Search

This essay focuses on Irish writer Kevin Barry's first collection of short stories, There Are Little Kingdoms (2007). The Ireland depicted in this work is the Ireland of the new millennium - a territory facing the transformations of Celtic Tiger prosperity. The analysis of these short stories, which provide several snapshots of contemporary Ireland, will explore how the Republic depicted in Barry's work is a territory in some ways bound to its rural past, often characterised by its short-sightedness despite pretensions of development. Changes are occurring, but at the same time stasis permeates the scenarios of the plots. The irony is salient, considering that the Celtic Tiger era is a time associated with prosperity and joy, yet the lives and stories of the characters of There Are Little Kingdoms (2007), as this essay will reveal, are downbeat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Porównania / Comparisons. A Journal on Comparative Literature & Interdisciplinary Studies is the property of Adam Mickiewicz University Poznao, Press of "Poznanskie Studia Polonistyczne" and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

During her lifetime, Dorothy Macardle was a prominent public intellectual in both her native Ireland and post-war Europe. Her passionate engagement in Irish nationalism found expression in her writing; in her only collection of short stories, Earth-bound: Nine Stories of Ireland, published early in her writing career, she protests Irish women's socially restricted status and offers literary models of female solidarity to her audience (her fellow prisoners in Kilmainham Gaol, where she was imprisoned during the Civil War). Complex and ambiguous messages regarding maternal attitudes and female sexuality are encoded within the collection, particularly in the two Maeve stories (as I have labelled them because of their shared narrator), 'The Return of Niav' and 'The Portrait of Roisin Dhu', in which she offers coded expressions of the realities of women's lives in early twentieth-century Ireland that the larger public would have preferred remain unspoken, particularly with regard to expressions of maternal inclinations and female sexuality. Earth-bound, driven by her reactions to the many ways that the Irish struggle for national autonomy was purchased by the sacrifice of female autonomy, becomes a vehicle through which she explores socially taboo issues, most notably mothering practices and both heterosexual and homosexual expressions of female sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on Claire Keegan's markedly satirical understanding of the inadequacy of quotidian reality in rural Ireland and its tragic effects on people, especially on women, as well as in Keegan's use of the short story genre to concentrate on the quality of seeing rather than on moralizing issues - a technique which has led her way of writing to be considered cold, externalist and non-emotional. To this end, I shall explore which of the rhetorical strategies of the satirical apparatus are present in three stories from her 2007 collection Walk the Blue Fields: "Walk the Blue Fields", "The Forester's Daughter" and "Night of the Quicken Trees". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the celebration of the 50th birthday of Whiskas through the launch of a collection of short stories in aid of animal charities in Ireland. The best-selling Irish author Marisa Mackle joined forces with the brand to bring a collection of short stories by some of the world's top writers, celebrities and media personalities to the public. Furthermore, the collection titled "Party Animal" is filled with tales from some of the country's most passionate animal lovers.