This book examines the topic of excess in modern Irish writing in terms of mysticism, materialism, myth and language. The study engages ideas of excess as they appear in works by major thinkers from Hegel, Kierkegaard and Marx through to Nietzsche, Bataille, Derrida and, more recently, Badiou. Poems, plays and fiction by a wide range of Irish authors are considered. These include works by Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, G. B. Shaw, Patrick Pearse, James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, Louis MacNeice, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Roddy Doyle, Seamus Heaney, Marina Carr and Medbh McGuckian. The readings presented illustrate how Matthew Arnold’s nineteenth-century idea of the excessive character of the Celt is itself exceeded within the modernity of twentieth-century Irish writing.

Anomalous States is an archeology of modern Irish writing. David Lloyd commences with recent questioning of Irish identity in the wake of the northern conflict and returns to the complex terrain of nineteenth-century culture in which those questions of identity were first formed. In five linked essays, he explores modern Irish literature and its political contexts through the work of four Irish writers--Heaney, Beckett, Yeats, and Joyce. Beginning with Heaney and Beckett, Lloyd shows how in these authors the question of identity connects with the dominance of conservative cultural nationalism and argues for the need to understand Irish culture in relation to the wider experience of colonized societies. A central essay reads Yeats's later works as a profound questioning of the founding of the state. Final essays examine the gradual formation of the state and nation as one element in a cultural process that involves conflict between popular cultural forms and emerging political economies of nationalism and the colonial state. Modern Ireland is thus seen as the product of a continuing process in which, Lloyd argues, the passage to national independence that defines Ireland's post-colonial status is no more than a moment in its continuing history. Anomalous States makes an important contribution to the growing body of work that connects cultural theory with post-colonial historiography, literary analysis, and issues in contemporary politics. It will interest a wide readership in literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and history.

The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature offers a fresh new look at the origins of literary modernism in Ireland, tracing a history of Irish writing through James Clarence Mangan, J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. Beginning with the archives of the Ordnance Survey, which mapped Ireland between 1824 and 1846, the book argues that one of the sources of Irish modernism lies in the attempt by the Survey to produce a comprehensive archive of a land emerging rapidly into modernity. The Ordnance Survey instituted a practice of depicting the country as modern, fragmented, alienated, and troubled, both diagnosing and representing a landscape burdened with the paradoxes of colonial modernity. Subsequent literature returns in varying ways, both imitative and combative, to the complex representational challenge that the Survey confronts and seeks to surmount. From a colonial mapping project to an engine of nationalist imagining, and finally a framework by which to evade the claims of the postcolonial nation, the Ordnance Survey was a central imaginative source of what makes Irish modernist writing both formally innovative and politically challenging. Drawing on literary theory, studies of space, the history of cartography, postcolonial theory, archive theory, and the field Irish Studies, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature paints a picture of Irish writing deeply engaged in the representation of a multi-layered landscape.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Irish Writers and Politics R explores a variety of responses, the essays in this collection (the third in the IASAIL-Japan series) dealing with Irish writers past and present, such as Swift, Burke, Ferguson, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Joyce, Shaw, O'Casey, Stewart Parker, and Desmond Egan as well as Northern Irish poets and playwrights. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. Masaru Sekine; ENGLISH READERS: THREE HISTORICAL 'MOMENTS'. Vivian Mercier; SWIFT: ANATOMY OF AN ANTI-COLONIALIST. A. Norman Jeffares; EDMOND BURKE: A VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS. Lorna Reynolds; THE ENIGMA OF SAMUEL FERGUSON. Maurice Harmon; W. B. YEATS: POLITICS AND HISTORY. Donna Gerstenberger; ASCENDENCY NATIONALISM, FEMINIST NATIONALISM AND STAGECRAFT IN LADY GREGORY'S REVISION OF R KINCORA, Maureen S. G. Hawkins; THE FIFTH BELL: RACE AND CLASS IN YEATS'S POLITICAL THOUGHT. John S. Kelly; JAMES JOYCE AND POLITICS. Heather Cook Callow; SAINT JOAN. Declan Kiberd; THE 'MIGHT OF DESIGN' IN R THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS. Christopher Murray; THE WILL TO FREEDOM: POLITICS AND PLAY IN THE THEATRE OF STEWART PARKER. Elmer Andrews; TOO LITTLE PEACE: THE POLITICAL POETRY OF DESMOND EGAN. Brian Arkins; WHO WE ARE: PROTESTANTS AND POETRY IN THE NORTH OF IRELAND. David Burleigh; THEATRE WITH ITS SLEEVES ROLLED UP. Emelie Fitzgibbon; NOTES; NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS; INDEX R. Irish Literary Studies Series No. 36.

Fifty Key Irish Plays charts the progression of modern Irish drama from Dion Boucicault’s entry on to the global stage of the Irish diaspora to the contemporary dramas created by the experiences of the New Irish. Each chapter provides a brief plot outline along with informed analysis and, alert to the cultural and critical context of each play, an account of the key roles that they played in the developing story of Irish drama. While the core of the collection is based on the critical canon, including work by J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Teresa Deevy, and Brian Friel, plays such as Tom Mac Intyre’s The Great Hunger and ANU Productions’ Laundry, which illuminate routes away from the mainstream, are also included. With a focus on the development of form as well as theme, the collection guides the reader to an informed overview of Irish theatre via succinct and insightful essays by an international team of academics. This invaluable collection will be of particular interest to undergraduate students of theatre and performance studies and to lay readers looking to expand their appreciation of Irish drama.