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This volume comprises articles by scholars from three disciplines – literary studies, TEFL methodology, and history – from three universities – University College Cork (UCC), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven/Leuven Centre for Irish Studies (KU Leuven/LCIS), and Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg/Irish Studies Würzburg (JMU/ISWÜ) – in three European countries – Ireland, Belgium, and Germany. The contributors explore Irish ‘history in stories'from the vantage point of their national and disciplinary contexts, emphasizing cultural knowledge and historical lessons to be drawn from ‘texts'from and about the Irish past.

«Politic Words is an invigorating mix of the personal, the political and the poetic. Gerry Dawe flings his net wide. From Eavan Boland's ‘secret history'of women to war memoirist Christabel Bielenberg's luminous prose; from the vaulting ambition of Éilís Dillon's historical fiction to hunger striker's Bobby Sands'favourite poet, the now unsung Ethna Carbery, he takes us on a bracing journey from the Troubles to Brexit. Drawing on contemporaneous criticism, Dawe revitalizes 35 years of cultural history into urgent news from the literary front.» (Mary Morrissy, Novelist and former associate director of the writing programme, University College Cork) Politic Words reflects five decades of writing about and discussing Irish literature, both inside the university classroom and in various literary and academic forums. Part one concentrates upon Irish women writers, their influence and example including Edna Longley, Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin alongside the achievements of younger contemporaries such as Lucy Caldwell and Leontia Flynn. Part two develops some of the historical settings and themes of part one while exploring the social and political legacies of traumatic Irish historical events such as the Great Famine, and its representation in the fiction of William Carleton and reimagined by later interpreters including Benedict Kiely. The collection concludes with a series of readings of Irish culture and politics in terms of the legacy of the Troubles, the impact on Ireland of Brexit and renewed calls for Irish reunification. Politic Words is the final part of a trilogy of studies by Gerald Dawe published by Peter Lang in their Reimagining Ireland series.

The Leaving of Ireland brings together an international group of scholars to reflect critically on the unfolding nature of the experience of Irish cultural identity at a time when Ireland is struggling to adjust to the shattering impacts of globalization and religious scandals of recent decades. Looking back over the last two centuries, the volume considers a range of literary and filmic works that have sought to articulate something of this experience and its multiple locations. The essays revisit crucial constituents of Irish history and self-perception at the micro-level, exploring the representation of individual experiences of migration and identification and the definition of a sense of belonging. They also examine these issues at the macro-level, looking at larger politico-historical transformations, national affiliations and changed social and geographical landscapes. The book is organized around key themes including history, mobility, memory and place and addresses the works of a wide range of authors, including Emily Lawless, Frank McCourt, Sinéad Morrissey, Paul Muldoon, Joseph O'Connor, J.M. Synge and W.B. Yeats.

This book explores the performance of Irish collective memories and forgotten histories. It proposes an alternative and more comprehensive criterion of Irish theatre practices. These practices can be defined as the'rejected', contested and undervalued plays and performativities that are integral to Ireland's political and cultural landscapes.

Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel is a major work of criticism on some of the greatest and most globally recognisable writers of the novel form. Writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern have demonstrated the extraordinary intellectual range, thematic complexity and stylistic innovation of Irish fiction. Derek Hand provides a remarkably detailed picture of the Irish novel's emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows the story of the genre is the story of Ireland's troubled relationship to modernisation. The first critical synthesis of the Irish novel from the seventeenth century to the present day, this is a major book for the field, and the first to thematically, theoretically and contextually chart its development. It is an essential, entertaining and highly original guide to the history of the Irish novel.

In Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory Nicholas Miller re-examines memory and its role in modern Irish culture. Arguing that a continuous renegotiation of memory is characteristic of Irish modernist writing, Miller investigates a series of case-studies in modern Irish historical imagination. He reassesses Ireland's self-construction through external or'foreign'discourses such as the cinema, and proposes readings of Yeats and Joyce as'counter-memorialists'. Combining theoretical and historical approaches, Miller shows how the modernist handling of history transforms both memory and the story of the past by highlighting readers'investments in histories that are produced, specifically and concretely, through local acts of reading. This original study will attract scholars of Modernism, Irish studies, film and literary theory.