The Irish Poet and the Natural World - Book Review

http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Irish-poet-p/9781782050643.htm

The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics 

by 

Andrew Carpenter and Lucy Collins (editors)

"The editors of this collection from the late sixteen to the early nineteen century have edited and annotated their selection with skill, including judicious footnotes and coconut biographical notes. This is both a relief and a pleasure, making this a work one wants to dip into and flick back and forth, as indeed the editors would wish us to do... this lovely, wide-ranging and superbly selected anthology. This is a book to take down from the shelves often." -- Books Ireland

This annotated anthology of poems make available a rich variety of Irish texts depicting the relationship between humans and the environment between the years 1580 and 1820. more than a hundred poems are printed here, together with an extensive critical introduction, notes on each text, and a full biography. all the poets whose work is represented were born in Ireland or are identified as Irish.

Publication Year: Hardback March 2014
Pages: 430
Size: 234 x 156mm

ISBN: 9781782050643

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2015, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics,” please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

Soccer in Munster: A Social History, 1877-1937 -- Book Review

http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Soccer-in-Munster-p/9781782051268.htm

Soccer in Munster: A Social History, 1877-1937 

by 

David Toms

This book charts soccer's development  in Munster from its earliest days as a game played by an elite few to a game of the everyman. Along the way, it explores the ups and downs pf the sport as it was played amid war, revolution and class conflict. David Toms guides us through soccer's journey in Munster from a field in Mallow in the 1870s to the glamour and excitement of cup finals in front of crowds of thousands by the end of the 1930s. Along the way we encounter the emergence of modern sporting culture where sport is as much entertainment as exercise.

Publication Year: Hardback May 2015
Pages: 256
Size: 234 x 156

ISBN: 9781782051268

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2015, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "Soccer in Munster: A Social History, 1877-1937,” please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

PS: Currently Ottawa has a professional soccer club, Ottawa Fury Football Club. The captain of the club is an Irishman, Richie Ryan from County Tipperary, one of the defenceman is another Irishman, Colin Falvey from County Cork. Ottawa Fury, in their 2nd year of existence clinched the Fall Championship Trophy in late October 2015.

The Irish Hand: Scribes and their Manuscripts from the Earliest Times -- Book Review

http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Irish-Hand-p/9781782050926.htm

The Irish Hand: Scribes and their Manuscripts from the Earliest Times

by 

Timothy O'Neill

This is a revised and expanded edition of what has long been regarded as the standard work on Irish Manuscripts. The new book incorporates high quality digital images of the works of Irish scribes through the centuries. The extraordinary stories of the survival of these volumes provide a commentary on the cultural history of Ireland, its language, scholars and scribes.


Timothy demonstrates in this beautifully produced book that Irish writing is a living art; the fine ancient script has, to this day, a continuing tradition- Irish Arts Review


The Irish Hand is arranged in two parts. Part One presents survey of the manuscript tradition, followed by essays on thirty-one of the great books of Ireland. The context, contents, and history of each manuscript are given, accompanied by a full-page illustration.


Part Two surveys the work of the scribes from a practical perspective, examining script and lettering in detail. Extracts are given from fifty-two manuscripts, transliterated and translated, with a commentary on the penwork. The Irish Hand covers 1,500 years of Irish script and letter design from the sixth to the twenty-first century


Timothy O'Neill, widely acknowledged to be the finest calligrapher in Ireland, is also a scholarly authority on the manuscript tradition and the author of Merchants and Mariners in Medieval Ireland (1987). He was the Burns Scholar at Boston College in 1995 and currently serves on the council of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. His artworks include the Roscrea Missal (1981), the Ó Fiaich Gospel Book, Maynooth (1995), Celtic-style tailfins for British Airways (1997), stamps for An Post in 2009 and a facsimile of the Faddan More Psalter in 2011.

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "The Irish Hand: Scribes and their Manuscripts from the Earliest Times,” please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

Staging Intercultural Ireland New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives -- Book Review

http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Staging-Intercultural-Ireland-p/9781782051046.htm

Staging Intercultural Ireland New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives

by 

Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler

This collection features eight plays and six interviews with migrant and Irish-born theatre artists who are producing work at the intersection of interculturalism and inward-migration in Ireland during the first decades of the 21st Century.


Plays covered:

Cave Dwellers (2002) by Nicola McCartney

Hurl (2003) by Charlie O’Neill

Orpheus Road (2003) by Ursula Rani Sarma

The Cambria (2005) by Donal O’Kelly

Once Upon a Time & Not So Long Ago (2006) by Bisi Adigun

Mushroom (2007) by Paul Meade

Rings (2012) by Rosaleen McDonagh

Broken Promise Land (2013) by Mirjana Rendulic


The Celtic Tiger era witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of transnational migrants entering Ireland. By the 2011 Census, 17% of the population was born outside of Ireland and much of what had been assumed about Irish identity (and theatre) could no longer hold. This groundbreaking anthology brings together six interviews and eight plays by migrant and Irish-born theatre artists who probe the impact of inward-migration and interculturalism in post-1990s Ireland. The interviews and plays collected here, all available in print for the first time, model a range of devising strategies, dramaturgical frameworks, and literary forms. To date, the work documented here has been produced at a wide range of venues from the Abbey Theatre and New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre to mid-sized theatre companies, community centres, street theatres, and even refugee accommodation centres throughout Ireland. This book represents established as well as emerging theatre artists and includes work by Donal O’Kelly, Bisi Adigun, Charlie O’Neill, Rosaleen McDonagh, Paul Meade, Nicola McCartney, Ursula Rani Sarma, and Mirjana Rendulic. Additionally, there are interviews with Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, Anna Wolf, Kasia Lech, John Currivan, Alicja Ayres, José Miguel Jimenéz, Declan Gorman, Declan Mallon, and John Scott. Staging Intercultural Ireland offers a snapshot of Ireland’s long-term intercultural process in its early stages and contributes to transnational migration studies and intercultural theatre research in a global context.


Charlotte McIvor is Lecturer in Drama, National University of Ireland, Galway and Matthew Spangler is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at San José State University in California, USA.

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "Staging Intercultural Ireland New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives," please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

Hellenism and Reconciliation in Ireland from Yeats to Field Day -- Book Review

http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Hellenism-p/9781782050681.htm

Hellenism and Reconciliation in Ireland from Yeats to Field Day

by 

Nathan Wallace

This book is a genealogy of reconciliation in modern Ireland. As Seamus Deane has written, reconciliation stands at a nexus between politics and aesthetics in Irish writing, and has therefore often been a vehicle of colonial ideology. This book shows that the term often fits into a pattern that the author calls the ‘iconography of reconciliation’.


This iconography began in the 1810s when Samuel Taylor Coleridge synthesized Edmund Burke’s thoughts about Ciceronian conciliatio and Aristotelian ethos with Schlegelian literary organicism. That is, Coleridge identified what Aristotle called ‘ethical music’ with the ‘balanced’ personality of Romantic literary genius itself. Wallace then shows that Matthew Arnold and Edward Dowden adopted this Coleridgean synthesis and used it to make their writings about Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Sophocles (now icons of reconciliation) chime with their writings in favour of the Anglo-Irish Union.


Moving on to the twentieth century, Wallace shows first that Yeats and Joyce contested the Unionist icons and, later, that Conor Cruise O’Brien revived them in his writings about Northern Ireland. Wallace finishes by arguing that Field Day countered O’Brien’s ‘Sophoclean’ reading of the Troubles with their own, more ethically responsive icons of Sophoclean reconciliation between 1980 and 1990.


Nathan Wallace is an Assistant Professor of English, Ohio State University, Marion, Ohio.

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "Hellenism and Reconciliation in Ireland from Yeats to Field Day," please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

James Barry's Murals at the Royal Society of Arts: Envisioning a New Public Art -- Book Review

http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/James-Barry-p/9781782051084.htm

James Barry's Murals at the Royal Society of Arts: Envisioning a New Public Art

by 

William L Pressly 

Between 1777 and 1784, the Irish artist James Barry (1741-1806) executed six murals for the Great Room of the [Royal] Society of Arts in London. Although his works form the most impressive series of history paintings in Great Britain, they remain one of the British art world’s best kept secrets, having attracted little attention from critics or the general public.


James Barry’s Murals at the Royal Society of Arts is the first to offer an in-depth analysis of these remarkable paintings and the first to demonstrate that the artist was pioneering a new approach to public art in terms of the novelty of the patronage and the highly personal nature of his content.


Barry insisted on, and received, complete control over his subject matter, the first time in the history of Western art that the patron of a large, impressive interior agreed to such a demand. The artist required autonomy in order to present his personal vision, which encompasses a rich and complex surface narrative as well as a hidden meaning that has gone unperceived for 230 years. The artist disguised his deeper message due to its inflammatory nature. Were his meaning readily apparent, the Society would have thrown out him and his murals.


Ultimately, as this book seeks to show, the artist intended his paintings to engage the public in a dialogue that would utterly transform British society in terms of its culture, politics, and religion. In making this case, the book brings this neglected series into the mainstream of discussions of British art of the Romantic period, revealing the intellectual profundity invested in the genre of history painting and re-evaluating the role Christianity played in Enlightenment thought.


William L Pressly is Emeritus Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century European Art at the University of Maryland. He is the author of James Barry: The Life and Art of James Barry (Yale University Press, 1981) and James Barry: the Artist as Hero (Tate Gallery, 1983).

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "James Barry's Murals at the Royal Society of Arts: Envisioning a New Public Art," please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

Great Deeds in Ireland: Richard Stanihurst’s De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis -- Book Review

http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Great-Deeds-p/9781909005723.htm 

Great Deeds in Ireland: Richard Stanihurst’s De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis

by 

Hiram Morgan and John Barry 

 
Great Deeds in Ireland is the first full translation of the controversial Latin history of Ireland by the famous Dublin intellectual, Richard Stanihurst. Written after he fled Elizabethan London for the Netherlands, De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis was published in 1584 by Christopher Plantin, the greatest printer of the age.

In facing Latin and English texts, Great Deeds in Ireland provides a contemporary account of Ireland’s geography and people and what the author considered to be the greatest event in Irish history – the Anglo-Norman conquest. Relying on the work of Giraldus Cambrensis, Stanihurst celebrated the origins of the English colony in Ireland whilst simultaneously allegorizing the dilemma facing his own community from a new wave of Protestant English conquerors.

The Anglo-Irishman’s attempt to introduce Ireland to Europe’s Renaissance elite in a literary tour-de-force went awry after many Gaelic Irish, also exiled on the continent, objected to the book’s satirical portrayal of Ireland’s clergy and its representation of the country’s customs, history and learned classes. The book was burned on the orders of the Inquisition in Portugal, marked prohibido in libraries in Spain and provoked a number of angry responses from readers and other writers over the following eighty years. Because of its centrality to debates about Ireland, Stanihurst’s De Rebus was the first book translation undertaken by the Centre for Neo-Latin Studies established at University College Cork for the study of this hitherto neglected corpus of Irish literature.

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "Great Deeds in Ireland: Richard Stanihurst’s De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis," please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics -- Book Review

http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Irish-poet-p/9781782050643.htm

The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics

by 

Andrew Carpenter and Lucy Collins

This annotated anthology of poems makes available a rich variety of Irish texts depicting the relationship between humans and the environment between the years 1580 and 1820. More than a hundred poems are printed here, together with an extensive critical introduction, notes on each text, and a full bibliography. All the poets whose work is represented were born in Ireland or are identified as Irish.



As well as re-publishing the work of major poets such as Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Whyte and William Drummond, this anthology includes many works by little known or anonymous authors. This volume also reflects current scholarship on the relationship between literature and the environment, enriching our understanding of attitudes in pre-Romantic Ireland towards changing landscapes and agricultural practices, towards human responsibility for the non-human world, and towards the relationship between nature and aesthetics. As well as adding considerably to existing knowledge of the printing and reading of poetry in Ireland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this anthology also traces the developments in sensibility in Irish poetry during this period, offering new perspectives on the advent of Romanticism in England and on the ways in which this revolutionised the relationship between nature and representation. The anthology fulfils the dual purpose of making a significant contribution to the study of literature and the environment, and of expanding our understanding of Irish writing during the period.



Andrew Carpenter Emeritus Professor of English, University College Dublin, General Editor, The Art and Architecture of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy/ Yale University Press.

Lucy Collins is a Lecturer in English Literature, University College Dublin.


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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics,” please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

Where Motley is Worn: Transnational Irish Literatures -- Book Review

http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Transnational-Irish-Literatures-p/9781782051008.htm

Where Motley is Worn: Transnational Irish Literatures

by 

Amanda Tucker and Moira Casey

Transnationalism—and the connected issues of race, migration, and diaspora—has been an area of increasing interest in Irish Studies. Where Motley Is Worn is one of the first collections to focus on transnationalism in Irish literature. Although Irish literature has shaped national consciousness, this collection illustrates how literature has constructed a transnational imaginary—not only in the contemporary moment but also during earlier periods of Irish history. The chapter-length introduction outlines the transnational turn in Irish Studies while the eleven essays that follow are split between transnational Irish literature in the nineteenth century and the twentieth and twenty-first century.


From Ireland’s emergence in the global economy and accompanying inward migration to its increasing emigration and racial strife following the 2008 recession, transnationalism has been a meaningful topic in contemporary Irish culture. Most scholars view the “new” multicultural Ireland as a rupture from earlier historical periods. This collection takes a different approach. Using transnationalism as a framework, the volume investigates how the multiple connections that Ireland has fostered with diverse parts of the globe influenced its literary output and production. Where Motley is Worn opens the borders of Irish literary studies, which has traditionally been dominated by a nation-centred focus.


The essays in this collection cover both a wide historical period, covering the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries and a broad geographical range, from Asia to the Caribbean and Latin America. By examining writing that places Irish identity in dialogue with other cultural, national, or ethnic affiliations, the collection allows us to see how Irish literatures have participated in and shaped dynamic cultural flows across the globe.


Amanda Tucker is at the Department of Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Platteville and Moira Casey is in the Department of English Miami University.

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "Where Motley is Worn: Transnational Irish Literatures,” please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

Flann O'Brien: Contesting Legacies -- Book Review

http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Flann-OBrien-p/9781782050766.htm

Flann O'Brien: Contesting Legacies

By

Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan and Werner Huber 

Employing a wide range of critical perspectives and new comparative contexts, Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies breaks new ground in O’Brien scholarship by testing a number of popular commonplaces about this Irish (post-) Modernist author. Challenging the narrative that Flann O’Brien wrote two good novels and then retired to the inferior medium of journalism (as Myles na gCopaleen), the collection engages with overlooked shorter, theatrical, and non-fiction works and columns (‘John Duffy’s Brother’, ‘The Martyr’s Crown’, ‘Two in One’) alongside At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, and An Béal Bocht. The depth and consistency of O’Nolan’s comic inspiration that emerges from this scholarly engagement with his broader body of work underlines both the imperative and opportunity of reassessing O’Brien’s literary legacy.


Challenging the critical standard of O’Brien as a provincial writer, these essays reveal his writing as a space that uniquely complicates the old lines between stay-at-home conservatism and international experimentalism. Renegotiating O’Brien’s place in the European Avant-Garde alongside tensions closer to home – Republicanism, the Gaelic tradition, the Dublin literary scene – the collection reveals as outdated prejudice the dismissal of his talent as a matter of localised interest.


Finally, the contributors excavate O’Nolan’s oeuvre as fertile territory for a broad range of critical perspectives by confronting some of the more complex ideological positions tested in his writing. Employing perspectives from genetic criticism and cultural materialism to post-modernism and deconstruction, the essays gathered in this volume address with new critical rigour the author’s gender politics, his language politics, his parodies of nationalism, his ideology of science, and his treatment of the theme of justice.

Ruben Borg and Paul Fagan are to co-founders of the International Flann O'Brien Society. Werner Huber was the host organiser of the 2011 Flann O'Brien Centenary Conference at the Vienna Centre for Irish Studies; the largest conference ever held on the author.

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "Flann O'Brien: Contesting Legacies," please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

Flann O'Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist -- Book Review

https://cup.presswarehouse.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=296460 

Flann O'Brien

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist

2nd Edition

by Keith Hopper

Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, completed in 1940, was initially rejected by his publishers for being "too fantastic", and only appeared posthumously in 1967. Since then O’Brien has achieved cult status, although critical appraisal of his work has focused almost exclusively on his first novel, At Swim Two Birds (1939). By 1940 O’Brien was confronted with two towering traditions: the jaded legacy of Yeats’s Celtic Twilight and the problematic complexities of Joyce’s modernism. With The Third Policeman, O’Brien forges a powerful synthesis between these two traditions, and the paraliterary path he chooses marks the historical transition from modernism to post-modernism.



This groundbreaking study, first published in 1995 and now substantially revised, reconfigures O’Brien as a highly subversive writer within a rich and fertile literary landscape: indisputably Irish yet distinctly post-modern. It identifies The Third Policeman as a subversive intellectual satire, in the cutting-edge tradition of Swift and Sterne, and situates it as one of the earliest – and most exciting – examples of post-modernist fiction.

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "Flann O'Brien, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist," please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

Eco-Joyce -- Book Review

https://cup.presswarehouse.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=400532 

Eco-Joyce

The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce

Edited by Robert Joseph Brazeau ,  Derek Gladwin

Scholars working within Irish studies draw on a wide variety of critical outlooks, including cultural studies, post-colonial studies, transnational studies, gender studies and, of course, modernist studies; this book will help that community become better acquainted with how ecocriticism elucidates the work of Irish writers, and will encourage further research in this direction. Even writers like Joyce, who are usually regarded as primarily urban, exhibit a strong ecological dimension in their work, and there are many other Irish writers who have produced work that directly engages issues in ecology and environmental studies. Eco-Joyce covers a multitude of disciplines in an attempt to serve as a point of entry into Joyce and ecocriticism, of course, but it will also suggest ways in which Irish studies and modernist studies could gain energy from this relatively new and vital approach.

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "Eco-Joyce," please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

Black Magic and Bogeymen - Book Review

https://cup.presswarehouse.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=410962

Black Magic and Bogeymen. Fear, Rumour and Popular belief in Northern Ireland 1972-74.

By Richard Jenkins

This book gives insight into a particular grim period during the early 1970s in Northern Ireland using an extremely unusual episode - the black maid rumours - as a privileged window onto a world that may now be behind us, but which continues to fascinate many readers. 

Providing a fascinating insight into some of the problems and procedures if social history, the author also demonstrates that phenomena like black magic rumours cannot be understood without taking a multidisciplinary approach, taking in perspectives and comparative evidence from anthropology, sociology, folklore and media studies.

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "Black Magic and Bogeymen," please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.