From Swift's repulsive shit-flinging Yahoos to Beckett's dying but never quite dead moribunds, Irish literature has long been perceived as being synonymous with subversion and all forms of subversiveness. But what constitutes a subversive text or a subversive writer in twenty-first-century Ireland? The essays in this volume set out to redefine and rethink the subversive potential of modern Irish literature. Crossing three central genres, one common denominator running through these essays whether dealing with canonical writers like Yeats, Beckett and Flann O'Brien, or lesser known contemporary writers like Sebastian Barry or Robert McLiam Wilson, is the continual questioning of Irish identity - Irishness - going from its colonial paradigm and stereotype of the subaltern in MacGill, to its uneasy implications for gender representation in the contemporary novel and the contemporary drama. A subsidiary theme inextricably linked to the identity problematic is that of exile and its radical heritage for all Irish writing irrespective of its different genres. Sub-Versions offers a cross-cultural and trans-national response to the expanding interest in Irish and postcolonial studies by bringing together specialists from different national cultures and scholarly contexts - Ireland, Britain, France and Central Europe. The order of the essays is by genre. This study is aimed both at the general literary reader and anyone particularly interested in Irish Studies.

In pointing to the way in which women have been historically represented (or left out altogether) and the reality of women's lives, feminist performance makes the histories, lives and desires of women visible, as this volume of plays from the 1990s aims to illustrate.

Uses ethnographic tools to analyze political disorder and its representation at the end of the Cold War.

A revolutionary study of Spanish-language Filipino literature as the first creative reaction to American imperialism

In this richly illustrated book, Margot Francis explores how whiteness and Indigeneity are articulated through four icons of Canadian identity -- the beaver, the railway, the wilderness of Banff National Park, and "Indianness" -- and the contradictory and contested meanings they evoke. These seemingly benign, even kitschy, images, she argues, are haunted by ideas about race, masculinity, and sexuality that circulated during the formative years of Anglo-Canadian nationhood. Juxtaposing these nostalgic images with the work of contemporary Canadian artists, she investigates how everyday objects can be re-imagined to challenge ideas about history, memory, and national identity.

This study of medieval women as postcolonial writers defines the literary strategies of subversion by which they authorized their alterity within the dominant tradition. To dismantle a colonizing culture, they made public the private feminine space allocated by gender difference: they constructed 'unhomely' spaces. They inverted gender roles of characters to valorize the female; they created alternate idealized feminist societies and cultures, or utopias, through fantasy; and they legitimized female triviality the homely female space to provide autonomy. While these methodologies often overlapped in practice, they illustrate how cultures impinge on languages to create what Deleuze and Guattari have identified as a minor literature, specifically for women as dis-placed. Women writers discussed include Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France, Marguerite Porete, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and Christine de Pizan.

In the course of the nineteenth century France built up a colonial empire second only to Britain's. The literary tradition in which it dealt with its colonial 'Other' is frequently understood in terms of Edward Said's description of Orientalism as both a Western projection and a 'will to govern' over the Orient. There is, however, a body of works that eludes such a simple categorisation, offering glimpses of colonial resistance, of a critique of imperialist hegemony, or of a blurring of the boundaries between the Self and the Other. Some of the ways in which the imperialist enterprise is subverted in the metropolitan literature of this period are examined in this volume through detailed case studies of key works by Chateaubriand, Hugo, Flaubert and Segalen.

The book brings together original, state-of-the-art historical research from several continents and examines how mainly local peasant societies responded to colonial pressures to produce a range of different commodities. It offers new directions in the study of African, Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American societies.

Women across early modern Europe suffered repressive and restrictive patriarchal measures that denied them education and a voice. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Counter-Reformation Iberia. Yet there is increasing awareness of a wealth of cultural activity by women, produced in spite of long-cherished masculine notions of biological determinism, masculine control, and feminine shame. Women proved that given the opportunity and the education they were equal in reason and intelligence to their male counterparts. Subtle Subversions is the first full-length, contextual, and analytical study of the sonnets of five seventeenth-century women in Spain and Portugal: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán, Sor María de Santa Isabel, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, and Sor Violante del Cielo. Using the sonnets as a basis for inquiry, Gwyn Fox adds significantly to scholarship on women's interpersonal relationships through nuanced and revealing analyses of family and friendship as seen through the sonnets. She deciphers issues of subjectivity, interpersonal relationships, and power structures and engages with patronage as a major issue in women's writing. As a difficult form of poetry requiring wit, artistry and education, sonnets provided the ideal framework to display intellectual skills and education, but they also allowed the women to create a subtext of criticism of contemporary systems of control. Although their criticisms had to be subtle, since these systems still offered them much in terms of social advancement and privilege, these women and their works revise our understanding of women's lives in Baroque Spain and Portugal. English translations accompany the Spanish quotations throughout the book. Gwyn Fox is honorary research fellow at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where she teaches Spanish language and literature. Fox is currently translating Los baños de Argel, a previously untranslated play by Miguel de Cervantes. "Fox demonstrates that the fixed form of the sonnet simultaneously allowed women to showcase their intellectual talents and critique predominant masculine norms in an understated fashion. . . . Recommended." -- P.W. Manning, Choice "In this beautifully written study of five early modern Iberian poets, Gwyn Fox offers a revisionary history of women's poetics as well as a challenge to conventional Renaissance hermeneutics. . . . Fox delves deeply into each theme, not only contextualizing, but also historicizing her analysis by comparing these women's writings with a broad range of examples. Indeed a bonus of this book is that it does not limit itself to the five women specified above or solely to their sonnets. Fox speaks knowledgeably about other women writers, such as Maria de Zayas and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, to name the most well known, and mentions lesser-known figures such as Inarda de Arteaga. . . . [Fox's] close readings of individual poems are themselves subtle and nuanced. . . . She offers original insights into the poems' social purpose. . . . It is a welcome and much-needed addition to early modern Spanish scholarship." -- Anne J. Cruz, Renaissance Quarterly "Fox's contribution adds to prior rediscoveries and assessments of the poetry of five Iberian women of the Baroque about whose lives, in some cases, very little is known. . . . The critical analysis offered in Subtle Subversions present new insights into the interpersonal relationships of women as well as their engagement with structures of social power, affirming that their sonnets were meant to display these authors' intellect, wit, and education. . . . With her skillful readings of their sonnets, Fox offers a fuller picture of these women's poetic production and contributes to an overall understanding of upperclass women's lives in Spain and Portugal." -- Dana Bultman, Caliope

"This contextualizing of the imagination reveals two dimensions in the writer's discursive strategy: the ideological function of reconciling contradictions, and the utopian drive to subvert imperialist subjection via the invention of an egalitarian, resurgent Filipino community--the fulfillment of the dream of the 1896 Revolution. Joaquin's corpus is therefore as conflicted, as torn by the same contradictions as the body politic which his art seeks to mediate."--P. [4] of cover.