Ireland is suffering from a crisis of authority. Catholic Church scandals, political corruption, and economic collapse have shaken the Irish people’s faith in their institutions and thrown the nation’s struggle for independence into question. While Declan Kiberd explores how political failures and economic globalization have eroded Irish sovereignty, he also sees a way out of this crisis. After Ireland surveys thirty works by modern writers that speak to worrisome trends in Irish life and yet also imagine a renewed, more plural and open nation. After Dublin burned in 1916, Samuel Beckett feared “the birth of a nation might also seal its doom.” In Waiting for Godot and a range of powerful works by other writers, Kiberd traces the development of an early warning system in Irish literature that portended social, cultural, and political decline. Edna O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Hartnett lamented the loss of the Irish language, Gaelic tradition, and rural life. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eavan Boland grappled with institutional corruption and the end of traditional Catholicism. These themes, though bleak, led to audacious experimentation, exemplified in the plays of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy and the novels of John Banville. Their achievements embody the defiance and resourcefulness of Ireland’s founding spirit—and a strange kind of hope. After Ireland places these writers and others at the center of Ireland’s ongoing fight for independence. In their diagnoses of Ireland’s troubles, Irish artists preserve and extend a humane culture, planting the seeds of a sound moral economy.

This edition of Cormac O'Grada's study expands upon his central arguments about the agricultural and demographic developments surrounding the Great Irish Famine. It provides new statistical information, new appendices and integrated responses to the new research and writing on the subject that has appeared since the publication of the first edition in 1987.

This collection brings together work from scholars across sociolinguistics, World Englishes and linguistic landscapes to reflect on developments and future directions in Irish English, building on the ground-breaking contributions of Jeffrey Kallen to the discipline. Taking their cue from Kallen’s extensive body of work on Irish English, the 20 contributors critically examine advances in the field grounded in frameworks from variationist sociolinguistics and semiotic and border studies in linguistic landscapes. Chapters cover pragmatic, cognitive sociolinguistic, sociophonetic, historical and World Englishes perspectives, as well as two chapters which explore the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland through the lens of perceptual dialectology and linguistic landscape research. Taken together, the collection showcases the significant role Kallen has played in the growth of Irish English studies as a field in its own right and the impact of this work on a new wave of researchers in the field today and beyond. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars of varieties of English, variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic landscape research.

The problems of modern Ireland have attracted the attention of many British political leaders from Gladstone to Major. Attempts to formulate a 'solution' have been governed by the British perception of what the problem is, and by the structures, as well as the ideas of British party politics and British political life: Ireland was never a laboratory in which dispassionate political experiments could be conducted. Modern Ireland has been shaped by British policy, and this has itself been influenced by British political habits and traditions, social and economic reforms, and new governmental institutions have been applied by politicians both of the left and the right. The 'Framework Documents' represent the latest attempt to achieve what Gladstone, David Lloyd George and Neville Chamberlain sought, and failed to achieve: a lasting settlement of the political divisions within Ireland, and between Ireland the Great Britain. This book places the Irish question in the wider context of the history of the British Isles, and thus seeks to explain its special place in British history as the 'Oldest Question', and as a question for contemporary Britain. Fully revised and with a new chapter to bring the analysis up to 1996, this new edition of Professor Boyce's work will be widely acclaimed.

This book offers a unique and fascinating examination of British and Irish responses to Italian independence and unification in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapters explore the interplay of religion, politics, exile, feminism, colonialism and romanticism in fuelling impassioned debates on the 'Italian question' on both sides of the Irish Sea.

This collection of essays brings together exciting, fresh work by young scholars working on vital aspects of modern Irish unionism. Its range is broad, taking in much material (literary, political, cultural, intellectual) which has previously been ignored. Using new and extensive sources, the contributors examine important features of modern unionism and do so in ways which challenge much previous thinking about the subject. The book will be of value to scholars working on any aspect of modern Ireland, and also to students and to a wider public with an interest in Irish history, politics, culture, and society.