This book tells the story of Irish poetry in English, from the union of Ireland and Great Britain in 1801 to the Irish Free State in 1921 and beyond. It offers both a literary history of nineteenth-century Irish poetry and a way of reading it for scholars of Irish studies as well as Romantic and Victorian literature.

Studies Irish poetry in English, from the union of Ireland and Great Britain in 1801 to the Irish Free State in 1921 and beyond.

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.

A fresh, accessible and authoritative study that conveys the richness and diversity of Irish poets, their lives and times.

From Gaelic annals and medieval poetry to contemporary Irish literature, A History of Irish Literature and the Environment examines the connections between the Irish environment and Irish literary culture. Themes such as Ireland's island ecology, the ecological history of colonial-era plantation and deforestation, the Great Famine, cultural attitudes towards animals and towards the land, the postcolonial politics of food and energy generation, and the Covid-19 pandemic - this book shows how these factors determine not only a history of the Irish environment but also provide fresh perspectives from which to understand and analyze Irish literature. An international team of contributors provides a comprehensive analysis of Irish literature to show how the literary has always been deeply engaged with environmental questions in Ireland, a crucial new perspective in an age of climate crisis. A History of Irish Literature and the Environment reveals the socio-cultural, racial, and gendered aspects embedded in questions of the Irish environment.

This volume examines the nineteenth century not only through episodes, institutions, sites and representations concerned with union, concord and bonds of sympathy, but also through moments of secession, separation, discord and disjunction. Its lens extends from the local and regional, through to national and international settings in Britain, Europe and the United States. The contributors come from the fields of cultural history, literary studies, American studies and legal history.

This book retells the story of Irish poetry written in English between the union of Britain and Ireland in 1801 and the early years of the Irish Free State. Through careful poetic and historical analysis, Matthew Campbell offers ways to read that poetry as ruptured, musical, translated and new. The book starts with the Romantic songs and parodies of nationalist and unionist writers - Moore, Mahony, Ferguson and Mangan - in times of defeat, resurgence and famine. It continues through a discussion of English Victorian poets such as Tennyson, Arnold and Hopkins, who wrote Irish poems as the British Empire unraveled. Campbell's treatment ends with Yeats, seeking a new poetry emerging from under union in times of violence and civil war. The book offers both a literary history of nineteenth-century Irish poetry and a way of reading it for scholars of Irish studies as well as Romantic and Victorian literature.

How far is the art of drama inspired or impaired by non-literary forces? The problems the farmers met with in the unrest of 20th century Ireland have found manifold expression on the stage. The present investigation analyzes the theatrical and literary means of Irish peasant realism and tries to bring into view the historical, literary and social preconditions of this frequently neglected genre.

This text offers a reappraisal of the Irish Revival by focusing on the progressive energies of self-help movements such as the Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein and the Co-operative Movement.

Exile, Emigration and Irish Writing is the first book to analyze the experience of exile and emigration in Irish writing. It traces the origin of the concept of exile from Columcille and early Christian Ireland through the centuries to the present. In tracing the origins, mutations and representations of exile and emigration, the author draws on modern post-colonial theory to contribute to the re-reading of Irish writing that is now under way.