This collection of essays, written by many of the foremost McGahern scholars, provides solid reasons for why the Leitrim writer has assumed canonical status since his premature death in 2006, an event which sparked something akin to a period of national mourning in Ireland. The reason why so many people felt his loss so keenly is probably due to the fact that McGahern’s attention to detail, his feel for landscape, his understanding of the Irish psyche, his carefully chiselled prose, his lo...

This collection of essays by established McGahern scholars and others interested in his work was put together to assess the writer’s current status some 20 years after his death in 2006. The Companion covers various aspects of McGahern’s oeuvre: the reception of his books among readers and literary critics; his epistolary exchanges with publishers, friends and family, and the adaptations that have been done of a certain number of his works, most recently the film version of his novel, ...

A deft, masterful study of the life and work of Jean Sulivan. Maher makes a compelling case for the continuing importance of Sulivan’s writings in challenging times and illuminates crucial and often neglected intersections between faith and fiction. A book to cherish. — Michael Cronin (Trinity College Dublin)Thanks to Eamon Maher’s tireless work, Sulivan’s output is now reaching the wider audience in the Anglo-Saxon world it has always deserved. Sulivan’s depiction of the margins a...

This book traces the steady decline in Irish Catholicism from the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979 up to the Cloyne report into clerical sex abuse in that diocese in 2011. The young people awaiting the Pope’s address in Galway were entertained by two of Ireland’s most charismatic clerics, Bishop Eamon Casey and Fr Michael Cleary, both of whom were subsequently revealed to have been engaged in romantic liaisons at the time.The decades that followed the Pope’s visit were characteri...

To mark the fact that the Reimagining Ireland series will soon have one hundred volumes in print, this book brings together a selection of essays from the first fifty volumes, carefully chosen to give a flavour of the diversity and multidisciplinary nature of the series. Following a chronological order, it begins with an essay by Luke Gibbons tracing the roots of modernity from the middle decades of the nineteenth century and concludes with Michael Cronin’s discussion of time and ...

From a Church that once enjoyed devotional loyalty, political influence, and institutional power unrivaled in Europe, the Catholic Church in Ireland now faces collapse. Devastated by a series of reports on clerical sexual abuse, challenged publicly during several political battles, and painfully aware of plunging Mass attendance, the Irish Church today is confronted with the loss of its institutional legitimacy. This study is the first international and interdisciplinary attempt to conside...

Humans are naturally religious. They are enchanted by the world. They engage in collective rituals, and they try to live moral lives. Over the last two thousand years, this instinct has been colonised by churches and other religious institutions. In a personal and intimate approach, Inglis explores his early love of being Catholic, of being immersed in Catholic time and space and how in his teenage years, this grew stale and unfulfilling. He argues we have now entered a new cosmopolitan er...

This collection examines the Irish economic phenomenon of the Celtic Tiger and the financial disaster that came in its wake, from a socio-cultural perspective. It focuses on how these financial developments have been reflected in writing, film and culture in order to offer a more rounded analysis of the effects of this momentous period on people’s lives.Employing a wide range of cultural lenses, the book critiques the cultural, political and aesthetic implications of the progressio...

This collection emerged from a conference held in TU Dublin at a time when the theme of «New Beginnings» seemed particularly apposite. In the few years prior to the gathering, COVID-19 had brought the world to almost a complete standstill. The need to recalibrate, to find new and more effective ways of dealing with the climate crisis, domestic and international politics, literary expression, and technology, was clearly felt by everyone. The fourteen essays deal with literary figures such a...

Sounding the Margins is the second of two publications to emerge from the highly successful AFIS conference hosted by the Université de Lille in 2019. Concentrating on the literary manifestations of marginality in Ireland and France, the essays treat of various texts that demonstrate the extent to which marginality is a recurring trope. This may well be because writers tend to situate themselves at a distance from the centre or status quo in their desire to maintain a certain degr...

This landmark collection marks the publication of the 100th book in the Reimagining Ireland series. It attempts to provide a «forward look» (as opposed to what Frank O’Connor once referred to as the « backward look») at what Irish Studies might look like in the third millennium. With a Foreword by Declan Kiberd, it also contains essays by several other leading Irish Studies experts on (among other areas) literature and critical theory, sport, the Irish language, food and beverage ...

This volume of essays, which originated in the inaugural Dublin Gastronomy Symposium held in the Dublin Institute of Technology in June 2012, offers fascinating insights into the significant role played by gastronomy in Irish literature and culture.The book opens with an exploration of food in literature, covering figures as varied as Maria Edgeworth, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, Enid Blyton, John McGahern and Sebastian Barry. Other chapters examine culinary practices among the Dub...