As the mind wanders and becomes spectral, these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. The road Hewitt takes us on is a sleepwalk into the nightwoods, a dream-state where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories and encounters.

Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in Tongues of Fire, the poet conjures us here into a trance: a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved – a union in nature, with nature.

A threnody for what is lost, a dance of apocalypse and rebirth, Rapture’s Road draws us through what is hidden, secret, often forbidden, to a state of ecstasy. It leads into the humid night, through lethal love and grief, and glimpses, at the end of the journey, a place of tenderness and reawakening.

This book argues that a range of Old English texts were vehicles for emotional practice – that is, for doing things with emotion. Using case studies from heroic poetry (Beowulf, The Battle of Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon), religious poetry (Christ I and Christ III) and homilies (selections from the Vercelli Book, the Blickling Homilies and the works of Wulfstan), it shows how they could be used to act out emotional styles, manage the emotions arising from specific events, and negotiate relationships both within social groups and with God. In addition, the Old English Boethius teaches readers to control unruly emotions by transferring attachment from the things of this world to the divine. Overall, the volume offers new angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal.

This book examines the ways in which ideas about children, childhood and Ireland changed together in Irish Protestant writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses on different varieties of the child found in the work of a range of Irish Protestant writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents from the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion. The book is structured around a detailed examination of six 'versions' of the child: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the political child, the believing child, the enlightened child, and the freakish child. It traces these versions across a wide range of genres (fiction, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and children's bibles), showing how concepts of childhood related to debates about Irish nationality, politics and history across these two centuries.

Dublin is one of the world’s great literary cities, and Dublin Tales is illustrative of this. The book comprises a rich selection of city-centred stories from across the last 120 years. The collection features work by literary eminences as well as by lesser-known writers, and places celebrated texts alongside newly commissioned material. It also includes bilingual versions of two stories, published in Irish and in English. Dublin Tales is bookended by an extensive introduction and an annotated bibliography, and is part of OUP’s international ‘City Tales’ series.

Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion provides a comprehensive account of the extent to which Gothic can be traced in Irish cultural life from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, across both elite and popular genres, and through a range of different media, including literature, cinema, and folklore. It responds, in particular, to the understanding that Gothic is ubiquitous in Irish literature. Rather than focus specifically or exclusively on the oft-studied Irish Gothic foursome – Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker – this companion turns attention to overlooked ‘minor’ figures such as Regina Maria Roche, Stephen Cullen, and Anne Fuller. At the same time, it considers the multi-generic nature of Irish Gothic, thinking beyond fiction and, in particular, the novel, as the Gothic genre par excellence. The collection thus affords fresh perspectives on Irish Gothic and its pervasiveness in Irish culture from the eighteenth century to today.

The Nation in British Literature and Culture charts the emergence of Britain as a political, social and cultural construct, examining the manner in which its constituent elements were brought together through a process of amalgamation and conquest. The fashioning of the nation through literature and culture is examined, as well as counter-narratives that have sought to call national orthodoxies into question. As part of the First Folio celebrations an exhibition was created at Google Cultural Institute (https://artsandculture.google.com/story/_AUBn0dLV16w2A) .

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is now best remembered for its concluding story in which the great detective appears to plunge to his death into the waters at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, locked in a struggle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty. However, the collection also brings the reader back to the beginnings of Holmes' career, involving a mutiny at sea and a treasure hunt in a Sussex country house, and a first encounter with Holmes' older brother Mycroft, of whom Holmes says, "If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from any armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived". This collection includes some of the detective's greatest cases, such as 'Silver Blaze' and 'The Naval Treaty', and even one case which Holmes fails to solve. Edited with an introduction by Jarlath Killeen, this volume examines Holmes as a safeguard against social breakdown and chaos, as well as an agent of justice and goodness against the forces of evil. It also situates the collection in the growth of life writing in the period, and explores the ways in which Holmes became increasingly 'real' to readers as more details about his personality and biography are revealed in the stories.

For centuries, evidence of queer love in the ancient world was ignored or suppressed. Even today, only a few, famous narratives are widely known - yet there's a rich literary tradition of Greek and Roman love that extends far beyond this handful of stories. Here, the poet Seán Hewitt and painter Luke Edward Hall collect together, for the first time, forty of the most exhilarating queer tales in the classical canon and bring them newly to life. A ground-breaking anthology that changes the way we see the ancient world - and invites us to reflect on the puritanism of our own - 300,000 Kisses is a riotous celebration of desire in all its forms.

A luminous memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a tender exploration of queer identity. When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face to face with crisis. Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope. All Down Darkness Wide is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a fearless exploration of a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds.

WINNER OF THE ROONEY PRIZE FOR IRISH LITERATURE 2022

James Joyce's Ulysses is filled with all sorts of references that can get in the way of many of its readers. This volume, with over 12,000 individual annotations (and more than double the word count of Ulysses itself), explains these references and allusions in a clear and compact manner and is designed to be accessible to novices and scholars alike. The annotations cover the full range of information referenced in Ulysses: a vast array of literary allusions, such as Shakespeare, Aristotle, Dante, Aquinas, slang from various eras and areas, foreign language words and phrases, Hiberno-English expressions, Catholic ritual and theology, Irish histories, Theosophy, Freemasonry, cricket, astronomy, fashion, boxing, heraldry, the symbolism of tattoos, horse racing, advertising slogans, nursery rhymes, superstitions, music-hall songs, references to Dublin topography precise enough for a city directory, and much more besides.

This book positions the ‘California Gothic’ as a highly significant regional subgenre which articulates anxieties specific to the historical, cultural and geographical characteristics of the ‘Golden State’. California has long been perceived as a utopian space, but it is also haunted by the spectres of European and Anglo-American imperialism, genocide, racial and economic discrimination, natural disaster and aggressive infrastructural and commercial development. Drawing on the work of California historians and cultural commentators, this study explores the ways in which the nightmarish flipside of the ‘California Dream’ has been depicted within horror and Gothic.

During the latter half of the twentieth century the Gothic emerged as one of the liveliest and most significant areas of academic inquiry within literary, film, and popular culture studies. This volume covers the key concepts and developments associated with Twentieth-Century Gothic, tracing the development of the mode from the fin de siècle to 9/11. The eighteen chapters reflect the interdisciplinary and ever-evolving nature of the Gothic, which, during the century, migrated from literature and drama to the cinema and television.

Jermyn Pratt (1723-1791) was a highly idiosyncratic writer of comic and satirical literature. This volume presents an edition of Pratt’s literary work, much of which has only been available in manuscript. The editors’ introduction presents Pratt’s biography and also provides an analysis of Pratt’s writings, setting them in the contexts of anxieties about commercialisation and the changing social order in the Norfolk countryside, opposition to the American War of Independence, and debates over the role of the clergy in the Anglican church. The volume begins with Pratt’s unpublished five-act play The Grange (?1771), especially interesting for the way it incorporates the Norfolk dialect. The poetry section presents three longer poems: The Inundation or the Life of a Fen-Man (1771), portrayal of the precarious life in the Norfolk fens, September: A Rural Poem (1780), Pratt’s satire on hunting, and The Coal-Heavers (1774), a mock epic about a riot in King’s Lynn. Twelve shorter poems reveal Pratt’s interest in the relationship between the human and natural worlds in rural Norfolk. The final section of prose writings includes the tract A Modest Address to Lewis Lord Bishop of Norwich (c. 1784) and the playful essay The Zgubbs, a mock-serious disquisition on the mischievous sprites Pratt calls “Zgubbs,” who are supposedly responsible for the small mishaps that plague daily life.

This book is a complete re-assessment of the works of J.M. Synge, one of Ireland's major playwrights. The book offers the first complete consideration of all of Synge's major plays and prose works in nearly 30 years, drawing on extensive archival research to offer innovative new readings. Much work has been done in recent years to uncover Synge's modernity and to emphasise his political consciousness. This book builds on this re-assessment, undertaking a full systematic exploration of Synge's published and unpublished works. Tracing his journey from an early Romanticism through to the more combative modernism of his later work, the book's innovative methodology treats text as process, and considers Synge's reading materials, his drafts, letters, diaries, and journalism, turning up exciting and unexpected revelations. Thus, Synge's engagement with occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, and even a late reaction against eugenic nationalisms, are all brought into the critical discussion.

Breaking new ground in ascertaining the tenets of Synge's spirituality, and his aesthetic and political idealization of harmony with nature, the book also builds on new work in modernist studies, arguing that Synge can be understood as a leftist modernist, exhibiting many of the key concerns of early modernism, but routing them through a socialist politics. A timely and thorough study of one of Ireland's most controversial writers, this is an exciting contribution to studies of the Irish Revival, and to modernist studies more broadly.

Joyce’s art is an art of idiosyncratic transformation, revision and recycling. More specifically, the work of his art lies in the act of creative transformation: the art of the paste that echoes Ezra Pound’s urge to make it new. The essays in this volume examine various modalities of the Joycean aesthetic metamorphosis: be it through the prism of Joyce engaging with other arts and artists, or through the prism of other arts and artists engaging with the Joycean aftermath. We have chosen the essays that best show the range of Joycean engagement with multiple artistic domains in a variety of media. Joyce’s art is multiform and protean: influenced by many, it influences many others.

Focusing on John Milton’s Paradise Lost , this book investigates the metaphorical identification of nature with a court of law – an old and persistent trope, haunted by ancient aporias, at the intersection of jurisprudence, philosophy and literature. In an enormous variety of texts, from the Greek beginnings of Western literature onward, nature has been described as a courtroom in which an all- encompassing trial takes place and a universal verdict is executed. The first, introductory part of this study sketches an overview of the metaphor’s development in European history, from antiquity to the seventeenth century. In its second, more extensive part, the book concentrates on Milton’s epic Paradise Lost in which the problem of the natural law court finds one of its most fascinating and detailed articulations. Using conceptual tools provided by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Hans Blumenberg, Gilles Deleuze, William Empson and Alfred North Whitehead, the study demonstrates that the conflicts in Milton’s epic revolve around the tension between a universal legal procedure inherent in nature and the positive legal decrees of the deity.

Chaos is a perennial source of fear and fascination. The original "formless void" precedes the created world as a state of anarchy before the establishment of cosmic order. However, Chaos has frequently also been conceived of as a force that persists in the cosmos and in society, threatening to undo them both, but at the same time sustaining them in strange, indirect ways. Since antiquity, notions of the divine have included the power to check and contain Chaos as well as to unleash it as a sanction for the violation of social and ethical norms. And Chaos has furthermore been construed as a region of pure potentiality at the base of reality that provides the raw material of creation or even constitutes a kind of alternative order. Focusing on the connection between the cosmic and the political, this volume traces continuities and re-conceptualizations of Chaos across a variety of cultures, discourses and texts. Its eleven essays explore the transformations of Chaos from Hesiod’s Theogony and the Bible to Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and Hobbes.

For over a century British authors have been writing about the Antarctic for child readers, yet this body of literature has never been explored in detail. Antarctica in British Children’s Literature examines this field for the first time, identifying the dominant genres and recurrent themes and tropes while interrogating how this landscape has been constructed as a wilderness within British literature for children.

The text is divided into two sections. Part I focuses on the stories of early-twentieth-century explorers such as Robert F. Scott and Ernest Shackleton. Antarctica in British Children’s Literature highlights the impact of children’s literature on the expedition writings of Robert Scott, including the influence of Scott’s close friend, author J.M. Barrie. The text also reveals the important role of children’s literature in the contemporary resurgence of interest in Scott’s long-term rival Ernest Shackleton. Part II focuses on fictional narratives set in the Antarctic, including early-twentieth-century whaling literature, adventure and fantasy texts, contemporary animal stories and environmental texts for children. Together these two sections provide an insight into how depictions of this unique continent have changed over the past century, reflecting transformations in attitudes towards wilderness and wild landscapes.

This volume explores the history of Irish writing between the Second World War (or the 'Emergency') in 1939 and the re-emergence of violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It situates modern Irish writing within the contexts of cultural transition and transnational connection, often challenging pre-existing perceptions of Irish literature in this period as stagnant and mundane. While taking into account the grip of Irish censorship and cultural nationalism during the mid-twentieth century, these essays identify an Irish literary culture stimulated by international political horizons and fully responsive to changes in publishing, readership, and education. The book combines valuable cultural surveys with focussed discussions of key literary moments, and of individual authors such as Seán O'Faoláin, Samuel Beckett, Edna O'Brien, and John McGahern.

In this collection, Seán Hewitt gives us poems of a rare musicality and grace. By turns searing and meditative, these are lyrics concerned with the matter of the world, its physicality, but also attuned to the proximity of each moment, each thing, to the spiritual.

Here, there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. Drawing on the religious, the sacred and the profane, this is a collection in which men meet in the woods, where matter is corrupted and remade. There are prayers, hymns, vespers, incantations, and longer poems which attempt to propel themselves towards the transcendent.

In this book, there is always the sense of fragility allied with strength, a violence harnessed and unleashed. The collection ends with a series of elegies for the poet's father: in the face of despair, we are met with a fierce brightness, and a reclamation of the spiritual. 'This is when / we make God, and speak in his voice.'

Paying close attention to altered states and the consolations and strangeness of the natural world, this is the first book from a major poet.

Beginning with a letter to his parents in 1925 and concluding with a letter sent to the writer Edward Hoagland a few weeks before his death in 1972, The Selected Letters of John Berryman tells the poet’s story in his own words. Edited by Dr Philip Coleman with Dr Calista McRae (New Jersey Institute of Technology), the volume includes more than 600 letters to almost 200 people—editors, family members, students, colleagues, and friends. The exchanges reveal the scope of Berryman’s ambitions, as well as the challenges of practicing his art within the confines of the publishing industry and contemporary critical expectations. Correspondence with Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Adrienne Rich, Saul Bellow, and other writers demonstrates Berryman’s sustained involvement in the development of literary culture in the post-war United States. The letters show Berryman to be an energetic and generous interlocutor, but they also make plain his struggles with personal and familial trauma, at every stage of his career. Reinforcing the critical and creative interconnectedness of Berryman’s work and personal life, The Selected Letters confirms his place as one of the most original voices of his generation and opens new horizons for appreciating and interpreting his poems.

This is the first book to provide comprehensive treatment of Robert Lowell's engagements with Irish poetry. Including original contributions by leading and emerging scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, the essays in the volume explore topics such as Lowell and W.B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, and Denis Devlin, as well as the ways in which the American poet's work was read by later Irish poets Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Paul Durcan, Leontia Flynn, and others. In addition to exploring the ways that several poets have engaged with Lowell, the book encompasses a wide range of thematic concerns, from Lowell and ecology to the politics of identification. The book also includes essays on aspects of Lowell's engagements with Irish-American contexts, as well as contributions by contemporary poets Gerald Dawe, Paul Muldoon and Julie O'Callaghan. Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry concludes with a previously unpublished introduction Seamus Heaney gave to a reading by Lowell in Ireland in 1975, which is followed by a reminiscence by Marie Heaney.

This book examines the developments in British serial detective fiction which took place in the seven years when Sherlock Holmes was dead. In December 1893, at the height of Sherlock’s popularity with the Strand Magazine’s worldwide readership, Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his detective. At the time, he firmly believed that Holmes would not be resurrected. This book introduces and showcases a range of Sherlock’s most fascinating successors, exploring the ways in which a huge range of popular magazines and newspapers clamoured to ensnare Sherlock’s bereft fans. The book’s case-study format examines a range of detective series-- created by L.T. Meade; C.L. Pirkis; Arthur Morrison; Fergus Hume; Richard Marsh; Kate and Vernon Hesketh-Prichard— that filled the pages of a variety of periodicals, from plush monthly magazines to cheap newspapers, in the years while Sherlock was dead.

Throughout his career in poetry, Seamus Heaney maintained roles in education and was a visible presence in the print and broadcast media. Seamus Heaney and Society presents a dynamic new engagement with one of the most celebrated poets of the modern period, examining the ways in which his work as a poet was shaped by his work as a teacher, lecturer, critic, and public figure. Drawing on a range of archival material, this book revives the varied contexts within which Heaney's work was written, published, and circulated. Mindful of the different spheres which surrounded his pursuit of poetry, it assesses his achievements and status in Ireland, Britain, and the United States through close analysis of his work in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, and manuscript drafts of key writings now held in the National Library of Ireland.

The Sound of the Shuttle is a eloquent and compelling selection of essays written over four decades by Belfast-born poet Gerald Dawe, exploring the difficult and at times neglected territory of cultural belonging and northern Protestantism. The title, taken from a letter of John Keats during a journey through the north-east in 1818, evokes the lives, now erased from history, of the thousands of workers in the linen industry, tobacco factories and shipyards of Belfast. Sketching in literary, social and political contexts to widen the frame of reference, Dawe offers fascinating insights into the current debate about a ‘New Ireland’ by bringing into critical focus the experiences, beliefs and achievements of an (at times) maligned and often misread community, generally referred to as Northern protestants. In making the telling point that ‘The jagged edges of the violent past are still locked within ideological vices’, The Sound of the Shuttle is an insightful and honest report based upon many years of creative and critical practice. An essential book for our changing times.

Umbria: a cultural guide offers a history of peninsular Italy’s only landlocked region from prehistory to the 2019 Italian general election. The chronological narrative is supplemented by a gazetteer of the region’s artistically rich cities, towns and villages, including Perugia, Assisi, Orvieto, Spoleto, and Norcia, and 64 pages of full-colour photographs. Following an introduction, ‘The Greening of Umbria’ which considers how the modern region came into being, the book continues with chapters including ‘Umbrians and Etruscans’, ‘Roman Umbria’, ‘From the Fall of Rome to the Longobard Supremacy’, ‘The Rise of the Communes’, ‘From Commune to Signoria’, ‘The Church State’, and ‘The Kingdom of Italy and the First Republic’, along with others on St. Francis of Assisi and Franciscanism, art and architecture in Umbria, and Umbrian food and wine. First published by Viking in 1995, this fifth thoroughly revised and updated edition considers the most recent cultural, political, and economic developments in the region.

Lucy Collins praised Gerald Dawe’s poetry for ‘the seriousness of its engagement with acts of remembering. The very brevity and precision challenges the ease with which the past can be deployed in the contemporary lyric, suggesting instead the risk-taking — both creatively and emotionally — that such investigations involve.’ (Poetry Ireland Review). The Last Peacock celebrates the lives of family and friends while viewing with a questioning and ironic eye the present-day world of conflict and crisis from his ‘eyrie’ in south County Dublin and from the River Lagan following his return to his native Belfast. In the Dublin Review of Books Richard Hayes acknowledged ‘A poetry that trusts in the power of images’ as history — ‘the near dark’ — erupts in the smallest, out-of-the-way detail to produce a powerful and cohesive collection.

The theatre was a crucial forum for the representation of Irish civility and culture for the eighteenth-century English audience. Irish actors and playwrights, operating both as individuals and within networks, were remarkably popular and potent during this period, especially in London. As ideas of Enlightenment percolated throughout Britain and Ireland, Irish theatrical practitioners - actors, managers, playwrights, critics and journalists - exploited a growing receptivity to Irish civility, and advanced a patriot agenda of political and economic autonomy. Mobility, toleration and the capacity to negotiate multiple allegiances are marked features of this Irish theatrical Enlightenment, whose ambitious participants saw little conflict between their twin loyalties to the Crown and to Ireland. This collection of essays responds to recent work in the areas of eighteenth-century theatre studies, Irish studies and Enlightenment studies. The volume's discussions of genre, colonialism, gender, race, music, slavery, and dress open up new avenues of scholarship and research across disciplines.

Élie Bouhéreau (1643–1719), a French Huguenot refugee, settled in Dublin in 1697 and served as Keeper of Marsh’s Library. His diary and accounts offer political, personal, social, cultural and diplomatic insights, shedding light on the history of Ireland, France and Europe more broadly. The diary offers a unique perspective on the experiences of exile and diaspora through the primary reporting of one affected by religious persecution, featuring recurrent references to the lives and struggles of refugees, the distribution of passports and large movements of people hoping to relocate family members. It also provides eyewitness accounts of military exploits and contains domestic details pertaining to the lives (and deaths) of Bouhéreau’s children and grandchildren. His financial accounts are of equal interest, offering an exceptional picture of family life and social realities in Ireland in the eighteenth century.

This Companion explores the history and development of the short story in the anglophone world since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Ranging across texts from different parts of the English-speaking world, it studies the form in its many guises and venues of publication. Why have writers of so many nationalities and dispositions found the short story amenable to experimentation and discovery? What is the history and origin of the modern short story, and what has been the role of the publishing business, of academic criticism, of the Creative Writing ‘industry’, and of the digital revolution in shaping and disseminating it over the past two centuries? These innovative essays by new and established scholars explore these and other questions, addressing stories from around the world, and considering their relationship to place, identity, history and genre.

Aesop is widely regarded as a writer who promoted such values as honesty and punctuality, diligence and hard work, duty and forbearance. This isn’t true: the idea that we should be all of the above and more is what the popularizers of his work have imposed on him for their own reasons. Aesop’s actual message, rather differently, is that we should always look behind agreed nostrums and moral platitudes to see what is really going on, and that is what this new version of his fables by Carlo Gébler with illustrations by Gavin Weston seeks to do – to render back to the fables the quality of truth telling before they had before the moralisers got hold of them. And the reason for doing this of course is that though Aesop wrote a long time ago his texts have a lot to say to us in the troubled world in which we find ourselves living today.

This special double issue of Caribbean Quarterly on Irish-Caribbean Connections has developed out of an international interdisciplinary conference held at University College Cork in July 2016, organized by Lee M. Jenkins (UCC) and Melanie Otto (TCD). It contributes to a larger ongoing debate among scholars about the cultural, historical and imaginative connections between Ireland and the Caribbean. In 2012 a conference was held at The University of the West Indies Cave Hill campus in Barbados, followed in 2015 by a volume, Caribbean Irish Connections: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Alison Donnell, Maria McGarrity and Evelyn O’Callaghan. The starting point of this first discussion was the question raised by the Jamaican writer Erna Brodber: “What did the Irish contribute to the Caribbean creole literary mix?” This special issue of Caribbean Quarterly expands on Brodber’s question and explores what Caribbean thought might have to offer contemporary interrogations of Irishness and what Caribbean writing has contributed to representations of Irishness both in the Caribbean and Ireland itself.

The emergence of an Irish 'common reader' in the nineteenth century had significant implications for the evolution of Irish cultural nationalism. The rise of literacy rates prompted a cultural crisis, with nationalists fearing that the beneficiaries of mass education were being drawn to populist publications emanating from London which were having the effect of eroding Irish identity and corrupting Irish morals. This fear prompted an intensification of cultural nationalist activity at the turn of the century. Andrew Murphy’s study, which includes a chapter on W. B. Yeats and the Irish reader, moves freely between historical and literary analysis and demonstrates how a developing sense of cultural crisis served as an engine for the Irish literary revival. Examining responses to Irish reading habits advanced by a wide range of cultural commentators, Murphy provides a nuanced discussion of theories of nationalism and examines attempts finally to control reading habits through the introduction of censorship.

This book examines the recent expansion of Ireland's literary tradition to include home-grown crime fiction. It surveys the wave of books that use genre structures to explore familiar Irish issues such as the Troubles and the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, as well as experiences of human trafficking, the supernatural, abortion, and civic corruption. This study includes chapters on Northern Irish crime fiction, novels set in the Republic, women protagonists, and transnational themes, and discusses Irish authors’ adaptations of a well-loved genre and their effect on assumptions about the nature of Irish literature.

This first modern scholarly edition of the letters of Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) sets the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer in a rich context, showing how Goldsmith's Irish identity was marked and complicated by cosmopolitan ambition. He was at the very heart of Grub Street culture and the Georgian theatre, and was a founding member of Dr Johnson's Literary Club; his circle included Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, George Colman and Hester Piozzi. Containing a detailed introduction and extensive notes, this edition is essential to those wishing to know more about Goldsmith the man and the writer, and provides a rich and suggestive nexus for understanding the cultural cross-currents of the literary Enlightenment in eighteenth-century London.

Sleeping with the Lights On is a critical study of the enduring power of horror. While horror has often been viewed as a disreputable or debased cultural form, the book argues that it has been indissociable from our ideas about civilization for as long as there has been art and culture. This is because horror poses crucial questions – about the social function of violence, the nature of evil, the existence of the human soul; and about power, injustice, and inequality. Horror, the book argues, causes anxiety because it is a form of extreme, confrontational, or even avant-garde art, deliberately setting out to antagonise and divide audiences. The book has been widely and very well reviewed: ‘Jones’s exploration of taboo, control, and the politics of fear seems particularly timely and potent’ (Irish Times); ‘For those outside the field who want to know more, this is an excellent place to start, and even for those within it, this is an object lesson in concision of thought and precision of argument’ (THES); ‘This new book … will undoubtedly inspire thought-provoking critical studies of horror’s future; for now, it remains an unsettling but mesmerising story of culture’s oldest emotion’ (The Gothic Imagination website of the University of Stirling’s Gothic Studies Centre); ‘for the horror writers amongst us, it's an absolute necessity. It is inspirational and affirming, infectious in its enthusiasm. A must-buy if you take your craft seriously, if you're sincere about the business of horror’ (This is Horror blogsite); ‘The scope of Sleeping with the Lights On is, surprisingly for such a small book, vast’ (Weekly Standard). It was one of Michael Dirda’s 2018 Books of the Year in the Washington Post.

This groundbreaking collection captures the state of popular fiction in present day. It features twenty new essays on key authors associated with a wide range of genres and sub-genres, providing chapter-length discussions of major post-2000 works of contemporary popular fiction. The lively, accessible and academically rigorous essays presented here cover a wider range of established popular fiction genres such as fantasy, horror and the romance, as well as more niche areas such as Domestic Noir, Steampunk, the New Weird, Nordic Noir and Zombie Lit.

This Special Issue of EMLS takes as its focus a figure that, in many early modern dramatic texts, is doubly other – not only European but also female. In doing so i t seeks to begin a redressal of a notable gap in literary scholarship by exploring representations of European women in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The contributing authors have endeavoured to cover the majority of European nationalities commonly represented in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama: Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Saxon/German, Scottish, and Spanish, as well as Jewish. Their essays explore many of the issues that foreign women present in early modern England dealt with including xenophobia, religious intolerance, linguistic barriers, material hardship, and failed intermarriage, as well as instances of successful co-existence, integration, and assimilation. This Special Issue is concerned therefore with how the staging of foreign women enabled English dramatists and their audiences to engage in debates about international relations, to deliberate on racial anxieties, to play out strategies of integration or exclusion, and to imagine England’s future vis-à-vis the rest of Europe.

Tom Murphy shot to fame with the London production of A Whistle in the Dark in 1961, establishing him as the outstanding Irish playwright of his generation. The international success of DruidMurphy, the 2012-13 staging of three of his major plays by the Druid Theatre Company, served to underline his continuing appeal and importance. This is the first full scale academic study devoted to his theatre, providing an overview of all his work, with a detailed reading of his most significant texts. His powerful and searchingly honest engagement with Irish history and society is reflected in the violent Whistle in the Dark, the epic Famine (1968), the often hilarious Conversations on a Homecoming (1985) and the darkly Chekhovian The House (2000).

Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690-1840 argues that between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries manual writing was a dynamic technology. It examines script in relation to becoming a writer; in constructions of the author; and in emerging ideas of the human. Revising views of print as displacing script, Work in Hand argues that print reproduced script, print generated script; and print shaped understandings of script. In this, the double nature of print, as both moveable type and rolling press, is crucial.

Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction provides an accessible, concise and reliable overview of core critical terminology, key theoretical approaches, and the major genres and sub-genres within popular fiction.

This innovative exploration of the recurring use of fourteen objects in Beckett's work is the first study of the material imagination of any single modern author. Its identification of Beckett’s creative praxis over more than half a century as an 'art of salvage' offers an integrated way of understanding Beckett's writing and offers a fresh assessment of his importance and relevance today.

The War of the Worlds is the most important and influential invasion narrative ever written, as well as being one of the tiny handful of the most important scientific romances ever written. This is a brand-new critical edition of one of the landmark Victorian novels, fully annotated, and based on the first English edition of 1898.

‘It should never have been published.’ This is a modern scholarly edition of H. G. Wells’s only full-length work of horror fiction, based on the 1896 first edition. When The Island of Doctor Moreau was first published, it was considered too extreme; it was proposed that the novel be withdrawn from circulation. The critical introduction discusses the contexts and influence of the novel, and its place in a rich tradition of island and castaway fiction, from Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels to Lord of the Flies.

Drawing on the proceedings of two conferences organized to celebrate the centenary of John Berryman’s birth in 2014, John Berryman: Centenary Essays provides new perspectives on a major US American poet’s work by critics from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. In addition to new readings of important aspects of Berryman’s development – including his creative and scholarly encounters with Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats – the book gives fresh accounts of his engagements with contemporaries such as Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell.

BLAST at 100 makes an original contribution to the understanding of a major modernist magazine. Providing new critical readings that consider the magazine’s influence within contexts that have not been acknowledged before – in the development of Irish and Spanish literature and culture in the twentieth century, for example, as well as in the areas of cultural studies, performance studies and the scholarship of teaching and learning – BLAST at 100 reconsiders the magazine’s complex legacy.

This timely volume explores the signal contribution George Saunders has made to the development of the short story form in books ranging from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) to Tenth of December (2013). The book brings together a team of scholars from around the world to explore topics ranging from Saunders’s treatment of work and religion to biopolitics and the limits of the short story form. It also includes an interview with Saunders specially conducted for the volume, and a preliminary bibliography of his published works and critical responses to an expanding and always exciting creative œuvre.

This unique collection of 54 short biographical essays, by scholars and experts, brings together a vast array of figures who have played a role in the ever-expanding world of Gothic and Horror.

This is the first-ever scholarly edition of Conan Doyle's Gothic Tales, meticulously sourced with full details of the publication history of each tale. Drawing on the latest scholarship, the Introduction offers an analysis of the importance of the Gothic to the whole of Doyle's writing career and the wide range of his interests, from science to imperialism to spiritualism. The book includes extensive explanatory notes, glossing the often complex range of ideas with which the stories engage.

The concept of a personal identity was a contentious issue in the early eighteenth century. John Locke’s philosophical discussion of personal identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding fostered a public debate upon the status of an immortal Christian soul. This book argues that Defoe, like many of this age, had religious difficulties with Locke’s empiricist analysis of human identity. In particular, it examines how Defoe explores competitive individualism as a social threat while also demonstrating the literary and psychological fiction of any concept of a separated, lone identity.

Best known for his Gothic masterpiece Uncle Silas and the vampire story Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was a prolific writer whose extensive body of work included historical, sensation and horror novels, poems and ballads, numerous stories of the supernatural, journalism and a verse-drama. The main aim of the collection is to read Le Fanu in the round, expanding the critical focus away from its current obsession with a small proportion of his work and taking account of the full extent of his writing, from his other Gothic novels, The Rose and the Key, Haunted Lives and A Lost Name, to his short stories and journalism.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre provides the single most comprehensive survey of the field to be found in a single volume. Drawing on more than forty contributors from around the world, the book addresses a full range of topics relating to modern Irish theatre from the late nineteenth-century theatre to the most recent works of postdramatic devised theatre.

‘Beautifully crafted by Sansom, Professor Morley promises to become a little gem of English crime writing; sample him now’ Daily Mail. Welcome to Westmorland. Perhaps the most scenic county in England! Home of the poets! Land of the great artists! District of the Great lakes! And the scene of a mysterious crime… Swanton Morley, the People’s Professor, once again sets off in his Lagonda to continue his history of England, The County Guides.

This study focuses on Louis MacNeice's creative and critical engagement with other Irish poets during his lifetime. It draws on extensive archival research to uncover the previously unrecognised extent of the poet's contact with Irish literary mores and networks.

The eighteenth-century salon played an important role in shaping literary culture, while both creating and sustaining transnational intellectual networks. Focusing on archival materials, this book is the first detailed examination of the literary salon in Ireland, considered in the wider contexts of contemporary salon culture in Britain and France.

This anthology of new Irish short stories is the fifth in a series established by the late David Marcus. All the stories were commissioned for the book which features the work of both new and established writers, including Colm Toibin, Mary Morrissy and Eoin McNamee. It also includes work by Eileen Casey, Andrew Fox and other alumni of the MPhil in Creative Writing in the Oscar Wilde Centre, where Deirdre Madden teaches.

The Stoic Man is Gerald Dawe’s retrospective on the Northern Irish society in which he grew up during the 1950s and ’60s, set alongside a portrait of the west of Ireland where he settled in the early 1970s and concludes with some views of Irish writing and present day Ireland as seen from the poet’s home in County Dublin.

Research into the emotions is beginning to gain momentum in Anglo-Saxon studies . In order to integrate early medieval Britain into the wider scholarly research into the history of emotions (a major theme in other fields and a key field in interdisciplinary studies), this volume brings together established scholars, who have already made significant contributions to the study of Anglo-Saxon mental and emotional life, with younger scholars.

This collection of essays contributes to a global discussion concerning the value and meaning of David Foster Wallace’s work, providing fresh readings and insights on texts that have already received considerable critical attention but also advancing new ways of understanding one of the most important American writers of the late twentieth century.

Gerald Dawe's Of War and War's Alarms is a unique study of war and revolution and their impact on the writing lives of Irish poets and novelists from WW1 and the Easter Rising through the War of Independence to the Spanish Civil War, WWII and the Northern 'Troubles'. These timely reflections on literature in wartime include such figures as W B Yeats, Thomas MacGreevy, Seamus Heaney along with Francis Ledwidge, Charles Donnelly and Padraic Fiacc, Benedict Kiely, William Trevor, John Hewitt and Christabel Bielenberg. Of War and War's Alarms is a fascinating narrative that builds upon Gerald Dawe's achievement in his original ground-breaking anthology of Irish war poems, Earth Voices Whispering.

The book of Psalms was at the core of devotional practice in western Christianity throughout the Middle Ages. The study of medieval Latin Psalters provides evidence for the owners, users and makers of each of these unique books. This volume examines Psalter manuscripts as objects, exploring how they were designed and the changes that have been made to them over time. The choices made about text, decoration, size and layout in these manuscripts reveal a diverse range of engagements with the Psalms, as they were sung, read and scrutinized.

Early Poems charts Gerald Dawe's original mapping of his Belfast upbringing in the 1950s and 1960s through the difficulties of the Northern Irish Troubles to his moving to the west of Ireland in the 1970s. Early Poems prefigures the poet s singular achievement in such distinctive volumes as The Morning Train, Lake Geneva and Mickey Finn's Air (published by The Gallery Press). 'Serious, often grave, but inculcated with such sympathy and passion and affection that any obscurity is the enemy. It s as if what Gerald Dawe has to tell us is so vital that clarity such a virtue is a moral matter' - Richard Ford

Melville: Fashioning in Modernity considers all of the major fiction with a concentration on lesser-known work, and provides a radically fresh approach to Melville, focusing on: clothing as socially symbolic; dress, power and class; the transgressive nature of dress; inappropriate clothing; the meaning of uniform; the multiplicity of identity that dress may represent; anxiety and modernity. The representation of clothing in the fiction is central to some of Melville's major themes; the relation between private and public identity, social inequality and how this is maintained; the relation between power, justice and authority; the relation between the 'civilized' and the 'savage.'

The 1880s and 1890s were the years in which detective fiction firmly established itself as a genre and sealed its popularity with the reading public. Late-Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock, 1885 - 1900 investigates representations of detectives and criminals in both canonical and forgotten crime fiction at this key juncture, challenging studies which have given undue prominence to a handful of key figures. These fascinating Shadows of Sherlock showcase the often wholly overlooked formal and moral diversity of late-Victorian crime writing, forcing us to rethink our preconceptions about what the nineteenth-century detective genre is and does. Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock was awarded the HRF Keating Prize in 2015.

This innovative new study provides a detailed interrogation of the texts that Seán O'Faoláin wrote during the 1930s – the decade that was crucial for his emergence as a prose writer. During this decade, O'Faoláin produced some of his most important work, including the highly-influential biography of Daniel O'Connell, King of the Beggars, two seminal collections of short stories, Midsummer Night Madness and A Purse of Coppers, and the controversial, banned novel Bird Alone. Exploring the sum of O'Faoláin's work over this decade, this book provides a comprehensive re-reading which is original and timely. O'Faoláin's reflections on critical themes, including decolonization, freedom of expression, cultural inheritance, and the relationship between Church and State, are contextualized and teased out in accessible fashion. What emerges, in consequence, is the complex legacy but also the enduring significance of this once towering figure in contemporary Ireland.

A unique and wide-ranging anthology of horror fiction from the Victorian and Edwardian periods that embraces the diversity of the developing genre to showcase its terrifying achievements. Includes all horror types from supernatural tales and ghost stories to scientific horror and mad doctor tales, to psychological horror and colonial horror.

This collection of essays illustrates pressures and concerns – both practical and theoretical – in the fast-developing area of print culture studies. As the editors suggest in a provocative introductory essay, such issues range from the reliability of digitized resources and the limiting parameters of 'national' book history to the varied definitions of 'print culture' itself. Contributors include leading experts in the field such as Leslie Howsam, James Raven, David Finkelstein and Toby Barnard.

Serious, often grave, but inculcated with such sympathy and passion and affection that any obscurity is the enemy. It's as if what Gerald Dawe has to tell us is so vital that clarity — such a virtue — is a moral matter. — Richard Ford Mickey Finn's Air, Gerald Dawe's eighth collection of poems, revels in how memory plays tricks with the passing of time as traces of the past are restored in the mind's eye like 'the torc's beaten gold.' Bearing the loss of loved ones and the pressures 'of the way things are;' Mickey Finn's Air makes a 'simple arc of sun.' From the encompassing vision of home life in 'Déjà Vu' through the startling landscapes of a remembered Galway to the present day worlds of south county Dublin and the American east coast, 'everything becomes new once more.' As Fiona Sampson remarked of Gerald Dawe's Selected Poems— Emotional intelligence will always distinguish the truly important poet.

The main aim of the collection is to read Stoker in the round, expanding the critical focus away from an exclusive obsession with Dracula and taking account of the full extent of Stoker's writing, from his other Gothic novels, The Lair of the White Worm and The Snake's Pass, to his short stories and journalism, and his romances Miss Betty, Lady Athlyne and The shoulder of Shasta. Where Dracula is considered, new scholarship is presented by the leading experts on that novel. The main aim of the collection is to read Stoker in the round, expanding the critical focus away from an exclusive obsession with Dracula and taking account of the full extent of Stoker's writing, from his other Gothic novels, The Lair of the White Worm and The Snake's Pass, to his short stories and journalism, and his romances Miss Betty, Lady Athlyne and The shoulder of Shasta. Where Dracula is considered, new scholarship is presented by the leading experts on that novel.

This book provides a robustly theorised and thoroughly historicised account of the 'beginnings' of Irish Gothic fiction, maps the theoretical terrain covered by other critics, and puts forward a new history of the emergence of the genre in Ireland.

Drawing on theorists of space such as Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan, in Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place, Chris Morash and Shaun Richards argue that theatre is 'a machine for making place from space.' Concentrating on Irish theatre, the book looks at how this Irish sense of place took shape in the theatre of Yeats, Synge and their contemporaries, before moving on to consider what it means for Irish theatre that this spatial formation has begun to fade – when a 'sense of place' is replaced by a 'fluorescence of place,' where 'fluoresence' is understood to be light emitted by a dying particle. In the course of mapping this history of change, Chris Morash and Shaun Richards propose an original theory of theatrical space, whose implications extend beyond Irish theatre and culture.

This volume of essays illuminates a long and diverse history of cultural communication between these two regions, tracing several of the literary, artistic and political relationships which have linked them since the early nineteenth century. In its focus on the varied forms of connection between these two peripheries of Europe, the book recalibrates the map of Irish cultural experience, and in doing so, looks to develop theoretical understandings of modern Irish culture beyond the limits of a geographical boundary.

Drawing on published and previously unpublished manuscript sources in poetry and prose, John Berryman's Public Vision offers an original reappraisal of an important twentieth-century American poet's work. Challenging the confessional labelling of him that has dominated his critical reception and popular perception for decades, the book argues that Berryman (1914-72) had a far greater concern for developments in the public sphere than has previously been acknowledged. It reassesses the poet's engagements with W.B. Yeats and Robert Bhain Campbell in the 1940s and offers radical re- contextualisations of Berryman's work from every stage of his career.

Despite Tolkien's association with the natural world, Middle-earth as a landscape and built environment has been relatively neglected critically. Tolkien: the Forest and the City presents new work by some of the finest established scholars in the field as well as research by a number of young emerging scholars, addressing this neglect. From philology to eco-criticism this collection explores the interaction of culture and nature that imbues Tolkien's secondary world with meaning and an immediacy rivaling our own.

As a serious drama set in an ordinary middle-class home, Ibsen's A Doll's House established a new politics of the interior that was to have a lasting impact upon twentieth-century drama. In this innovative study, Nicholas Grene traces the changing forms of the home on the stage through nine of the greatest of modern plays and playwrights. Shortlisted for the 2014 Society for Theatre Research Theatre Book Prize.

Gathering together poems by over fifty poets, Berryman’s Fate is at once a testament to John Berryman’s living presence in contemporary poetic culture and a gift on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. Contributors include Paul Muldoon, John Montague, Paula Meehan, and Martin Dyar.

This collection explores the significance of New York City in children's literature, stressing literary, political, and societal influences on writing for young people from the twentieth century to the present day. It examines not only dominant themes, motifs, and tropes, but also the different narrative methods employed to tell readers about the history, function, physical structure, and conceptualization of New York City, acknowledging the shared or symbiotic relationship between literature and the city: just as literature can give imaginative 'reality' to the city, the city has the potential to shape the literary text.

Irish Women's Fiction examines women's novels up to and following the establishment of the Irish state, the period of the Second World War, the Second Wave of feminism in the 1970s, to postmodernism in the 1990s and the writing of the Celtic Tiger era. Describing the circumstances of women's writing lives, as well as the themes with which they deal, the book discusses both literary and popular fiction.

This is the first book-length treatment of James Joyce's multiplicity of styles through the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, the pre-eminent philosopher of style and perspectivism. Sam Slote argues that the range of styles Joyce deploys throughout his works has an ethical dimension. Rather than an influence study, this book concerns Joyce's engagement with issues and problems that are central throughout Nietzsche's works. Deeply informed and wide in its range of reference, Sam Slote's new book reveals the variety of filiations between Nietzsche and Joyce. In doing so, it not only sheds light on many aspects of Joyce's major works, but also inspires us to read Nietzsche anew - and differently. Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University.

The North American wilderness has often served as the setting for narratives in which the boundaries between order and chaos, savagery and civilization are torn down, and the natural world becomes a threat to physical and moral safety. The Rural Gothic argues that the complex and often negative responses early European settlers expressed toward the North American Wilderness continues to influence horror and gothic narratives to this day. The book undertakes a detailed and historically grounded analysis of key literary and filmic texts. The works of authors such as Mary Rowlandson, Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne are discussed, as are the origins and characteristics of the backwoods horror film and post-1960s eco-horror.

All of Derrida's texts on Joyce together under one cover in fresh, new translations, along with nine essays by leading scholars from across the humanities addressing Derrida's treatments of Joyce throughout his work, and two remembrances of lectures devoted to Joyce that Derrida gave in 1982 and 1984.

William Trevor: Revaluations offers a comprehensive examination of the oeuvre of one of the most accomplished and celebrated contemporary prose writers in the English language. The book draws on a team of distinguished, international scholars, and combines discussions of individual texts with overviews of key tropes and themes in Trevor's novels, screenplays and short stories. Essays are provided by Hermione Lee, George O'Brien, Lyn Innes, Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Lance Pettitt, Tina O'Toole, Michael O'Neill, Derek Hand, Jennifer Jeffers, Tom Herron, and Heidi Hansson, as well as by each of the co-editors. The book situates Trevor's writing within the contexts of both Irish and English cultures, stressing its transnational significance and contemporary compass.

Time Present and Time Past is Deirdre Madden's eighth novel. Set in Dublin in the spring of 2006 it seeks not to portray the economic boom and subsequent recession, but to set these events in a larger and more visionary context; and to explore the nature of time. Autochromes - early colour photographs – are one of the devices used in the course of the novel to this end, and the jacket image is an autochrome of an apple sitting on a mirror, taken in 1907. To mark the publication of this novel, Faber republished three of Deirdre Madden's earlier novels with new jackets, all showing early colour photographs.

M. R. James is the greatest ghost-story writer in English. This is the first ever single-volume critical edition of his collected works, with a wide-ranging introduction and comprehensive annotations. The book has been widely- and extremely well-reviewed, and was the subject of a long review essay (by Anthony Lane) in the New Yorker magazine, and a five-star review in the Daily Telegraph. It has been called 'outstanding' (Boyd Tonkin, Independent), 'excellently introduced and annotated'(Peter Kemp, Sunday Times), 'first-rate' (Ferdinand Mount, London Review of Books) and 'definitive' (Politico). The newly-issued paperback edition was named the Guardian's 'Book of the Week' (Nicholas Lezard, 1 October 2013).

Olivia Manning (1908-1980), author of the Fortunes of War novel sequence, was a leading chronicler of Britain's political, military and cultural role abroad during the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, this book covers her experiences in wartime Bucharest, Athens, Cairo and Jerusalem, examining in each location the social and political landscapes of her fiction and charting her relationships with fellow writers such as Stevie Smith, Arthur Koestler, Elizabeth Bowen and Lawrence Durrell.

Since its first appearance in book form in 1978 Gerald Dawe's poetry has been praised for its feeling of unpadded completeness and unforced structure (Alastair MacLean, TLS). His achievement has been described by Dennis O'Driscoll as brave and risk-taking, finely tuned and perfectly pitched and, by John McAuliffe, as serious and seriously enjoyable. Selected Poems is a generous representation of this gifted poet's work. Spanning over thirty-five years, in poems that move through Irish city and country life — Belfast, Galway, Dublin —to Italian, Swiss and Polish landscapes and the American east coast, both of the present and ranging through the past half-century, Gerald Dawe's clear and unadorned voice — in the words of Terence Brown — articulates an imagination of European scope.

Joyce's masterpiece is here presented in its 1939 version with 9,000 all-new annotations by Sam Slote. 'Anyone looking for an accurate, annotated Ulysses will find one here and be grateful to Sam Slote for condensing so much information.' Times Literary Supplement. 'Slote's annotations are by far the most systematic, the most thorough, the most scholarly, of any single-volume Ulysses. He has a very good feel for the things a reader might like to know.' The Irish Times.

This collection of essays considers aberrational elements in a poet's oeuvre. With an introductory essay exploring aberration, the fourteen contributions investigate the work of major 20th-century poets from the U.S., Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Aberration is considered from the standpoint of both the artist and the audience, prompting discussion on a range of important issues, including canon- formation. The essays explore the aberrant work and the ways in which it challenges, enlarges or supports the overall perception of the poet.

This volume of essays has its origin in the 2010 Biennial Conference of the European Association for American Studies. With contributions from scholars from around the world, the topics addressed include the interactions between youth and age; the idealization of youth in American culture; the relationship between war and youth; the cultural constructions of youth and age. The essays also examine the ways that Americanness has been constructed from a wide range of contexts, including Turkey, Mexico, China, and the United States itself.

This groundbreaking collection examines popular and literary culture in the 1950s through the lens of postwar Ireland. The 1950s are at once a site of cultural nostalgia and of vital relevance to twenty-first-century readers. The diverse essays collected here offer insight into the artistic effects of austerity on both creators and consumers of 1950s culture, examining cultural production in Britain and the United States as well as Ireland. The first book of its kind, it blends critical analysis with cultural memory of a unique time in the history of Irish literature and the broader world. From Samuel Beckett to Elvis Presley and Movement poetry to bestselling science fiction, this volume highlights the crucial role Ireland played in the growth of literary and popular culture throughout this fascinating decade and beyond.

Synge and Edwardian Ireland is the first book to explore the cultural life of Edwardian Ireland as a distinctive period. By emphasizing several less familiar contexts for J.M. Synge's work, this collection shows how the Revival's preoccupation with folk culture intersected with the new networks of mass communication in the late imperial world. Often misunderstood as apolitical, Synge's work displays a romantic resistance to modernity alongside his more accurate observations of contemporary conditions. This book aims to change readers' sense of Synge's significance, and by doing so to illuminate in a quite new way the era of Edwardian Ireland during this period of rapid modernization.