 0-86140-095-X / 987-0-86140-095-9 £25.00

Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-096-8 / 978-0-86140-096-6 £8.99

21.6 x 13.8 cm    192 pp.   1991

Contains: The Twisting of the Rope, The Marriage, The Lost Saint, The Nativity, King James, The Bursting of the Bubble, The Tinker and the Sheeog, The Matchmaking, The School-master, bibliographical checklist. This volume publishes the original Irish language texts with Lady Gregory's translations.

When Douglas Hyde was elected in 1938 as first President of Ireland, he brought to this last of many rôles the prestige of an important scholar, a noted author and a leader of the cultural nationalist movement. Born in 1860, the son of the Church of Ireland rector at Frenchpark, Co. Roscommon, he grew up among the local people, learning Irish and listening  to folk tales, which he began to record and which proved valuable experience when writing dialogue for his plays. After study at Trinity he became a founder member of the Gaelic League, formed in 1893 to preserve and promote the Irish language, and he was its President for twenty-two years.

Hyde was struck by the idea of promoting the Irish language through drama, especially puppet shows and short plays. In the hands of a writer less gifted in mimicry, with a less-developed sense of humour, the results of an effort undertaken for admittedly propagandist purposes might have been deadly. In his hands they ushered in a new dramatic tradition. That his one-act plays, classics of the modern Irish theatre, continue to be performed today, both in their original Irish and in Lady Gregory's English translations is but one indication of the versatility of his talent and his appeal to both popular and artistic tastes. Eight one-act plays are reproduced here with Lady Gregory's translations on the facing pages.

More than three decades after his death, the inevitable reassessment is under way and new stock must be taken of his rôles as folklorist, poet, translator and playwright, each assumed at a carefully chosen time for what it could contribute to the goal of his life: first the cultural, then the social and political independence of Ireland.