Talking about contemporary Ireland, this work also looks at literary criticism, fiction, history, politics, and art."

Field Day Review, the best Irish Studies essays and international contexts

Field Day Review, the finest essays in Irish Studies

Irish Studies essays from the best academics in the field

A special issue of the annual Field Day Review dedicated to the City of Derry and environs in celebration of Derry City of Culture UK 2013.

In 1985 the Vassar College Athletic Association ignored the constraints placed on women athletes of that era and held its first-ever womens field day, featuring competition in five track and field events. Soon colleges across the country were offering women the opportunity to compete, and in 1922 the United States selected 22 women to compete in the Womens World Games in Paris. Upon their return, female physical educators severely criticized their efforts, decrying "the evils of competition." Wilma Rudolphs triumphant Olympics in 1960 sparked renewed support for womens track and field in the United States. From 1922 to 1960, thousands of women competed, and won many gold medals, with little encouragement or recognition. This reference work provides a history, based on many interviews and meticulous research in primary source documents, of womens track and field, from its beginnings on the lawns of Vassar College in 1895, through 1980, when Title IX began to create a truly level playing field for men and women. The results of Amateur Athletic Union Womens Indoor and Outdoor Track and Field Championships since 1923 are given, as well as full coverage of female Olympians.

This collection of essays offers twelve innovative approaches to contemporary literary criticism. The contributors, women scholars who range from undergraduate students to contingent faculty to endowed chairs, stage a critical dialogue that raises vital questions about the aims and forms of criticism— its discourses and politics, as well as the personal, institutional, and economic conditions of its production. Offering compelling feminist and queer readings of avant-garde twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, the essays included here are playful, performative, and theoretically savvy. Written for students, scholars, and professors in literature and creative writing, Reading and Writing Experimental Texts provides examples for doing literary scholarship in innovative ways. These provocative readings invite conversation and community, reminding us that if the stakes of critical innovation are high, so are the pleasures.

This study considers writing within the cultural context of Northern Ireland and discusses how writing creates a sense of community, and the different forms this takes when written from loyalist or republican perspectives. The book takes its major theoretical energy from readings of Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony and Walter Benjamin's work on historiography. hese are applied to major writers such as Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Paul Muldoon and Edna Longley and to institutions such as the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum.