The transformations undergone by Ireland in the last decades have relocated the country within that liminal space of the local and the global. The country of the deeply-rooted rural traditions, the severely religious impositions and the fragile economic system became in the 1990s a world referent due to its unprecedented and impressive growth. However, the emergence of the so-called Celtic Tiger and the recognition that Ireland had become one of the most globalised nations in the Western world met a dramatic downfall that has left the country (pre)occupied with matters concerning its re-positioning and re-definition within a wider European framework. The cultural and artistic productivity of this nation has also moved away from the topical insularity of the past, adopting more transnational and universal subjects, at the same time that it has struggled to retain its genuine values and its own signs of identity. For, in Ireland, the more this global progress has grown to be unavoidable, the more evocatively the local has befallen. Therefore, the editors of this volume contend that the global and the local should be understood not as opposed concepts but as two ends of a continuum of interaction. Within this state of affairs, this volume comprises a series of articles that revolve around the issue of glocality in Irish literature, culture and cinema in order to disentangle the complexities that underlie this concept and which are inextricably related to the drastic changes undertaken by Ireland in the years before and after the economic boom and posterior bailout.

The present collection of essays grew out of a conference, held in Dresden in December 2001, exploring the relationship between the public sphere and legal culture. The conference was held in connection with the ongoing research undertaken by the Sonderforschungsbereich 537 ‘Institutionalisation and Historical Change’ and, in particular, by the project ‘Circulation of Legal Norms and Values in British Culture from 1688 to 1900’. The conference papers include essays on the theory of the public sphere from a systematic and historical point of view by Gert Melville, by Peter Uwe Hohendahl and by Jürgen Schlaeger, all of whom try to re-evaluate and/or improve upon Jürgen Habermas’ seminal contribution to the discussion of the emergence of modernism. Alastair Mann’s contribution investigates the situation in Scotland, particularly censorship and the oath of allegiance; Annette Pankratz focuses on the king’s body as a site of the public sphere; Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock looks into the widespread ‘culture of contention’ at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and Eckhart Hellmuth considers the reform movement at the end of the century and the radical democrats’ insistence on the right to discuss the constitution. Ian Bell, who took part in the conference, suggested the inclusion of part of the first chapter of his seminal study Literature and Crime in Augustan England (1991). Beth Swan, Anna-Christina Giovanopoulos, and Christoph Houswitschka respectively analyse the ideologies of justice, the interrelation between journalism and crime, and the juridical evaluation of the crime of incest and its representation in public. Greta Olson investigates keyholes as liminal spaces between the public and the private, Juliet Wightman focuses on theatre and the bear pit, Uwe Böker examines the court room and prison as public sites of discourse, and York-Gothart Mix discusses the German emigrant culture in North America.

First published in 1969, The Novel in Letters is a collection of nine novels in letters, representative of certain tendencies in narrative technique and subject-matter between 1678 and 1740. The editor shows how the narrative attitude of the letter writer, his humorous or sentimental viewpoint, give the events the flavour of personal experience. Motifs such as the arranged betrothal, or the gradual decline of an innocent girl to a common whore thus become more immediate. The increasing importance of the narrator, the use of the point-of-view technique, sentimental analysis, and a new interest in characterisation through direct or indirect self-revelation, all mark the transition from the romance to the ‘realistic novel.’ In the introduction, the editor traces the structure of the epistolary novel back to the sub-literary forms which it most resembles and illustrates how the novel is rooted in journalism and other forms of non-literary writing such as the genuine letter, the diary, autobiography, manuals and didactic literature. There is also an examination of the problem of differentiating between historical reality and literary fiction. This book will be of interest to students and teachers of literature.