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"This book also looks at how authors have persistently used the bildungsroman to complicate and challenge the idealization of the family, exposing the divorce ban as symptomatic of an unrealistic notion of domestic inviolability. This study concludes with a discussion of the future of the bildungsroman in a country that has transcended many of its formative crises. This chapter considers Doyle's A Star Called Henry as a text that inaugurates a new phase in Irish coming-of-age narratives in which many of the problems of Irish life, formerly treated so earnestly and tragically, can be a source of play and humor." "By looking at a comprehensive range of novels by writers like Sean O'Faolain, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, and William Trevor, as well as lesser known figures like Eimar O'Duffy, Francis MacManus, and Mary Morrissy, Blighted Beginnings traces the evolving concerns of Irish writers as they pushed for a greater accommodation of individual freedoms and aspirations."--BOOK JACKET.
This collection of essays reveals the extent to which politics is fundamental to our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s life and writing. Bringing together internationally established and emerging scholars, Beckett and Politics considers Beckett’s work as it relates to three broad areas of political discourse: language politics, biopolitics and geopolitics. Through a range of critical approaches, including performance studies, political theory, gender theory, historicizing approaches and language theory, the book demonstrates how politics is more than just another thematic lens: it is fundamentally and structurally intrinsic to Beckett’s life, his texts and subsequent interpretations of them. This important collection of essays demonstrates that Beckett’s work is not only ripe for political engagement, but also contains significant opportunities for understanding and illuminating the broader relationships between literature, culture and politics.
This is a study of some of Anglo-Ireland's most compelling twentieth-century attempts at self-representation. In contrast to formative studies that read Anglo-Irish fiction as a predictably colonialist literature that nostalgically champions ruling-class culture, the author argues that novels by such authors as Molly Keane, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett are in fact richly textured narratives that sustain continuous debates with their own visions and revisions of history and culture. The book contributes to the ongoing effort in Irish cultural studies to analyze myths and stereotypes that have been both symptom and cause of Irish troubles past and present, and helps destabilize problematically binary terminologies, toward which discourse about postcoloniality can tend. In the process, the author refines received ideas about literary modernism and post-modernism, and suggests failings in the prevailing theory and practice of ideology critique. Ellen M. Wolff is Eleanor Gwin Ellis Instructor in English at Phillips Exeter Academy.
In this updated and expanded edition of Invisible Leviathan, Murray E.G. Smith critically explores and makes significant contributions to the debate surrounding Karl Marx’s ‘capitalist law of value’ and its corollary, the law of the falling rate of profit. A powerful case is presented that capitalism has exhausted its potential to contribute to human progress. Humanity confronts a fateful choice: to allow this obsolescent system – which necessarily measures ‘wealth’ in terms of ‘abstract social labour’ and money profit – to destroy human civilisation; or to make the leap toward a global, egalitarian-socialist society in which the satisfaction of human need is the starting-point and the all-round development of each and every human individual the goal of the socio-economic life process. First printed in 1994 as Invisible Leviathan: The Marxist Critique of Market Despotism Beyond Postmodernism by University of Toronto Press. This second and revised edition includes a new Foreword by Michael Roberts, and a Preface to the Second Edition.
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Crafting Infinity is a multi-disciplinary collection of essays that investigates how aspects of traditional Irish culture have been revised, retooled, and repackaged in the interest of maintaining the integrity of Irish myth tales, artistic values, spiritual foundations, and historic icons. From perspectives on early Irish Christianity to national mythology, traditional Irish music, Irish history represented in film, literary inventiveness, and evidence of the Irish diaspora, this study examines how artists, writers, theorists, and emigrants from Ireland re-interpreted, and reshaped Irish traditions, often invoking Ireland’s relationship with other nations before it acquired independence. ...
This is the first book to focus on masculinity in Samuel Beckett's work as a way to understand his historical and national context, the difficulty of reading and interpreting his texts, and his ruthless disintegration of sexual and gendered norms throughout his oeuvre.