Since the 1980s, Ireland has gone through a profound social, demographic, and religious disruption, the impact of which has been seen across recent fiction from Irish writers. Companion to the Contemporary Irish Novel traces this cultural shift and its impact by examining how modern novels have reckoned with a new conception of Irishness.Despite the heady mix of cultural and social destabilization, reform, and economic successes and challenges, this period of relentless di...

In this moment of growing anxiety about the environment and the fate of humanity, literature continues its vital role of articulating dynamic new ways of thinking about the relations between humanity, environment and technology. In this book, cultural historian Gerry Smyth focuses on English genre fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploring the ways in which popular novelists of the period engaged with debates relating to environment (England), culture (En...

Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce: Joyces Noyces offers a fresh perspective on the Irish writer James Joyce’s much-noted obsession with music. This book provides an overview of a century-old critical tradition focused on Joyce and music, as well as six in-depth case studies which revisit material from the writer’s career in the light of new and emerging theories. Considering both Irish cultural history and the European art music tradition, the book...

Music and Irish Identity represents the latest stage in a life-long project for Gerry Smyth, focusing here on the ways in which music engages with particular aspects of Irish identity. The nature of popular music and the Irish identity it supposedly articulates have both undergone profound change in recent years: the first as a result of technological and wider industrial changes in the organisation and dissemination of music as seen, for example, with digital platforms such as Yo...

This book argues that modern Irish history encompasses a deep-seated fear of betrayal, and that this fear has been especially prevalent since the revolutionary period at the outset of the twentieth century. The author goes on to argue that the novel is the literary form most apt for the exploration of betrayal in its social, political and psychological dimensions. The significance of this thesis comes into focus in terms of a number of recent developments – most notably, the economic downt...

Some of the most innovative and spell-binding literature has been written for young people, but only recently has academic study embraced its range and complexity. This Companion offers a state-of-the-subject survey of English-language children's literature from the seventeenth century to the present. With discussions ranging from eighteenth-century moral tales to modern fantasies by J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, the Companion illuminates acknowledged classics and many more neglected w...

This volume brings together specially commissioned essays by some of the world's leading experts on the life and work of W. H. Auden, one of the major English-speaking poets of the twentieth century. The volume's contributors include a prize-winning poet, Auden's literary executor and editor, and his most recent, widely acclaimed biographer. It offers fresh perspectives on his work from Auden critics, alongside specialists from such diverse fields as drama, ecological and travel studies. I...

As both a politically engaged and stylistically versatile poet, W.H. Auden is one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His work is not only widely studied and read, but has been used in musical scores and quoted in Hollywood films.This guide to Auden’s compelling work offers:an accessible introduction to the contexts and many interpretations of Auden’s texts, from publication to the presentan introduction to key critical texts and perspe...

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction presents authoritative essays by thirty-five leading scholars of Irish fiction. They provide in-depth assessments of the breadth and achievement of novelists and short story writers whose collective contribution to the evolution and modification of these unique art forms has been far out of proportion to Ireland's small size. The volume brings a variety of critical perspectives to bear on the development of modern Irish fiction, situatin...

Forty chapters, written by leading scholars across the world, describe the latest thinking on modern Irish poetry. The Handbook begins with a consideration of Yeats's early work, and the legacy of the 19th century. The broadly chronological areas which follow, covering the period from the 1910s through to the 21st century, allow scope for coverage of key poetic voices in Ireland in their historical and political context. From the experimentalism of Beckett, MacGreevy, and others of the mod...

The classical Bildungsroman charted an idealized path of human development: the harmonizing of individual desires and societal norms in the formation of a well-rounded liberal subject. But what happens when this Enlightenment blueprint for self-cultivation runs up against the particularities of a colonial society riven by nationalism, revolution, and uneven modernization?The Irish Bildungsroman provides the first comprehensive study of how this quintessentially bourgeois a...

Denis Donoghue has been a key figure in Irish studies and an important public intellectual in Ireland, the UK and US throughout his career. These essays represent the best of his writing and operate in conversation with one another. He probes the questions of Irish national and cultural identity that underlie the finest achievements of Irish writing in all genres. Together, the essays form an unusually lively and far-reaching study of three crucial Irish writers – Swift, Yeats and Joyce – ...