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The first book of its kind, Out of What Began traces the development of a distinctive tradition of Irish poetry over the course of three centuries. Beginning with Jonathan Swift in the early eighteenth century and concluding with such contemporary poets as Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland, Gregory A. Schirmer looks at the work of nearly a hundred poets. Considering the evolving political and social environments in which they lived and wrote, Schirmer shows how Irish poetry and culture have come to be shaped by the struggle to define Irish identity. Schirmer includes a large number of accomplished poets who have been unjustly neglected in standard accounts of Irish literature; many of these writers are women, whose work has been kept in the shadows cast by that of well-known male poets. He also emphasizes the importance of political poetry in a country that continues to be torn by sectarian violence. With its rich selection of poetic voices, Out of What Began reveals the political, social, and religious diversity of Irish culture.
This book discusses key works by important writers from Church of Ireland backgrounds (from Farquhar and Swift to Beckett and Bardwell), in order to demonstrate that writers from this Irish subculture have a unique socio-political viewpoint which is imperfectly understood. The Anglican Ascendancy was historically referred to as a “middle nation” between Ireland and Britain, and this book is an examination of the various ways in which Irish Anglican writers have signalled their Irish/British hybridity. “British” elements in their work are pointed out, but so are manifestations of their proud Irishness and what Elizabeth Bowen called her community’s “subtle ... anti-Englishness.” Crucially, this book discusses several writers often excluded from the “truly” Irish canon, including (among others) Laurence Sterne, Elizabeth Griffith, and C.S. Lewis.
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. 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.
Imagining Ireland's Pasts describes how various authors addressed the history of early modern Ireland over four centuries and explains why they could not settle on an agreed narrative. It shows how conflicting interpretations broke frequently along denominational lines, but that authors were also influenced by ethnic, cultural, and political considerations, and by whether they were resident in Ireland or living in exile. Imagining Ireland's Past: Early Modern Ireland through the Centuries details how authors extolled the merits of their progenitors, offered hope and guidance to the particular audience they addressed, and disputed opposing narratives. The author shows how competing scholars, whether contributing to vernacular histories or empirical studies, became transfixed by the traumatic events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they sought to explain either how stability had finally been achieved, or how the descendants of those who had been wronged might secure redress.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.
The appearance of James Macpherson's Ossian in the 1760s caused an international sensation. The discovery of poetic fragments that seemed to have survived in the Highlands of Scotland for some 1500 years gripped the imagination of the reading public, who seized eagerly on the newly available texts for glimpses of a lost primitive world. That Macpherson's versions of the ancient heroic verse were more creative adaptations of the oral tradition than literal translations of a clearly identifiable original may have exercised contemporary antiquarians and contributed eventually to a decline in the popularity of Ossian. Yet for most early readers, as for generations of enthusiastic followers, what...
Mair'ead Nic Craith's has sought to integrate critical heritage studies, cultural history, literature and folklore into a creative ethnology. Issues of community and place, memory and nostalgia are key themes in her work. The tensions around forms, definitions and uses of heritage are picked up in the contributions to this book. Research essays engage with the wide range of topics Mair'ead has explored. Other contributions note her support and mentoring or illustrate the author's appreciation of her work through prose, music and artistic representations. Ullrich Kockel teaches at Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, the Latvian Academy of Culture and Vytautas Magnus University Kaunas. He is Emeritus Professor of Ethnology at Ulster University, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and Mair'ead's anam cara.
The aim of this investigation is to reconsider the cultural confrontation between England and Ireland from a new methodological perspective, and to trace how this confrontation resulted in a particular notion, literary as well as political, of Irish nationality.
This edited collection showcases the contribution of women to the development of political ideas during the Enlightenment, and presents an alternative to the male-authored canon of philosophy and political thought. Over the course of the eighteenth century increasing numbers of women went into print, and they exploited both new and traditional forms to convey their political ideas: from plays, poems, and novels to essays, journalism, annotated translations, and household manuals, as well as dedicated political tracts. Recently, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to women’s literary writing and their role in salon society, but their participation in political debates is less wel...