Literature, History and Ideas. Essays in honour of Patrick Rafroidi
21.6 x 13.8 cm.    xii, 221 pp.  1992     Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 42

Ireland and France, A Bountiful Friendship: Literature, History and Ideas is a collection of essays looking at 'Irish matters' in a new and exciting way. Accepting the historical significance of France as a catalyst for Irish genius and a fertile field for missionaries, wild geese and assorted Irish expatriates, the book explores compatibilities and contrasts between the Irish and the French. Has French republicanism come to life again in the IRA? Are Paisley and Le Pen mirror images of each other or of `national' impulses? If Irish intellectual history is imbricated with the Enlightenment and the counter-reformation, how do we read Edmund Burke?

If Irish writers from Wilde to Beckett seem equally at home in French and in English perhaps this suggests the value of tracing the footsteps of others: Charles Maturin, John Banim, James Stephens, Denis Devlin and Derek Mahon, whose work in varying ways draws upon and mediates French influence. On the other hand, a French perspective on things Irish, as in several essays included here, provides new insights and assessments, new versions of understanding.

The inspiring presence of this book is the late Patrick Rafroidi, whose study of Irish romanticism has become a standard work and who has proven himself among the best French commentators on Irish culture in recent times. As Rafroidi's family history and career exemplified Irish-French interactions, so these essays in his honour celebrate the fruitfulness of a long-standing affaire.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.  xiv, 432 pp.  1983    Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 12

The twenty-nine stories in William Carleton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry each had a different publishing history. Some had appeared in periodicals as different as the Christian Examiner and the Dublin Literary Gazette; every story underwent revision when it first appeared in a book and in subsequent editions. These revisions were not slight. On occasion Carleton transformed the story almost out of recognition: ‘The Landlord and Tenant’ was doubled into ‘Tubber Derg or the Red Well’; he censored ‘An Essay on Irish Swearing’; ‘Going to Maynooth’ was improved by lengthy inter­polations.

In this study, Dr. Hayley follows the development of all the stories from their earliest appearances, through all the editions of the First and Second Series of Traits and Stories, up to the definitive ‘New Edition’ of the collection of 1842-44, with observations on later editions. She comments on all the changes to each story in this important work, which was so popular and influential on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th Century.

Traits and Stories marks a significant period in Irish letters and in Irish publishing. By having his books published in Dublin rather than London, Carleton led the revival of Irish literature and publishing that took place in the 1830s and 1840s. The revisions that he made to the collection were a response to the changing literary and political climate of Ireland, and also to the reactions of his wide readership abroad. For this reason, and for its own unusual history, this chronicle of the development of a book is an interesting and valuable study.

ISBN: 978-0-84140-263-

21.0 x 14.8 cm    36 pp.    1986    Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures series (ISSN 0950-5121) volume 2

This second number in the series is in two sections. In his lecture given at the Library on 17 September 1986, Professor Clive Hart explores how Samuel Beckett modifies the fundamental structure of the outward and return journey by reducing it to obsessive repetitions getting nowhere. He begins by examining the large structural patterns of the plays to which he then relates the details of Beckett's language. Describing Beckett's characteristic, he analyses the stress on falling cadences, evocative of despair. He concludes his lecture by suggesting that, however depressing the content of the plays, they generate intense aesthetic delight.

In the second section Dr. George Sandulescu provides a synopsis of Beckett's output, detailing when each work was written, in what language, its translator, publisher and date of publication.

Volume1 ISBN: 0-86140-409-2 / 978-0-86140-409-4 £45.00
Volume2 ISBN: 0-86140-410-6 / 978-0-86140-410-0 £45.00
The Pair ISBN: 0-86140-411-4 / 978-0-86140-411-7 £90.00

21.6 x 13.8 cm.  vol. 1  xii, 1-438 pp.  vol. 2  x, 439-859 pp.           1998                       Princess Grace Irish Library series (ISSN 0269-2619)  11

The two volumes which form the eleventh publication in the Princess Grace Irish Library Series contain the proceedings of the Twelfth International James Joyce Symposium held in Monte Carlo in June 1990 under the auspices of the Princess Grace Irish Library and the patronage of H.S.H. Rainier III, Sovereign Prince of Monaco.

The first volume contains general and biographical essays and those dealing with theoretical and linguistic matters, sources, influences and comparative studies, while the second deals with the individual works - Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake - workshops and living book reviews, the major addresses, as well as papers on W.B.Yeats and Joyce and on Jack B.Yeats, details of the conference programme and the Index.

In all, there are contributions from some eighty scholars, covering every aspect of Joyce criticism, as well as the texts of speeches and talks by H.S.H. Princess Caroline of Monaco, Michael W.J. Smurfit, Stephen J. Joyce, and Anne Yeats.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.      x, 203 pp.     1984       Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 18
.

The papers in this collection were given at the fifth triennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature held at University College, Dublin in July 1982.

The theme of the conference – the Irish writer and the city – is one that has not been extensively studied. Traditionally Irish writing has concerned itself with the countryside and the Big House, but as essays in this collection show, there was a hidden literature of the city, particularly in the drama, in the eighteenth and nine­teenth centuries, and in the nineteenth the city was a recurrent element in novels from Maria Edgeworth to George Moore. The incidence of urban settings increased in the twentieth century with Belfast, Cork, Dublin and Limerick emerging as challenging centres of literary concern. It is the complex issue of the relationships between the writers and the cities that these essays discuss. The movement of population from the countryside to the cities in the late nineteenth century led to some ambivalence on the part of writers who viewed the urban setting with a distaste that was partly determined by nostalgia for the rural hinterland. Social revolution complicated the problem by reducing the social density and creating a middle class that took some time to assert itself. Eventually ambivalence and dis­taste were replaced by acceptance or at least by the recognition that the city was home, the world they knew best and could best describe. These essays help us to understand how that confidence de­veloped and to see its thematic, technical and linguistic features. In the process they show that the subject of the Irish writer and the city is well worth examining.

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With a Foreword by Benedict Kiely

21.6 x 13.8 cm.     170 pp.    2000     Ulster Editions & Monographs series (ISSN 0954-3392) volume 8

At the peak of his career, Charles Lever (1806-1872) was one of the most successful novelists in the English language, and the only mid-nineteenth century Irish novelist to vie with Charles Dickens in popularity and earning potential. Yet, within three decades of his death, his works had sunk into uninterrupted obscurity. The light-heartedness of his earliest novels, The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer (1839) and Charles O’Malley - the Irish Dragoon (1841), brought condemnation from Nationalists who championed the serious and didactic purpose of literature in highlighting the desperate plight of Ireland’s indigenous population. It is in Lever’s positive and thoughtful reaction to these criticisms that his profound contribution to Irish literature in English is to be identified, most of all in his sensitive and ultimately pessimistic analysis of the role of the doomed Protestant ascendancy.

In this incisive critical study, Stephen Haddelsey charts the rise and fall of this gifted and much-maligned commentator on Irish affairs, and calls for a reappraisal of his position in the canon of Irish literature.

Using a selection from the thirty novels and five volumes of essays, he argues that Lever’s contribution is unique in its evolution from a Tory and non-separatist stance to the near-overt and despairing advocacy of Home Rule in his final and greatest novel, Lord Kilgobbin (1872).

STEPHEN HADDELSEY is a graduate of the University of Wales. Working as a freelance editor and writer, he has contributed to projects ranging from a study of European ethnology and cultural identity, to historical atlases of Ancient Greece and the American Civil War. He is currently working on a novel and is planning a comparative critical biography of the Victorian novelists, Charles Lever, George Whyte-Melville and Francis Smedley.

CONTENTS:
Foreword by Benedict Kiely
Introduction: Writing on the Margins
1: The Novels of Dr Quicksilver
2: A Year of Growth
3: An Iniquitous Act
4: The Double-Sided Coin
5: The Art of Brevity
6: Lever's Anti-Heroines
7: Last Efforts
Notes
Index

Chosen and Introduced by Mary FitzGerald

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

Hardcover ISBN: 0-86140-099-2 / 978-0-86140-99-7 £25.00
Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-100-X / 978-0-86140-100-0 £9.99
21.6 x 13.8 cm. 379 pp. 1983

Contains: The Travelling Man, Spreading the News, Kincora, Hyacinth Halvey, The Doctor in Spite of Himself, The Gaol Gate, The Rising of the Moon, Dervorgilla, The Workhouse Ward, Grania, The Golden Apple, The Story Brought by Brigit, Dave, Lady Gregory on playwriting and her plays, bibliographical checklist.

Lady Gregory wrote her first play when she was forty-nine years old. Apart from her collaborations with W. B. Yeats and others, and translated adaptations, she produced thirty-nine plays, while devoting a great deal of time to the management of the Abbey Theatre, and the Lane Pictures.

Described with admiration by Bernard Shaw as the Irish Molière, she contributed plays in every genre – comedies, tragedies, tragic-comedies, wonder and supernatural plays - and for every audience, most effectively in the one act form.

This collection of thirteen plays, and her writings about them, is intended to show the breadth of her playwriting abilities, and her thoughts on the plays and their creation. Chosen, with an introduction, by Mary FitzGerald, this third volume in the Irish Literary Studies series has a bibliographical checklist by Colin Smythe.

Mary FitzGerald gained her PhD from Princeton University for work on Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats, and taught at Fordham University before taking up her appointment at the University of New Orleans. She was Review Editor of Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.   245pp.   1996

The aim of the present collection, which is edited by Jacqueline Genet, is to draw a picture of rural Ireland through Irish literature, from the 18th century, through the numerous rich productions of the nineteenth century, up to the present time. Starting with studies of the background to the subject by Catherine Maignant and Paul Brennan, the remaining essays, by Bernard Escarbelt, Claude Fierobe, Jean Brihault, Colin Meir, Godeleine Carpentier, Caroline MacDonogh, Declan Kiberd, Jacqueline Genet, Rene Agostini, Martin Croghan, the late Augustine Martin, Colbert Kearney, Maurice Harmon, and Danielle Jacquin, cover aspects of rural Ireland in the work of William Chaigneau, Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, William Carleton, Charles J. Kickham, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Tomas O’Crohan, Daniel Corkery, Seamus O’Kelly, Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien.

CONTENTS

The Background
Catherine Maignant: "Rural Ireland in the 19th Century and the advent of the modern world"
Paul Brennan: "Ireland's Rural Population"

Rural Ireland in Literature
Bernard Escarbelt: "William Chaigneau's Jack Connor: a literary image of the Irish peasant"
Claude Fierobe: "The peasantry in the Irish novels of Maria Edgeworth"
Jean Brihault: "Lady Morgan: Deep Furrows"
Colin Meir: "Status and style in Carleton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry"
Godeline Carpentier: "The peasantry in Kickham's tales and novels: an epitome mof the writer's realism, idealism and ideology"
Caroline MacDonogh: "Augusta Gregory: A Portrait of a Lady"
Declan Kiberd: " Decolonizing the mind: Douglas Hyde and Irish Ireland"
Jacqueline Genet: "Yeats and the myth of rural Ireland"
Ren‚ Agostini: "J.M.Synge's 'celestial peasants'"
Martin Craghan: "'...the great and good... the worthless and insignificant'. A case study of Tomas O'Crohan: The Island Man"
Augustine Martin: "The Past and the peasant in the stories of Seumas O'Kelly"
Colbert Kearney: "Daniel Corkery: a priest and his people"
Maurice Harmon: "Kavanagh's Old Peasant"
Danielle Jacquin: "'Cerveaux lucides is good begob': Flann O'Brien and the world of peasants"

21.6 x 13.8 cm.     xviii, 232 pp.   1989  The Prince Grace Irish Library series (ISSN 0269-2619) volume 4
ISBN: 976-0-86140-314-1

Feeling that none of the existing editions of Ulysses adequately represented the text of the novel, Philip Gaskell and Clive Hart looked again at the evidence of Joyce's manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs, and have produced lists of suggested alterations for the three most important editions of the book: the first edition of 1922, the standard American edition of 1961, and the so-called 'corrected' edition of 1984. They believe that a copy of any of these editions, marked up with the alterations they propose, will result in a text closer to what Joyce intended in 1922 than any that has yet been achieved. What is offered here, in fact, is not a new edition of Ulysses, but a kit for repairing the major faults of existing editions.

ISBN: 978-0-86140-363-9

21.6 x 13.8 cm.      xii, 450 pp.  1996   Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 44,   IASAIL Japan series volume 5

This is a selection of the papers read at the Inter­national Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature’s 1990 conference, held in Kyoto, with the theme ‘Irish Literature as an International Literature’, at which Seamus Heaney was the keynote speaker.

The collection is divided into sections: ‘Time Out of Mind’, ‘Regional Responses’, and ‘Chrono­logical Responses’, with panels on ‘Interdiction of an Artist: Samuel Beckett’ and ‘Women in Irish Writing’, the essayists being Marie Arndt, Joseph Chadwick, Joan Coldwell, Steven Connor, Richard Corballis, Martin J. Croghan, Adele M. Dalsimer, Ganesh Devy, Theo D’Haen, Eilis Dillon Mercier, Seamus Heaney, Werner Huber, Clair Hughes, Michael Kenneally, Masaki Kondo, Heinz Kosok, Junko Matoba, Peter MCMillan, Leon McNamara, Naoya Mori, Kristin Morrison, Maureen Murphy, Ciaran Murphy, Seán O h-Eidirsceoil, Mitsuko Ohno, Britta Olinder, Peter Robinson, Joseph Ronsley, Ann Saddlemyer, Tetsuro Sano, Bonnie Kime Scott, Fuyiji Tanigawa, Stanley Weintraub, Robert Welch, and summaries of papers not published in full in this volume.

There are essays on folk memory as history, folklore, place names in early Irish and Japanese literature, Irish novels in an early 19th century German court library, echoes of Ireland in New Zealand literature, Irish regionalism, magic real­ism, four essays on aspects of W. B. Yeats, four on Joyce, with others featuring Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Lafcadio Hearn, Sean O’Casey, Jack B. Yeats, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, John Hewitt, Toni Morrison, Maria Edgeworth, Sean O’Faolain and John Butler Yeats.

Chosen and Introduced by John Cronin

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

ISBN: 0-86140-101-8 / 978-0-86140-101-7 Hbk £35.00
ISBN 978-0-86104-102-6 /978-0-86140-102-4 Pbk £9.95

21.6 x 13.8 cm.

Contains: Mixed Marriage, Jane Clegg, John Ferguson, Boyd's Shop, Friends and Relations, prose extracts, bibliographical checklist.

John Greer Ervine was born in Ballymacarrett, a working-class district of East Belfast, in 1883 (he added the prefix ‘St.’ to his name when he began to write). He was to achieve a considerable reputation as playwright, drama critic, novelist and biographer, working at various times in London and New York. As a young man, he got to know Bernard Shaw and was associated with the Fabian Society. In 1915 he was appointed manager of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, but his brusque manner and his declared intention of turning the Abbey into a typical British repertory theatre alienated the players, many of whom left to set up a separate company of their own.

Ervine’s real contribution to the Abbey consisted of a number of his vigorous early plays, including Mixed Marriage and John Ferguson. After leaving the Abbey, he joined the British Army and was severely wounded in 1918, necessitating the amputation of a leg. After the War, he wrote drawing-room comedies for the London stage, and his most substantial work of biography was a book on his idol, Shaw. He returned to Irish themes in the 1930s, with plays like Boyd’s Shop, which was to prove one of his most popular and frequently revived works for the stage. A determined realist, Ervine had little sympathy with the work of some his notable contemporaries, and wrote severely about, for example, Synge. Ervine is at his best in those plays in which he depicts characters like John Ferguson, whose rigid moral attitudes are grimly tested by cruel circumstances. He is also impressive in his creation of strong women characters, such as Mrs Rainey in Mixed Marriage and Jane Clegg in the play of that name. In plays like those, he often anticipates his more famous successor, Sean O’Casey, and even looks forward to later Northern Irish writers like Sam Thompson.

This volume was published with assistance from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

John Cronin is Emeritus Professor of English at the Queen’s University, Belfast. His publications include Somerville and Ross, Gerald Griffin 1803-1840: A Critical Biography, and The Anglo-Irish Novel, Volume 1: The Nineteenth Century, and Volume 2, 1900-1940. He is general editor of a series of eight Classic Irish Novels of the Nineteenth Century. In addition to his academic activities, Professor Cronin has worked extensively on arts programmes for BBC Northern Ireland and BBC World Service and was for many years a member of the Anglo-Irish Literature Committee of the Royal Irish Academy.

21.6 x 13.8 cm   174 pp.  1983       Irish literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 16

George Moore was considered during his lifetime to have been one of the supreme masters of prose style in the early years of the 20th century, and he was renowned for rewriting his books as his style developed. His many famous works include Hail and Farewell!, The Lake, A Drama in Muslin (rewritten as Muslin), Evelyn Innes, Esther Waters, The Brook Kerith and A Story Teller's Holiday, though many would immediately call to mind others of his oeuvre.

Moore died in January 1933 and this collection was brought together to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his death. The essays (in order of appearance in the book) are
'George Moore, a reappraisal' (Janet Egleson Dunleavy);
'Moore Hall, 1952' (Richard J.Byrne);
'George Moore's Paris' (Jane Crisler);
'George Moore's Dublin' (James Liddy);
'Private Moore, Public Moore' (Robert Stephen Becker);
'George Moore's Medievalism' (Gareth W. Dunleavy);
'The Moore-Joyce Nexus' (Patrick A.McCarthy);
  'George Moore and Samuel Beckett' (Melvin J. Friedman);
'Collecting Moore' (Edwin Gilcher).
To these are added a collection of 17 portraits, in life and caricature, of George Moore, and an appendix 'Some Bibliographical Notes' by Edwin Gilcher, in which he adds to the information he published in his 1970 Bibliography.

23.4 x 15.3 cm.   xx, 500 pp. 
ISBN: 978-0-86140-288-5

Omnium Gatherum was conceived by the editors, Susan Dick, Declan Kiberd, Dougald McMillan and Joseph Ronsley, all past students of Richard Ellmann, as a festschrift to mark his retirement, but on his death some months later in May 1987 it became a memorial volume, and now honours his memory.

Containing over forty contributions, this collection begins with a number of personal pieces in prose and verse on Richard Ellmann and his work, and while most of the essays are on various aspects of the twentieth century literary figures that formed the centre of his wide range of literary interests – Joyce, Wilde and Yeats – there are also essays on Isabel Archer, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, Henry James, Denis Johnston, D. H. Lawrence, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and Modern­ism, as well as a Chronology and a Bibliography.

The contributors are Daniel Albright, Alison Armstrong, Christopher Butler, Carol Cantrell, Jonathan Culler, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Andonis Decavalles. Rupin Desai, Susan Dick, Terence Diggory, Denis Donoghue, Terry Eagleton, Rosita Fanto, Charles Feidelson, James Flannery, Charles Huttar, Bruce Johnson, John Kelleher, Brendan Kennelly, Frank Kermode, Declan Kiberd, Peter Kuch, James Laughlin, A. Walton Litz, Christie McDonald, Dougald McMillan, Dominic Manganiello, Ellsworth Mason, Vivian Merrier, Seán Ó Mórdha, Mary T. Reynolds, William K. Robertson, Joseph Ronsley, S. P. Rosenbaum, Ann Saddlemyer, Sylvan Schendler, Daniel Schneid­er, Fritz Senn, Jon Stallworthy, Lonnie Weatherby, Thomas Whitaker, and Elaine Yarosky.

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21.6 x 13.8 cm.       Ulster Editions & Monographs series (ISSN 0954-3392) volume 7

In recent years the literature arising out of the Troubles of the last three decades has understandably stimulated widespread and sustained critical comment and debate, but there has been no such intensive examination of the Irish literature of the century’s wars.

The events of 1916, the Anglo-Irish War, the Irish and Spanish Civil Wars and the First and Second World Wars stimulated a literature by Irish writers of cumulative interest and importance. In particular, in its diversity and in the complexities of allegiance, attitude and situation involved, it is in contrast with, for instance, English war writing of this century where the issues are less complex, and where First World War combatant writing with its stress on battlefield experience laid down an influential paradigm for writers of later wars. Much Irish writing relating to the century’s conflicts is the work of non-combatants – most famously Yeats and O’Casey – and the greater variety of types of war experience endured in conflicts of varying degrees of intensity and duration, both on home ground and abroad, gave rise to a war literature that shows a wide spectrum of literary responses. It is precisely this diversity in its various political and social contexts that the present volume seeks to address.

The essays collected here, a number of which were delivered at the first session of the Ulster Symposium at the University of Ulster in 1992, comprise an examination of a range of Irish war-related writing by specialists in various fields. Some attention is given to the literature of the recent Troubles, but the main focus of the book is on the century’s wars in Irish literary experience. 

CONTENTS
Introduction. Kathleen Devine
'The Secret Scripture: Irish Poets in the European War'. Bruce Stewart
'1916: the Idea and the Action'. Declan Kiberd
'Yeats and War'. Jacqueline Genet
'Maud Gonne: Romantic Republican'. A.Norman Jeffares
'O'Casey at War'. Christopher Murray
'Sean O'Faolain's Midsummer Night Madness and Other Stories: Contexts for Revisionism'. Patrick Walsh
'Frank O'Connor's ‘War Book’: Guests of the Nation'. Elmer Andrews
'Louis MacNeice and the Second World War'. Terence Brown
'Beckett and World War II'. John Fletcher
'Elizabeth Bowen: the War's ‘Awful Illumination’ in The Heat of the Day'. Josette Leray
'Denis Johnston: Neutrality and Buchenwald'. Terence Boyle
'A Question of Guilt - Francis Stuart's War'. Anne McCartney
'Reading Protestant Writing: representations of the Troubles in the Poetry of Derek Mahon and Glen Patterson's Burning Your Own'. John Goodby
'A Necessary Distance? Mythopoeia and Violence in At the Black Pig's Dyke'.  Alan J. Peacock and Kathleen Devine

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21.6 x 13.8 cm.    xviii, 184 pp.   1998    Ulster Editions & Monographs series (ISSN 0954-3392) volume 6

Louis MacNeice's status as a major 20th Century literary talent and a key figure in the development of modern Irish Literature in English is now established since the acceleration of critical interest and enterprise from the early 1970s to the present.

It is no accident that MacNeice's critical rehabilitation, after some decades of relative neglect, was effected largely by critics with an awareness of the Irish dimension of his make-up as a poet and who could thus appreciate the full complexity of the social, cultural and historical influences working on and through him; and it is similarly the case that the reassessment of MacNeice from the 1970s onward was consequent on the 'renaissance' in Northern Irish poetry in the 1960s.

MacNeice is no longer inadequately categorised as a 'Thirties' also-ran in the shadow of Auden, or as a writer of 'poetry on the surface'.

It is now more possible to see him whole – as a poet of complex, multiple identities and allegiances, as a writer of manifold talents (poet, critic, dramatist, broadcaster) and as a preternaturally alert, lyric recorder of the social and phenomenal world whose vision is conditioned by a profound philosophical scepticism.

The present volume, which brings together a number of experts on MacNeice's work, continues and extends the exploration of the range and depth of his achievement, with essays on various topics, including his influence on writers such as Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.

The essays were mostly given as papers at the conference held at the University of Ulster, Coleraine in September 1994. It was the first to have been exclusively devoted to the poet's work. It will be the seventh volume in the Ulster Editions and Monographs series.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.      xvi, 349 pp.   2006   Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 51

In 1922, James Stephens said: ‘we shall talk like Irishmen, or we are done for – we shall think like Europeans, or we are done for.’ In 1948, a later poet and critic, Robert Farren, recognised that Yeats had achieved at least one of those conditions when he said that he had ‘brought the Irishman’s voice – its inflections, cadences and idioms – into verse.’

The Irish brogue has often been considered as merely an ornamental adjunct to speech without any realisation of its value to poetry written in Ireland. But since poetic forms are based on the usual speech patterns of a country – its everyday talk – then the crucial significance of the patterns of Irish speech to the rhythms of poetry should be identified and explained.

Yeats, the Master of Sound is such a study. The author traces Irish speech rhythms back to Gaelic and, in this context, explains what Irish poets owe to their local accent – Heaney, in particular, has acknowledged such a debt. Using the American poet Robert Frost’s concept of the ‘sound of sense’ as a key, Dr Devine explores the rhythms of Anglo-Irish poetry and their stating of a formalised emotion through such traditions as the amhrán (Irish song metre) and the ancient method of singing known as sean-nós. Yeats was to build on these connected influences, adding a theatrically defiant tone to patterns of assonance and rhyme to attain an ‘elaborate rhythm’ – again a concept and practice derived from the Gaelic.

This book shows how the Irish speaking voice is in thrall to a language which has endured for over 2,000 years and which, by its shaping of the rhythms of that voice, continues to influence those of the island’s poets who write in English today.

Brian Devine received his MA from University College Dublin, and DPhil from the University of Ulster, Coleraine.  He is currently working on a Gaelic grammar and a study of the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, entitled The Awkward Visionary.

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21.6 x 13.8 cm.  x, 229 pp.   1990      Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X)  volume 39

An awareness of the work of Samuel Ferguson is essential to any understanding of the emergence of modern Irish writing. During a career which spanned more than fifty years of the nineteenth century, he was the initiator of several new literary possibili­ties for a community which was beginning to identify itself and to seek a distinctive voice. Although he achieved only limited recogni­tion as a poet in his own lifetime, later Irish writers have acknowledged him as being of central literary significance in the perception of the past and the production of the present.

Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achievement is the first full-length study to trace the range and development of his poetry, translations and fiction, and the changing contexts within which they were written, from the earliest published pieces of the 1830s to the last poems in the 1880s. By offering a comprehensive survey of these writings, Dr Denman evaluates a corpus of work which is at the heart of Irish Victorianism and which underpins much Irish writing during the century since Ferguson's death.

This volume sheds new light on Gissing's intellectual process and methods of work. Over 160 quotations which he recorded in his notebook reveal themes and passions which profoundly interested him. His novels are increasingly valued for their candour about nineteenth century social problems such as the status of women and the condition of the working class.

Edited by James H. Murphy

21.6 x 13.8 cm    
ISBN: 978-0-86140-315-8

This book presents the reader with a selection of the writings of Peter Connolly (1927-87) who retired as Professor of English Language and Literature at St Patrick's College, Maynooth in 1985.

Divided thematically, the essays cover the major subjects that interested him: apart from Censorship, Literature (his areas of greatest expertise were in the modern novel and modern poetry) and Religion are represented by his essays `The Priest in Modern Irish Fiction', `W.B.Yeats: "the unchristened heart" ', `God in Modern Literature', `Tragedy', and `The Church in Ireland since Vatican II'.

The issue on which Peter Connolly's ideas have had the most influence has undoubtedly been that of censorship, and the role he played in the public debate on censoring books in Ireland. Many of the distinctions he drew then could still have a useful role to play in the renewed contemporary debate, even though its focus has shifted towards the visual media, notably television. Included here are his essays `Censorship', `The Moralists and the Obscene', and `Thoughts after Longford'.

This volume, edited by James H. Murphy, opens with a collection of memories and tributes from friends and colleagues, and ends with a selection of his book reviews.

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21.6 x 13.8 cm.    x, 230 pp.    1982    
  Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 9

The papers in this collection were, with one exception, given at the triennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature held in St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, Ireland, in 1979.

The theme of the conference was the place of literature in a changing Ireland, and to this end the speakers' papers covered various aspects of this important subject. The contributors to this volume are in the order they appear here. Declan Kiberd, Klaus Lubbers, Cathal Ó Háinle, Vivian Mercier, Suheil Bushrui, Stan Smith, D. E. S. Maxwell, Thomas Kilroy, Peter Denman, James O'Brien, and Patrick Rafroidi.

CONTENTS<br

Introduction. Peter Connolly<br

Acknowledgements<br

THE PERILS OF NOSTALGIA: A CRITIQUE OF THE REVIVAL.  Declan Kiberd<br

AUTHOR AND AUDIENCE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY.  Klaus Lubbers<br

TOWARDS THE REVIVAL. SOME TRANSLATIONS OF IRISH POETRY:  1789-1897.  Cathal G. Ó Háinle<br

VICTORIAN EVANGELICALISM AND THE ANGLO-IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL. Vivian Mercier<br

IMAGES OF A CHANGING IRELAND IN THE WORKS OF W.B.YEATS.  Suheil Badi Bushrui<br

HISTORIANS AND MAGICIANS: IRELAND BETWEEN FANTASY AND HISTORY. Stan Smith<br

SEMANTIC SCRUPLES: A RHETORIC FOR POLITICS IN THE NORTH. D.E.S.Maxwell<br

THE IRISH WRITER: SELF AND SOCIETY, 1950-1980.  Thomas Kilroy<br

RHYME IN MODERN ANGLO-IRISH POETRY.  Peter Denman<br

THREE IRISH WOMEN STORY WRITERS IN THE 1970s.  James O'Brien<br

CHANGE AND THE IRISH IMAGINATION.  Patrick Rafroidi<br

Notes on the Contributors<br

Index

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