Irish Postmodernisms And Popular Culture

This collection explores popular culture in Ireland and Ireland in popular culture, from Fanfic to Orange Parades; from boybands to the Blessed Virgin Mary; from celebrity tourism to the Gaelic Athletic Association. The essays examine local and global Irishness, focusing on how gender, sexuality and race shape Irish 'postmodernity'.

Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture: Tiger's Tales is an interdisciplinary collection of essays by established and emerging scholars, analysing the shifting representations of Irish men across a range of popular culture forms in the period of the Celtic Tiger and beyond.

An intellectual adventure, this book engages with some of the most important academic debates of our time.

The highly performative categories of 'Irish culture' and 'Irishness' are in need of critical address, prompted by recent changes in Irish society, the arts industry and modes of critical inquiry. This book broaches this task by considering Irish expressive culture through some of the paradigms and vocabularies offered by performance studies.

Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology and musicology of 20th- and 21st-century Irish popular music. The volume consists of essays by leading scholars in the field and covers the major figures, styles and social contexts of popular music in Ireland. Each essay provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Irish popular music. The book is organized into three thematic sections: Music Industries and Historiographies, Roots and Routes and Scenes and Networks. The volume also includes a coda by Gerry Smyth, one of the most published authors on Irish popular music.

This study analyzes the role of gender in Irish cultural change from the 1890s to the present, exploring literature, the relationships between gender and national identities, and the recognized major political and cultural movements of the twentieth century. It includes discussion of film, television and, popular music, as well as diverse literary texts by authors such as Joyce, Yeats, Wilde, and Boland.

Geofeminism in Irish and Diasporic Culture: Intimate Cartographies demonstrates the ways in which contemporary feminist Irish and diasporic authors, such as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Tana French, cross borders literally (in terms of location), ideologically (in terms of syncretive politics and faiths), figuratively (in terms of conventions and canonicity), and linguistically to develop an epistemological “Fifth Space” of cultural actualization beyond borders. This book contextualizes their work with regard to events in Irish and diasporic history and considers these authors in relation to other more established counterparts such as W.B. Yeats, P.H. Pearse, James Joyce, and Mairtín Ó Cadhain. Exploring the intersections of postcolonial cultural geography, transnational feminisms, and various theologies, Christin M. Mulligan engages with media from the ninth century to present day and considers how these writer-cartographers reshape Ireland both as real landscape and fantasy island, traversed in order to negotiate place in terms of terrain and subjectivity both within and outside of history in the realm of desire.

Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O’Carroll Kelly offers a thorough examination of narrative devices, satirical modes, cultural context and humour, in Howard’s texts. The volume argues that his academic critical neglect is due to a classic bifurcation in Irish Studies between high and popular culture, and will use the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida to critique this division, building a theoretical platform from which to examine the significance of Howard’s work as an Irish comic and satirical writer. Addressing both the style and the substance of his work, this text locates him in a tradition of Irish satirical writing that dates back to the Gaelic bards, and includes writers like Swift, Wilde, Flann O’Brien and Joyce. Through textual and contextual analysis, this book makes the case for Howard as a significant and original voice in Irish writing, whose fusion of the three traditional types of satire (Horatian, Juvenalian and Menippean), has created a parallel Ireland that shines a satirical light on its real counterpart. As Freud suggests, humour is a way of accessing aspects of the psyche that normative discourses cannot enunciate, and Howard, through the confessional voice of Ross, offers a fictive truth on twenty years of Irish society, a truth that is not accessed by discourse in the public sphere or by what could be termed literary or high cultural fiction.