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Uses 19th and 20th-century Irish Gothic literary texts to argue that capitalism, the nuclear patriarchal family and Protestantism coincided with and reinforced the conditions for the plantation of Ireland and the colonization which followed.
Even though the Irish child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church have appeared steadily in the media, many children remain in peril. In The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature, Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus examine modern cultural responses to child sex abuse in Ireland. Using descriptions of these scandals found in newspapers, historiographical analysis, and 20th- and 21st-century literature, Valente and Backus expose a public sphere ardently committed to Irish children's souls and piously oblivious to their physical welfare. They offer historically contextualized and psychoanalytically informed readings of scandal narratives by nine notable modern Irish authors who actively, pointedly, and persistently question Ireland's responsibilities regarding its children. Through close, critical readings, a more nuanced and troubling account emerges of how Ireland's postcolonial heritage has served to enable such abuse. The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature refines the debates on why so many Irish children were lost by offering insight into the lived experience of both the children and those who failed them.
In Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars, Margot Gayle Backus charts the rise of the newspaper sex scandal across the fin de siècle British archipelago and explores its impact on the work of James Joyce, a towering figure of literary modernism. Based largely on archival research, the first three chapters trace the legal, social, and economic forces that fueled an upsurge in sex scandal over the course of the Irish Home Rule debates during James Joyce’s childhood. The remaining chapters examine Joyce’s use of scandal in his work throughout his career, beginning with his earliest known poem, “Et Tu, Healy,” written when he was nine years old t...
Uses 19th and 20th-century Irish Gothic literary texts to argue that capitalism, the nuclear patriarchal family and Protestantism coincided with and reinforced the conditions for the plantation of Ireland and the colonization which followed.
Though widely lauded as one of the most creative and challenging forces in Irish theatre Frank McGuinness’s plays have often met with a tempestuous reception. This new work details the significance of key productions of his plays in the context of Ireland’s culture and society. Charting McGuinness’s development as a dramatist from The Factory Girls through to Gates of Gold it combines cultural, political and theatrical analysis to position McGuinness as the most significant Irish playwright of his generation. Textual analysis supports considerations of theatrical performance to show how visual art, stagecraft, sculpture and song are central to our understanding of McGuinness’s theatre. Drawing forth the range of sexual, familial and national identities found in McGuinness’s work this book shows the significance of symbols in theatre that often seeks to confuse the simplicities of absolutes in order to show the complexities of difference. Wide-ranging, theoretically astute and written in a lucid and engaging style, Celebrating Confusion will appeal to all readers who are interested in Irish Theatre and its intersection with the politics and culture of contemporary Ireland.
Ireland is a country which has come to be defined in part by an ideology which conflates nationalism with the land. From the Irish Revival’s celebration of the Irish peasant farmer as the ideal Irishman to the fierce history of land claim battles between the Irish and their colonizers, notions of the land have become particularly bound up with conceptions of what Ireland is and what it is to be Irish. In this book, Wright considers this fraught relationship between land and national identity in Irish literature. In doing so, she presents a new vision of the Irish national landscape as one that is vitally connected to larger geographical spheres. By exploring issues of globalization, intern...
Enigmatic, vivid, and terse, James Joyce’s Dubliners continues both to puzzle and to compel its readers. This collection of essays by thirty contributors from seven countries presents a revolutionary view of Joyce’s technique and draws out its surprisingly contemporary implications by beginning with a single unusual premise: that meaning in Joyce’s fiction is a product of engaged interaction between two or more people. Meaning is not dispensed by the author; rather, it is actively negotiated between involved and curious readers through the medium of a shared text. Here, pairs of experts on Joyce’s work produce meaning beyond the text by arguing over it, challenging one another through it, and illuminating it with relevant facts about language, history, and culture. The result is not an authoritative interpretation of Joyce’s collection of stories but an animated set of dialogues about Dubliners designed to draw the reader into its lively discussions.
"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.
Frame narratives--stories within stories--are featured in nearly every canonical Gothic novel. Sometimes dismissed as a shopworn convention of the genre, frame narratives in fact function as a dynamic basis for imaginative variation and are vital to evaluating the diverse Gothic tradition. The juxtaposition between the everyday "frame world" of the story and the disturbing embedded narrative allows the monstrous to escape textual confines, forcing the reader to experience the reassurance of the ordinary alongside the horror of the uncanny.