This co-edited collection breaks new ground by bringing together several leading scholars to explore the substantial body of work produced by Padraic Colum (1881–1972) who was a poet, a novelist, a dramatist, a biographer, a writer of fiction for adults and children, and a collector of folklore. The awards, honours, and distinction conferred upon him and his work throughout his life and career, as well as retrospectively, give an indication of the significant and wide-ranging appeal and influence of Colum not only as an Irish writer and storyteller but also as a literary figure entrusted with the myths and legends of other cultures and nations. Despite such achievements, he has received comparatively little critical or scholarly attention to date. This volume showcases the richness of Colum’s work by subjecting it to a rigorous literary and theoretical examination and is the first combined and detailed analysis of both his children’s and adult texts.

Padriac Colum (1881-1972) at the age of twenty-three was already a gifted, prolific, and versatile writer. He was a major contributor to the Irish national Theatre Society, founded by William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, AE, and others, and he himself was one of the founders of the immortal Abbey Theatre. Unlike other leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival, Colum alone was Roman Catholic, peasant born, and country bred. AE convinced the young writer that he had a mission as a poet: to portray the fundamental nature of the Irish peasant experience as only Colum could. Colum's first book of poems, Wild Earth (1907), forms the foundation of his poetic canon, expressing the clarity, strength, and vitality of his unique voice. Although he wrote over sixty books, including plays, fiction, biography, folklore, and children's stories, it is as an Irish lyric poet that he will be remembered. His poetry depicts the nobility of men and women who lived in the ancient ways, close to the sky and the soil, and who were inherently endowed with the elemental understanding of life and death and the eternal cycle of the seasons. In 1914 Colum and his wife, the talented critic, Mary (Molly) Maguire, decided to visit America. They stayed on in New York City, initially because of the war, in voluntary exile. After Molly's death in 1957, Colum's poetry entered a new phase, and in a sense, he became a visitor to his own memories, telling stories about his longtime friends, such as James Joyce and Arthur Griffith, in Irish Elegies and Images of Departure, published when he was in his mid-eighties. Simultaneously personal and universal, these poems are a moving farewell to art and to life.

At the age of twenty-three, Padraic Colum (1881-1972) was one of the founding fathers of the Abbey Theatre. His contribution to the development of Irish drama continued until his voluntary exile to America in 1914. His play, Broken Soil (1903), was the first commercial success at the Abbey, and it established the long-lived tradition of the peasant play on the Irish stage. This collection comprises the three major forms of his dramatic art: The Land (1905); Betrayal (1912); and two of his five Noh plays (a five-play cycle containing poetry and prose following the Yeats and Japanese Model), Glendalough (based on the career of Charles Stewart Parnell), and Monasterboice (based on the early life of Colum’s lifelong friend, James Joyce).

The first book of its kind, Out of What Began traces the development of a distinctive tradition of Irish poetry over the course of three centuries. Beginning with Jonathan Swift in the early eighteenth century and concluding with such contemporary poets as Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland, Gregory A. Schirmer looks at the work of nearly a hundred poets. Considering the evolving political and social environments in which they lived and wrote, Schirmer shows how Irish poetry and culture have come to be shaped by the struggle to define Irish identity. Schirmer includes a large number of accomplished poets who have been unjustly neglected in standard accounts of Irish literature; many of these writers are women, whose work has been kept in the shadows cast by that of well-known male poets. He also emphasizes the importance of political poetry in a country that continues to be torn by sectarian violence. With its rich selection of poetic voices, Out of What Began reveals the political, social, and religious diversity of Irish culture.

Unique in its coverage of contemporary American children's literature, this timely, single-volume reference covers the books our children are--or should be--reading now, from board books to young adult novels. Enriched with dozens of color illustrations and the voices of authors and illustrators themselves, it is a cornucopia of delight. 23 color, 153 b&w illustrations.

This book provides scholars, both national and international, with a basis for advanced research in children’s literature in collections. Examining books for children published across five centuries, gathered from the collections in Dublin, this unique volume advances causes in collecting, librarianship, education, and children’s literature studies more generally. It facilitates processes of discovery and recovery that present various pathways for researchers with diverse interests in children’s books to engage with collections. From book histories, through bookselling, information on collectors, and histories of education to close text analyses, it is evident that there are various approaches to researching collections. In this volume, three dominant approaches emerge: history and canonicity, author and text, ideals and institutions. Through its focus on varied materials, from fiction to textbooks, this volume illuminates how cities can articulate a vision of children's literature through particular collections and institutional practices.

"Writing Ireland is a provocative and wide-ranging examination of culture, literature and identity in nine-teenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. Moving beyond the reductionist reading of the historical moment as a backdrop to cultural production, the authors deploy contemporary theories of discourse and the constitution of the colonial subject to illuminate key texts in the cultural struggle between the colonizer and the colonized. The book opens with a consideration of the originary moment of the colonial relationsip of England and Ireland through re-reading of works by Shakespeare and Spenser. Cairns and Richards move then to the constitution of the modern discourse of Celticism in the nineteenth century. A fundamental re-reading of the period of the Literary Revival through the works of Yeats, Synge, Joyce and O'Casey locates them in a social moment illuminated by detailed considerations of poems, playwrights and polemicists such as D. P. Moran, Arthur Griffith, Patrick Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh. Writing Ireland examines the psychic, sexual and social costs of the decolonisation struggle in the society and culture of the Irish Free State and its successor. Beckett, Kavanagh and O'Faolain registered the enervation and paralysis consequent upon sustaining a repressive view of Irish identity. The book concludes in the contemporary moment, as Ireland's post-colonial culture enters crisis and writers like Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Seamus Deane grapple with the notion of alternative identities. Writing Ireland provides students of literature, history, cultural studies and Irish studies with a lucid analysis of Ireland's colonial and post-colonial situation on which an innovative methodology transcends disciplinary divisions."--

Contains alphabetically arranged entries that provide biographical and critical information on major and lesser-known nineteenth- and twentieth-century British writers, and includes articles on key schools of literature, and genres.