This study surveys the course of verse translation from the Irish, starting with the notorious Macpherson controversy and ending with the publication of George Sigerson’s Bards of the Gael and Gall in 1897. Professor Welch considers some of the problems and challenges relating to the translation of Irish verse into English in the context of translation theory and ideas about cultural differentiation.

He outlines the historical and cultural background of Anglo-Irish literary relations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the surprising fashion for Celticism at the end of that period. It was this cultural phenomenon that provided the context for the endeavours of Charlotte Brooke and of later translators to render something of the spirit of Gaelic poetry in English verse. Throughout the book, we see again and again the dilemma of poets who must be faithful to the spirit or the form of Irish verse, but who rarely have the ability to capture both.

The relationship between Irish and English in the nineteenth century was, necessarily, a critical one, and the translators were often working at the centre of the crisis, whether they were aware of it or not. As Celticism evolved into nationalism and heroic idealism, these influences can be clearly seen in the development of verse translation from the Irish.

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21.6 x 13.8 cm

Although Kate O’Brien is coming to be classed among the most original novelists of this century, her reputation underwent the usual period of eclipse that follows the decease of most writers. Now, just twelve years after her death in 1974, her novels are coming back into favour on both sides of the Atlantic.

At first glance, a romantic realist whose field of operations was the rise of the middle-class from post-Famine Ireland to the second half of the present century, on closer inspection she will be seen to be a subtly feminist writer whose heroines are in search of both freedom and love, freedom as a pre-requisite of love – and education as the first necessity of either.

Highly responsive though she was to the lyrical beauty of the Irish landscape and appreciative of Irish wit and charm, she was, nevertheless, contemptuous of narrow nationalistic claims, and would set Ireland always among the nations of Europe. Long before Europe set up its present Economic Community, of which Ireland in due course became a member state, she saw her country as linked by old associations of religion, history and culture to a continental civilisation.

Readers of a generation new to Kate O’Brien see her as depicting an Ireland they scarcely knew existed, an educated, aspiring, sometimes wealthy middle-class Ireland. On one side of her, just before her beginnings as an artist, lies the wild Ireland of the dispossessed, and on the other the Ireland of what she called the ‘Top People’, whose sole criterion is success in making money, and whom she despised.

This is the first study of Kate O’Brien’s novels as a whole, in which her development as a writer is traced and the underlying themes of her work revealed.

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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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21.6 x 13.8 cm    350 pp.    1987
Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 27

W. B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu is a study of the Irish fairy faith in its ancient and traditional forms, and of Yeats’s response to that faith.

The first part concerns the ancient beliefs, chiefly as they are expressed in mythology, and describes the origins and characteristics of the Tuatha De Danann. Peter Alderson Smith shows how they are a folk memory of an ancient people who have to some degree acquired divine and ghostly characteristics.

Part two describes the fairies of modern folklore, the various types, their charac­teristics, and differences from ghosts, in being a separate and supernatural race of people, homogeneous but unpredictable and notorious for their capriciousness.

Part three finds in Yeats's work between the writing of The Countess Cathleen (1891-92) and the poems of Responsibilities (1914) a desire to know more about the Otherworld that resulted in a relationship that fluctuated between the poles of frustration and despair on the one hand, and morbid enthusiasm on the other. That the process was ultimately therapeutic is shown by Yeats’s move away from the Celtic Twilight to the poems of his maturity.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.           pbk edition of Irish Literary Studies Series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 28

Perhaps nothing is more fascinating to the student of literature than an insight into a writer's creative process, a study of how the published works, from All That Fall to Footfalls, came to be as they are.

Theatre of Shadows both defines and takes as its subject the middle period of Samuel Beckett's dramatic writing. By making a close study of the structure, and of the largely unpublished manus-cript drafts, of the plays written from 1956 to 1976, this book offers considerable insight into Beckett's creative process. A combination of rigorous patterning and a movement away from concrete expression (what Beckett himself called a 'vaguening' of the text) is seen to be his customary working method during this period. Dr Pountney goes on to discuss how the plays work in the theatre, through a detailed analysis of Beckett's stagecraft.

In order to set the middle period in context some discussion of Beckett's early work for the theatre is included, and a final chapter on the late plays shows his dramatic imagination still finding new channels to explore. The book provides the student with as comprehensive an approach as possible to two decades of Beckett's drama. This is a paperback edition of the original 1988 publication.

Rosemary Pountney, whose first training was in theatre, performed the Irish premières of Not I (Mouth) and Footfalls (May) at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1978. She combines her Lectureship in English at Jesus College, Oxford, with touring (most recently in Eastern Europe and New Zealand), lecturing on Beckett's work in the theatre, and performing Rockaby and other one-woman plays.

'a marvellous contribution to Beckett criticism....  painstakingly scholarly, meticulous in its observations, and illuminating in its detail' Review of English Studies, 1990

'If you want the best book on the background to Beckett's plays (without jargon) this is it. It is also the most useful for the actor.' Barry McGovern

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21.6 x 138. cm.      x, 193 pp.  1989 
Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 29

Critical Approaches to Anglo-Irish Litera­ture contains a selection of the papers given at the fifth triennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature held in Belfast in 1985, chaired by Professor John Cronin. It includes essays on Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, J. S. Le Fanu, J. M. Synge, and W. B. Yeats, as well as papers on more general themes, such as the critical condition of Ulster, English political writers on Ireland, national character and national audience, autobiographical im­agination and Irish literary autobiog­raphies. The contributors to this volume, the twenty-ninth in the Irish Literary Studies Series, are Catherine Belsey, Patricia Coughlan, Seamus Deane, Gerald FitzGibbon, Ruth Fleischmann, Margaret Fogarty, John Wilson Foster, Eamonn Hughes, Michael Kenneally, Tom Paulin, Walter T. Rix, and Nicholas Roe. The editors are Michael Allen and Angela Wilcox.

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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.    xvi, 241 pp.  + 4pp. illus       1990     Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X)  volume 32

Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats, fills a long-felt gap in a neglected area of Yeats studies. It begins with an account of Yeats’s knowledge of the Classics, and then deals with the topics of Philosophy, mainly Platonism; a full, new reading of ‘Under Ben Bulben’; Greek myth, used to validate both personal experience – Maud Gonne as Helen – and a cyclical theory of history; Literature, the two Oedipus plays; Visual art, including an elaborate reading of 'The Statues’, and ‘Byzantium’, the famous passage in A Vision, and the two great poems, in their historical context.

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Irish Literary Studies series 33

This volume gives a comprehensive view of Irish drama. studied chronologically from the nineteenth century to the present day. as well as considering its international impact. The study of the plays dealing with the lives of Deirdre and Grania rehabilitates Lady Gregory’s Grania. The similarities between Yeats and Beckett are pointed out: both were concerned with the actor considered as a marionette – Yeats, nearly sixty years before Beckett, had thought of rehearsing actors in barrels. Beckett's Irishness is also examined.

The image of Ireland in nineteenth-century drama is no longer an uncharted territory, while the problem of translation is considered in an essay on Joyce's translation into Italian of Riders to the Sea and one on Brian Friel's play Translations. There is also a more general essay on this major playwright. Synge's influence on other playwrights is also considered, while another contribution explores the three adaptations of Antigone, by Brendan Kennelly. Tom Paulin. and Aidan Carl Mathews: and after a study of Thomas Kiiroy's theatre, there is a view of the Field Day Theatre Company. The question of language is at the core of Thomas Murphy's drama, while MacNeice's perception of Irish history is studied through his They Met on Good Friday. John Hewitt's The Bloody Brae is situated in Irish drama and specifically in Ulster drama.

Throughout these essays, which constitute a network encompassing the different aspects of the Irish Theatre, we find recurring political and social problems, but also the universal topics of literature, the question of language and the care for art and stagecraft. The different literary approaches throw an interesting light on the vitality of the genre in Ireland.

All have developed from the papers given at the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature's 1987 conference held at the University of Caen, and hosted by Professor Jacqueline Genet, then President of the University. The contributors are Richard Allen Cave, Colin Meir, Margaret Rose, Katherine Worth, Heinz Kosok, Maureen S.G. Hawkins, Britta Olinder, Paul F. Botheroyd, Joan Fitzgerald, Lucia Angelica Salaris, the late Patrick Rafroidi, Christopher Murray, Denis Sampson, Patrick Burke, and Joseph Swann.

21.6 x 13.8 cm     x, 277 pp.   1991      Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 34

Though men dominated early Irish society, women dominated the supernatural. Goddesses of war, fertility, and sovereignty ordered human destiny. Christian monks, in recording the old stories, turned these pagan deities into saints, like St Brigit, or into mortal queens like Medb of Connacht. The Morrigan, the Great Queen, war goddess, remains a figure of awe, but her pagan functions are glossed over. She perches, crow of battle, on the dying warrior CuChulainn’s pillar stone, but her role as his tutelary deity, and as planner and fomentor of the whole tremendous Tain, the war between Ulster and Connacht, is obscured. Unlike the Anglo-Irish authors who in modem times treated the same material in English, the good Irish monks were not shocked by her sexual aggressiveness. They show her coupling with the Dagda, the ‘good god’ of the Tuatha De Danann before the second battle of Mag Tuired, but they conceal that this act – by a goddess of war, fertility and sovereignty – gives the Dagda’s people victory and the possession of Ireland. Or they reduce the sovereignty to allegory – when Niall of the Nine Hostages sleeps with the Hag she is allegorical of the trials of kingship!

With the English invasion and colonisation, the power of the goddesses diminishes further. The Sovereignty has no kingship to bestow. In the aisling poets she becomes unattainable sexually, a vision of Irish independence. She no longer legitimises the king, but dreams of a Jacobite rescue. Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan combines this inaccessible vision-woman with the hag, the Poor Old Woman. She offers only death for a dream, though she has the walk of a queen. The Great Queens juxtaposes early Irish texts – such as Tain Bo Reganina, Togail Bruidne Da Derga, and many others – with Anglo-Irish treatments of the same themes by Standish O’Grady, Lady Gregory, James Stephens, and W. B. Yeats. The book shows the fall in status of the pagan goddesses, first under medieval Christianity and then under Anglo-Irish culture. That this fall shows a loss in the recognition of the roles of women seems evident from the texts. This human loss only begins to be restored when, presiding over the severed heads in Yeats’s The Death of Cuchulain, the Morrigu declares, ‘I arranged the Dance.’

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, 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

IASAIL-JAPAN series Volume 4

In Memory of Barbara Hayley

This volume analyses the interplay between religion and society in Ireland and how Irish writing, whether poetry, prose, drama, sermon or pamphlet, has reflected that interplay, and how the idea of wholeness and integration, as part of the religious search, informs Irish writing.

Irish literature has been influenced by religion from the beginning. Writing itself came about as a result of the conversion to Christianity, because the early church brought with it a Latin orthography which the native men of learning adopted. Pagan beliefs and practices were assimilated into Christianity, but not entirely so: a theme that surfaces continually in Irish writing is the conflict between Pagan and Christian values. This tension is also an interaction: one of the characteristics of Irish literature of all periods is its capacity to retain pagan stories and modes of thought. This retention reflects a society which, while Christianised, has many roots in a pre-Christian Celtic past.

The essays follow a broadly chronological pattern covering every facet of the subject, starting with Paganism in early Ireland, and moving on to the literary uses of folk belief and religion in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

CONTENTS
'Paganism and Society in Early Ireland'. Séamus MacMathúna
'Literature and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: A Critical Survey'. Joseph McMinn
'Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Fiction'. Barbara Hayley
'The Word, the Lore, and the Spirit: Folk Religion and the Supernatural in Modern Irish Literature'. Dáithi Ó hÓgáin
'Ghosts in Anglo-Irish Literature'. Peter Denman
'Shaw and Creative Evolution'. A. M. Gibbs
'Catholicism in the Culture of the New Ireland: Canon Sheehan and Daniel Corkery'. Ruth Fleischmann
'Yeats and Religion'. Mitsuko Ohno
'Joyce and Catholicism'. Eamonn Hughes
'Francis Stuart and Religion: Sharing the Leper's Lair'. Anne McCartney
'Received Religion and Secular Vision: MacNeice and Kavanagh'. Alan Peacock
'"A mythology with which I am perfectly familiar": Samuel Beckett and the Absence of God'. Lance St John Butler
'Pilgrim's Progress: on the Poetry of Desmond Egan and Others'. Patrick Rafroidi
'Religion?'. Desmond Egan
'Mis and Dubh Ruis: A Parable of Psychic Transformation'. Nuala ni Dhomhnaill
Notes
Notes on Contributors
Index

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21.6 x 13.8cm. Irish Literary Studies series 38

W.B. Yeats wrote the plays in Four Plays for Dancers (1921) when he was strongly influenced by Japanese Noh theatre, and was searching for some breakthrough in his efforts to promote poetic drama.

Since then, various books have been published on this topic but, with the notable exception of Richard Taylor, no scholar has been able to cope with both Yeats and Noh. Yeats and the Noh started in a small seminar room in University College Dublin, when both authors took part in productions of The Dreaming of the Bones and Nishikigi with their students. Masaru Sekine directed both plays and Christopher Murray performed in them: they were therefore equipped with live experience as well as their personal expertise in Irish literature and Noh drama.

Professor Augustine Martin introduces the volume, and apart from the main section of the book, Colleen Hanrahan, one of the students who took part in both UCD productions, writes about acting in Yeats’s play; Peter Davidson writes about Yeats, Pound, Rummel and Dulac; and Katharine Worth provides an essay on Yeats, Beckett and Noh. There are 16 pages of illustrations.

This volume is unique in providing detailed analysis of contrasts in theatrical aims, as well as examining why man seeks to explore tragic drama as a means of extending the limits of reality.

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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.

Edited by Gregory A. Schirmer

21.6 x 13.8 cm.      Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X)  volume 40

Austin Clarke is widely regarded as one of 20th-century Ireland's most important poets. In this selection of nearly fifty essays and reviews written over Clarke's long career, he demonstrates that he is an astute and provocative literary critic as well.

Having grown up in Dublin when the excitement of the Irish Literary Revival was still running high, Clarke knew many of the principal figures of that movement personally, and his readings of Yeats, Joyce, Synge, O'Casey, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and others, enjoy the advantages of an insider's point of view. Moreover, committed in his own poetry to the basic assumption that fuelled the Literary Revival – that the most productive course for Irish  literature lay in the direction not of England but of Ireland – Clarke in his criticism provides a way of understanding, and judging, the Revival's major writers in terms of their relationships to Ireland's rich literary and cultural traditions. At the same time, these essays call attention to a number of distinctly Irish, but often overlooked, writers working on the margins of the revival.

As Yeats observed more than once, the Irish, for all the contributions that they have made to modern fiction, poetry, and drama, have fallen somewhat short in the genre of literary criticism. Austin Clarke's essays and reviews, many of which were written under a pseudonym and so not attributed to Clarke for years, go a long way towards filling that gap.

A selection of Clarke's writings on Yeats is followed by one on other Irish writers and the Irish Literary Revival, and on Modern English and American literature. Included as an appendix is an exhaustive list of Clarke's literary criticism, mostly in periodicals, including over 400 anonymous reviews written for the Times Literary Supplement.

 
Gregory A.Schirmer is the author of The Poetry of Austin Clarke and William Trevor: A Study of His Fiction, and has written widely on a variety of other modern Irish writers. He is Professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

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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.

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.

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.

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.