You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This is the most comprehensive and lively history of Ireland's writers ever to be published. It is a controversial survey of the whole course of Irish literature in English since the 1890s.
A celebration of the tenacious life of the enduring Irish classics, this book by one of Irish writing's most eloquent readers offers a brilliant and accessible survey of the greatest works since 1600 in Gaelic and English, which together have shaped one of the world's most original literary cultures. In the course of his discussion of the great seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gaelic poems of dispossession, and of later work in that language that refuses to die, Declan Kiberd provides vivid and idiomatic translations that bring the Irish texts alive for the English-speaking reader. Extending from the Irish poets who confronted modernity as a cataclysm, and who responded by using tradition...
Ireland is suffering from a crisis of authority. Catholic Church scandals, political corruption, and economic collapse have shaken the Irish people’s faith in their institutions and thrown the nation’s struggle for independence into question. While Declan Kiberd explores how political failures and economic globalization have eroded Irish sovereignty, he also sees a way out of this crisis. After Ireland surveys thirty works by modern writers that speak to worrisome trends in Irish life and yet also imagine a renewed, more plural and open nation. After Dublin burned in 1916, Samuel Beckett feared “the birth of a nation might also seal its doom.” In Waiting for Godot and a range of powe...
In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's Ulysses offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. As much a guide to contemporary life as it is virtuoso work of literary criticism, Ulysses and Us offers revolutionary insights to the scholar and the first-time reader alike. Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the hero of James Joyce's Ulysses, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the city streets, and in his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of the literature upon which Joyce drew in writing Ulysses, such as Homer, Dante and the Bible. 'Declan Kiberd's brilliantly informed and highly entertaining advocacy liberates Joyce's greatest book from the dungeon of unreadable masterpieces.' Joseph O'Connor
The Irish Writer and the World is a major new book by one of Ireland's most prominent scholars and cultural commentators. Declan Kiberd, author of the award-winning Irish Classics and Inventing Ireland, here synthesises the themes that have occupied him throughout his career as a leading critic of Irish literature and culture. Kiberd argues that political conflict between Ireland and England ultimately resulted in cultural confluence and that writing in the Irish language was hugely influenced by the English literary tradition. He continues his exploration of the role of Irish politics and culture in a decolonising world, and covers Anglo-Irish literature, the fate of the Irish language and the Celtic Tiger. This fascinating collection of Kiberd's work demonstrates the extraordinary range, astuteness and wit that have made him a defining voice in Irish studies and beyond, and will bring his work to new audiences across the world.
Declan Kiberd, author of the award-winning Irish Classics and Inventing Ireland, argues that political conflict between Ireland and England ultimately resulted in cultural confluence--causing the English literary tradition to greatly influence Irish language writing. Continuing his exploration of the role of Irish politics and culture in a decolonizing world, Kiberd covers Anglo-Irish literature, the fate of the Irish language and the Celtic Tiger. This collection of Kiberd's work over twenty-five years demonstrates the extraordinary range, astuteness and wit that have made him a defining voice in Irish studies and beyond.
A teasing but affectionate celebration of cricket through the ages, written by one of Ireland's greatest living critics. Cricket is the strangest game. It features idealism, brutality, low comedy, high intelligence, luck and sheer bravery in equal measure – and often achieves the condition of art. Declan Kiberd's remarkable book is a celebration of cricket through the ages, and of the peculiarities of the people who love and play it. He evokes brilliantly what it is like to be 'out there' on the field of play. Although the modern game is rooted in the gentle rural England described by LP Hartley and George Orwell, it has in its more modern versions come to reflect the industrial power and intermittent violence of modern life. England and Eternity is a teasing but affectionate study of the genius of the English people as seen from a postcolonial perspective – and of the game which was one of their richest, oddest and most lasting gifts to the wider world.
Handbook of the Irish Revival collects for the first time many of the essays, articles, and letters written during the Revival.
Synge was the victim of a cruel paradox: those who loved his works knew no Irish and those who loved Irish despised his works. This book aims to show that Synge's command of Irish was extensive and that this knowledge proved invaluable in the writing of his major plays.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice The first comprehensive biography of the most influential, controversial, and celebrated Palestinian intellectual of the twentieth century As someone who studied under Edward Said and remained a friend until his death in 2003, Timothy Brennan had unprecedented access to his thesis adviser’s ideas and legacy. In this authoritative work, Said, the pioneer of postcolonial studies, a tireless champion for his native Palestine, and an erudite literary critic, emerges as a self-doubting, tender, eloquent advocate of literature’s dramatic effects on politics and civic life. Charting the intertwined routes of Said’s intellectual development, Places ...