Download or read book Celtic Contraries written by Robin Skelton and published by Syracuse, N.Y. : Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1990-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a number of years Robin Skelton has been a major interpreter and definer of what we now mean by Anglo-Irish literature. This collection represents his own selection of fourteen of his best essays. All have been revised, several enlarged, and two are published here for the first time. Two major themes emerge from this collection: verse craftsmanship, with the language and structure of poetry; and a concern with the way that a writer can contrive to bring contraries (personal, national, aesthetic, etc.) together, fusing all the writer's themes and techniques into unity, so as to present a coherent, all-embracing "philosophy" or attitude. Most of the essays move from quite specific discussions of texts to broader generalizations about style and content in Irish writing. As always, Skelton is an extraordinarily alert and careful reader, and some of these essays contain valuable close readings of specific poems. In addition, he has the ability to draw the significant particulars into meaningful accounts of the totality of an artist's achievement. Time after time, Skelton simply makes one see new things, even in the most familiar texts, and his essays offer valuable insights both for the scholar and for the general reader of Irish literature.
Download or read book Celtic Theology written by Thomas O'Loughlin and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2000-09-13 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: O'Loughlin examines the theological framework within which St. Patrick presented his experiences and considers how the Celtic lands of Ireland and Wales developed a distinctive view of sin, reconciliation, and Christian law that they later exported to the rest of western Christianity.
Download or read book Celtic Spirituality written by Oliver Davies and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers translations of numerous texts from the Celtic tradition from the 6th through the 13th centuries, in a cross-section of genres and forms.
Download or read book The Celtic Unconscious written by Richard Barlow and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Celtic Unconscious offers a vital new interpretation of modernist literature through an examination of James Joyce’s employment of Scottish literature and philosophy, as well as a commentary on his portrayal of shared Irish and Scottish histories and cultures. Barlow also offers an innovative look at the strong influences that Joyce’s predecessors had on his work, including James Macpherson, James Hogg, David Hume, Robert Burns, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The book draws upon all of Joyce’s major texts but focuses mainly on Finnegans Wake in making three main, interrelated arguments: that Joyce applies what he sees as a specifically “Celtic” viewpoint to create the atmosphere of instability and skepticism of Finnegans Wake; that this reasoning is divided into contrasting elements, which reflect the deep religious and national divide of post-1922 Ireland, but which have their basis in Scottish literature; and finally, that despite the illustration of the contrasts and divisions of Scottish and Irish history, Scottish literature and philosophy are commissioned by Joyce as part of a program of artistic “decolonization” which is enacted in Finnegans Wake. The Celtic Unconscious is the first book-length study of the role of Scottish literature in Joyce’s work and is a vital contribution to the fields of Irish and Scottish studies. This book will appeal to scholars and students of Joyce, and to students interested in Irish studies, Scottish studies, and English literature.
Download or read book Celtic Christianity written by William Parker Marsh and published by SteinerBooks. This book was released on 1987 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Our God is the God of Heaven and Earth, of sea and river, of sun and moon and stars, of the lofty mountain and lowly valley." --St. Patrick In this anthology, the stories of the Celtic saints are interspersed with verses, prayers, and sayings attributed to those ancient sages--from Patrick and Brigit, through Brandan and Columba, to Aidan and Cuthbert. It is uncertain when or how Christianity first arrived at those westernmost reaches. It seems always to have been there. Legend tells us that Irish bards attended the events on Golgotha "in the spirit." In the Celtic tradition, there is a continuity in cosmic process. For the Celt, Christ's death and resurrection was a healing that allows reconciliation between humanity and nature in God. In this sense, Christianity was always in Ireland, and we seek its historical beginning in vain. If the Celtic Church had survived, perhaps the fissure between Christianity and nature, widening through the centuries, would never have fragmented our Western attitude toward nature and the universe.
Download or read book Irish Literature written by Mary Ketsin and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irish literature's roots have been traced to the 7th-9th century. This is a rich and hardy literature starting with descriptions of the brave deeds of kings, saints and other heroes. These were followed by generous veins of religious, historical, genealogical, scientific and other works. The development of prose, poetry and drama raced along with the times. Modern, well-known Irish writers include: William Yeats, James Joyce, Sean Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, John Synge and Samuel Beckett.
Download or read book Yeats The Poet written by Edward Larrissy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work addresses Yeats's "antinomies", seeing their origin and structure in his divided Anglo-Irish inheritance and examining the notion of measure. It then explores how this relates to freemasonry, Celticism and Orientalism and looks at the Blakean esoteric language of contrariety and outline which provided Yeats with the vocabulary of self-understanding.
Download or read book W B Yeats written by Edward Larrissy and published by Northcote House Pub Limited. This book was released on 2015 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An up-to-date account of one of the major poets in the English language of the past two centuries, this book not only introduces the reader to contemporary themes in Yeats criticism, but also provides a unified interpretation based on Yeats's ambivalent sense of identity as a nationalist conscious of the Anglo-Irish tradition from which he claimed
Download or read book Experimental Irish Theatre written by I. Walsh and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines experimental Irish theatre that ran counter to the naturalistic 'peasant' drama synonymous with Irish playwriting. Focusing on four marginalised playwrights after Yeats, it charts a tradition linking the experimentation of the early Irish theatre movement with the innovation of contemporary Irish and international drama.
Download or read book J M Synge written by Seán Hewitt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a complete re-assessment of the works of J.M. Synge, one of Ireland's major playwrights. The book offers the first complete consideration of all of Synge's major plays and prose works in nearly 30 years, drawing on extensive archival research to offer innovative new readings. Much work has been done in recent years to uncover Synge's modernity and to emphasise his political consciousness. This book builds on this re-assessment, undertaking a full systematic exploration of Synge's published and unpublished works. Tracing his journey from an early Romanticism through to the more combative modernism of his later work, the book's innovative methodology treats text as process, and considers Synge's reading materials, his drafts, letters, diaries, and journalism, turning up exciting and unexpected revelations. Thus, Synge's engagement with occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, and even a late reaction against eugenic nationalisms, are all brought into the critical discussion. Breaking new ground in ascertaining the tenets of Synge's spirituality, and his aesthetic and political idealization of harmony with nature, the book also builds on new work in modernist studies, arguing that Synge can be understood as a leftist modernist, exhibiting many of the key concerns of early modernism, but routing them through a socialist politics. Thus, this book is valuable not only to considerations of Synge and the Irish Revival, but also to modernist studies more broadly.
Download or read book Seamus Heaney written by Henry Hart and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1993-10-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seamus Heaney, widely considered the most gifted living poet in Ireland and Britain, is the first Irish poet since Yeats to gain an international reputation. In this remarkable study, henry Hart discusses Heaney's poems, his creative and personal situations, and his assimilation of contemporary literary theory. From Heaney's Ulster background to poetic influences as diverse as Dante and Wordsworth, Yeats and Bly, Hart offers sophisticated, lucid insights. Hart argues that the best way into Heaney's poetic world is in seeking to understand him—as with Blake and Yeats—in terms of oppositions and conflicts, progressions and syntheses. At the root of all his work is a multifaceted argument with himself, with others, with sectarian Northern Ireland, with his Anglo-Irish heritage, with his Roman Catholicism, and with his Nationalist upbringing on a farm in County Derry. For each volume of poems, from Door into the Dark to The Haw Lantern, Hart identifies and works with a specific problem in the text, while developing its intellectual and creative implications. He covers aspects as diverse as Heaney's incorporation of antipastoral attitudes in his poems, his fascination with how etymology recapitulates ancient and modern history, and apocalypticism in North. Placing his trust in art's ability to confront conflicts between freedom and responsibility, between private craft and public involvement, Heaney is shown nonetheless to chastise himself for failing to have a greater impact on the situation he left behind in Northern Ireland. In pursuing the literary, religious, and political themes in his books of poetry, Hart shows that Heaney is no provincial bard, as some critics have suggested, but is as intellectually informed and astute as any postmodernist writer. Any reader of Seamus Heaney's poetry, and any poet, poetry scholar, critic of contemporary poetry, or student of Irish literature will gain much from reading this book.
Download or read book Irish Orientalism written by Joseph Lennon and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-04 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centuries before W. B. Yeats wove Indian, Japanese, and Irish forms together in his poetry and plays, Irish writers found kinships in Asian and West Asian cultures. This book maps the unacknowledged discourse of Irish Orientalism within Ireland's complex colonial heritage.
Download or read book Fionn mac Cumhail written by James MacKillop and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1985-12-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gaelic hero Fionn mac Cumhaill (often known in English as Finn MacCool) has had a long life. First cited in Old Irish chronicles from the early Christian era, he became the central hero of the Fenian Cycle which flourished in the high Middle Ages. Stories about Fionn and his warriors continue to be told by storytellers in Ireland and in Gaelic Scotland to this day. This book traces the development of Fionn's persona in Irish and Scottish texts and constructs a heroic biography of him. As aspects of the hero are borrowed into English and later world literature, his personality undergoes several changes. Seen as less than admirable, he may become either a buffoon or a blackguard. Somehow these contradictions exist side by side. Among the writers in English most interested in Fionn are James Macpherson, the "translator" of The Poems of Ossian ( 17601, William Carleton, the first great fiction writer of nineteenth-century Ireland, and Fiann O'Brien, the multifaceted author of At Swim-Two-Birds. Aspects of Fiann appear as far apart as Mendelssohn's "Hebrides (or Fingal 's Cave) Overture" and a contemporary rock opera. But the most complex use of Fionn's story in modern literature is James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
Download or read book The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays written by John Montague and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stories by Contemporary Irish Women written by Daniel J. Casey and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1990-04-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These short stories invite the reader to see Ireland afresh. Included are works by well-known authors such as Mary Lavin, Edna O'Brien, and Julia O'Faolain; the collection also showcases new writers such as Clare Boylan, Rita Kelly, and Una Woods. Repeatedly, the stories bring us up against the inherent contradiction of provincial Ireland and Ireland as a modern European state, and the complexities of women's lives in both. Helen Lucy Burke writes tellingly of an older, devout Irish Catholic woman as she encounters the startling realities of Italian Catholic Rome. Other stories also dwell on traditional Irish themes and situations through refreshingly varied voices. Ita Daly movingly portrays the problems of an educated, sensitive schoolteacher, resigned to her life in a country town. Anne Devlin handles yet another familiar theme: the Irelander in England, an England edgy about IRA bombings. A few stories deal with the "troubles" in Northern Ireland, while others address the troubles of the country as a whole: too many children, too much hypocrisy, too little communication, especially between women and men. The editors have provided an introduction that examines the role of women writers in Irish literature. T-hey have also supplied detailed biographical notes for each contributing author.
Download or read book Textures of Irish America written by Lawrence J. McCaffrey and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "textures" of the Irish-American experience have been manifold, greatly influencing this country's economic, social, and cultural development over the past two centuries. Unlike that of many other European immigrants, the Irish journey to America was viewed largely as a one-way trip. They quickly adjusted to America, soon becoming citizens and active participants in politics. By the end of the 19th century, they dominated not only most American cities but also sports, especially baseball, and many were prominent in show business. In this entertaining study of one of America's most engaging and controversial groups, Lawrence McCaffrey reveals how the Irish adapted to urban life, progressing from unskilled working class to solid middle class. Denied power and influence in business and commerce, they achieved both through politics and the Catholic church. In addition to politicians and churchmen, McCaffrey discusses the roles of writers such as Finley Peter Dunne, James T. Farrell, Eugene O'Neill, J.F. Powers, Edwin O'Connor, William Kennedy, Elizabeth Cullinan, Tom Flanagan, Thomas Fleming, Jimmy Breslin, and John Gregory Dunne, as well as such film stars as Jimmy Cagney, Bing Crosby. Grace and Gene Kelly, and Spencer Tracy. McCaffrey completes the story with a look at the role of Irish nationalism in developing the personality of Irish America and in liberating Ireland from British colonialism. The result of some forty years of thinking and writing about Irish-American life, McCaffrey's Textures will appeal to scholars and general readers alike and may very well becomes the standard work on Irish America.
Download or read book J M Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival written by Giulia Bruna and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the late 1890s and the early 1900s, the young Irish writer John Millington Synge journeyed across his home country, documenting his travels intermittently for ten years. His body of travel writing includes the travel book The Aran Islands, his literary journalism about West Kerry and Wicklow published in various periodicals, and his articles for the Manchester Guardian about rural poverty in Connemara and Mayo. Although Synge’s nonfiction is often considered of minor weight compared with his drama, Bruna argues persuasively that his travel narratives are instances of a pioneering ethnographic and journalistic imagination. J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival is the first comprehensive study of Synge’s travel writing about Ireland, compiled during the zeitgeist of the preindependence Revival movement. Bruna argues that Synge’s nonfiction subverts inherited modes of travel writing that put an emphasis on Empire and Nation. Synge’s writing challenges these grand narratives by expressing a more complex idea of Irishness grounded in his empathetic observation of the local rural communities he traveled amongst. Drawing from critically neglected revivalist travel literature, newspapers and periodicals, and visual and archival documents, Bruna sketches a new portrait of a seminal Irish Literary Renaissance figure and sheds new light on the itineraries of activism and literary engagement of the broader Revival movement.
