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

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

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

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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.

 

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

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

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

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

 

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This volume contains the lectures delivered at Caen University in June 1992 for an international symposium organised by the Research Group in Anglo-Irish studies.

In memory of our dear friend, Gus Martin, 1935-1995

The theme was the creative process, successively studied in three literary genres: poetry, drama and the novel. Professor Genet selected two of the most famous representatives of each genre – Seamus Heaney and John Montague, Thomas Kilroy and Tom Murphy, John McGahern and John Banville – asking them to speak of their own creation: what happens in their minds during the birth and development of the creative work? A question that is far-reaching, abstruse and certainly indiscreet.

To challenge the writers slightly more, she had placed in front of each of them a critic – Maurice Harmon, Augustine Martin, Christopher Murray, Lynda Henderson, John Cronin, Rudiger Imhof – each of whom expounded their own point of view on the same phenomenon. These inner and outer perspectives generally converged and their complementarity throws a vivid light on the mystery of artistic creation. That was the purpose of the meeting and also the aim of this book, which should be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the creative process of writing.

CONTENTS

Introduction. Jacqueline Genet

I. The Irish Poets and the Creative Process

Seamus Heaney. 'The Frontier of Writing'
Maurice Harmon. 'Seamus Heaney and the Gentle Flame'

John Montague. 'The Sweet Way'
Augustine Martin. 'John Montague: Passionate Contemplative'

II. The Irish playwrights and the Creative Process'

Thomas Kilroy. 'From Page to Stage'
Christopher Murray. 'Thomas Kilroy's World Elsewhere'

Tom Murphy. 'The Creative Process'
Lynda Henderson. 'Men, Women, and the Life of the Spirit in Tom Murphy's Plays'

III. The Irish Novelists and the Creative Process

John McGahern. 'Reading and Writing'
John Cronin. 'John McGahern: A New Image?'

John Banville. 'The Personae of Summer'
Rudiger Imhof. 'In Search of the Rosy Grail: The Creative Process in the Novels of John Banville'

Notes
Index

 

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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"

 

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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.

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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.   xviii, 489 pp.    2003  Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 52

Since Mary McAleese embraced the expatriate and emigrant Irish in her inaugural Presidential address, much has been made of the global Irish family. This exciting collection of essays by a group of eminent scholars explores the teaching and research of Irish  literature in a region of the world that has scouted the attractions of western culture since the sixteenth century. Three or four centuries later those attractions, as far as the Irish are concerned, have become specific.

It is reasonably well-known that in his own life-time W.B. Yeats was invited to take up a Professorship in Japan; that Ulysses has been translated at least three times into Chinese; that the plays of George Bernard Shaw apparently strike a chord with students in Hong Kong; that the fairy-tales of Wilde are reverenced in China; and that the Irish influence on Australian literature has been pervasive if not profound.

But what is not well-known are the contexts for these and other interrelations. Irelands in the Asia-Pacific explores these in a sequence of articles grouped under the headings of: Writing an Irish Self; Joyce at large; Post-Colonial readings of Irish Literature; Antipodean Connections; Teaching Irish Literature in the Asia-Pacific; and Irish Literature Down-Under.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Section 1: Writing an Irish Self

Shakespeare and the Irish Self. Terence Brown

‘Not a disease but a social necessity!’ Shaw and the Function of the Artist. T.F. Evans

The Silver Mirror & the Woven Veil: Oscar Wilde & the Art of Criticism. Julie-Ann Robson

Reading Food: Feast and Famine in Irish Women’s Writing. Joan Coldwell

Eavan Boland: the Complex State of the Woman Poet. Maurice Harmon

Section 2: Joyce at Large

Bloom’s appeal to the peoples of the world. Jin Di

National Apostate vs National Apostle: Joyce and St. Patrick. Bruce Stewart

Mothers/Mirrors: Sources of Self-Image in Irish Modernism. Diane Stubbings

James Joyce and the Dreamwork of Language: The Book from the Twenty-first Century. Donald E. Morse

Section 3: Post-Colonial Readings of Irish Writing

Post-Colonial Interpretation: The case of The Playboy. Nicholas Grene

Irish Post-Colonial Drama: A Hungarian View. Csilla Bertha

Ireland, Post-Colonial Transformation and Global Culture. Bill Ashcroft

Section 4: Antipodean Connections

John, Willy, Lily, George, Gilbert ... and Arthur: My Australian Connections. Ann Saddlemyer

Ascendancy Down-Under: George Bernard Shaw’s Irish & Australian Relations. A.M.Gibbs

The Port Phillip Gentlemen: Still Neglected. Jarlath Ronayne

The Emigrant’s Friends: Three Women. Maureen Murphy

The Scotch-Irish in 18th century America and their Counterparts in 19th century Australia: A Comparative Study of Relations between Colonists and Natives on Two Frontiers. James E. Doan

Section 5: Teaching Irish Literature in the Asia-Pacific

The Reception of W.B. Yeats in Modern China. Linda Pui-ling Wong

Modern Irish Literature in an Asian Context: Relevance and Advantages. Andrew Parkin

The ‘Sense of Happiness’ must not Disappear: Teaching Irish Literature in Japan. Taketoshi Furomoto

Re-reading Irishness: The problem of Lafcadio Hearn and Japan. George Hughes

Japan as Celtic Otherworld: Lafcadio Hearn and the Long Way Home. Ciaran Murray

Section 6: Irish Literature Down-Under

‘The weight of social opinion on [his] side’?: Ulysses, Censorship, Modernism and Canonisation, Australian-style. Frances Devlin-Glass

Through The Irish Looking Glass: School Experience of Irish Literature, History and Culture in Australia. Donna Gibbs

The Burden of Tyre and ‘the Loyal Gael’: The Expatriate Muse in the work of Christopher Brennan. Justin Lucas

‘Too Cold and Wide for the Tender Plant of the Irish Language to Thrive in?’ The Teaching of the Irish Language in Australia: 1880-1960. Jonathan M. Wooding

Notes and References – Notes on Contributors – Index

This collection of papers was given at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, at a conference convened under the aegis of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL).

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21.6 x 13.8 cm.   l, 455 pp.      2006   Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 53

The William Carleton Summer School is one of the most important literary festivals on the island in that there are very few that make a point of studying an aspect of Ireland before the Great Famine. William Carleton (1794-1869) is the greatest author to have written about the Irish peasant and the Ireland of the period immediately preceding it: he enables the reader to think back past the Famine into the culture – particularly the peasant culture – of that time, confused, rich, tortured, bilingual, that made him as a writer.

Enjoying immense popularity during his lifetime, his popularity dwindled but a century after his death it began to revive, not least because of the influence of the Summer School. The lectures given at the School and revised for publication in William Carleton, The Authentic Voice provide ample evidence that he was one of the greatest entertainers of Irish literature in English.

This volume also contains contemporary portraits of Carleton, reproduces previously unpublished letters and documents, a chronology, publication history of his writings, provides fine line illustrations by Sam Craig and detailed maps of the countryside he loved and wrote about, so this is an indispensable book for everyone interested in Carleton and pre-Famine Ireland.

Edited by Gordon Brand, the collection contains contributions by Gordon Brand, Terence Brown, Brian Earls, Peter Denman, Owen Dudley Edwards, Marianne Elliott, Thomas Flanagan, Roy Foster, Maurice Harmon, Seamus Heaney, Eamonn Hughes, Jack Johnston, John Kelly, Declan Kiberd, David Krause, Robin Marsh, John Montague, Pat John Rafferty, Sean Skeffington, Barry Sloan, Norman Vance, and Robert Welch.

 

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