Postcolonial And Gender Perspectives In Irish Studies

This book represents an attempt to tackle questions related to fragmented and often conflicting ideologies within Irish studies. Although a collective outcome, with contributions in English and Spanish, its unifying concern has been the appliance of postcolonial and gender perspectives to the analysis of Irish literature (prose, drama and verse) and cinema, as well as to the aesthetic production of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Along the volume, while some authors have chosen to delve into the broad theoretical debate concerning the position of Irish studies within postcolonial and feminist theories, others offer detailed examinations of specific literary pieces and authors that fit in this panorama. All in all, the chapters are wide and diverse enough to trace a spatial and temporal map of the evolution of these paradigms within contemporary Irish studies, North and South of the border.

A pioneering study of the development of one of the key critical discourses in contemporary Irish studies, this book covers all the major figures, publications and debates within Irish postcolonial criticism, delivering a commentary on this diverse body of work as well as positioning Irish postcolonial criticism within the wider postcolonial field.

In Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender, Leith Davis studies the construction of Irish national identity from the early eighteenth until the midnineteenth centuries, focusing in particular on how texts concerning Irish music, as well as the social settings within which those texts emerged, contributed to the imagining of Ireland as the Land of Song. Through her considerations of collections of Irish music by the Neals, Edward Bunting, and George Petrie, antiquarian tracts by Joseph Cooper Walker and Charlotte Brooke, lyrics and The Wild Irish Girl by Sidney Owenson, and songs by Thomas Moore and Samuel Lover, Davis suggests that music served as an ideal means through which to address the terms of the colonial relationship between Ireland and England. Davis also explores the gender issues so closely related to the discourses on both music and national identity during the time, and the influence of print culture and consumer capitalism on the representation of Irish music at home and abroad.

The transformations undergone by Ireland in the last decades have relocated the country within that liminal space of the local and the global. The country of the deeply-rooted rural traditions, the severely religious impositions and the fragile economic system became in the 1990s a world referent due to its unprecedented and impressive growth. However, the emergence of the so-called Celtic Tiger and the recognition that Ireland had become one of the most globalised nations in the Western world met a dramatic downfall that has left the country (pre)occupied with matters concerning its re-positioning and re-definition within a wider European framework. The cultural and artistic productivity of this nation has also moved away from the topical insularity of the past, adopting more transnational and universal subjects, at the same time that it has struggled to retain its genuine values and its own signs of identity. For, in Ireland, the more this global progress has grown to be unavoidable, the more evocatively the local has befallen. Therefore, the editors of this volume contend that the global and the local should be understood not as opposed concepts but as two ends of a continuum of interaction. Within this state of affairs, this volume comprises a series of articles that revolve around the issue of glocality in Irish literature, culture and cinema in order to disentangle the complexities that underlie this concept and which are inextricably related to the drastic changes undertaken by Ireland in the years before and after the economic boom and posterior bailout.

This book is about the role that the imperfect, the disquieting and the dystopian are currently playing in the construction of Irish identities. All the essays assess identity issues that require urgent examination, problematize canonical definitions of Irishness and, above all, look at the ways in which the artistic output of the country has been altered by the Celtic Tiger phenomenon and its subsequent demise. Recent narrative from Ireland, principally published in the twenty-first century and/or at the end of the 1990s, is dealt with extensively. The authors examined include Eavan Boland, Mary Rose Callaghan, Peter Cunningham, Emma Donoghue, Anne Enright, Emer Martin, Lia Mills, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Bernard O’Donoghue, Peter Sirr and David Wheatley.

This book uncovers a new genre of ‘post-Agreement literature’, consisting of a body of texts – fiction, poetry and drama – by Northern Irish writers who grew up during the Troubles but published their work in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. In an attempt to demarcate the literary-aesthetic parameters of the genre, the book proposes a selective revision of postcolonial theories on ‘liminality’ through a subset of concepts such as ‘negative liminality’, ‘liminal suspension’ and ‘liminal permanence.’ These conceptual interventions, as the readings demonstrate, help articulate how the Agreement’s rhetorical negation of the sectarian past and its aggressive neoliberal campaign towards a ‘progressive’ future breed new forms of violence that produce liminally suspended subject positions.

The field of Irish Studies has undergone a period of great fruitfulness over the last decade. Concurrent with the economic revolution and subsequent financial crash, an immense interest in the island of Ireland and her cultural practices has been apparent from parts of the globe, and academic debate on Irish culture and society has been intense and prosperous. This volume contains a number of essays which approach a variety of issues raised within the framework of post-“Celtic Tiger” Ireland, with contributions from scholars working in Europe. The book is divided into four sections: on Trauma Studies, on the relationship between Ireland with Europe and the rest of the world, on Audiovisual Studies and on Ireland and the Celtic Tiger. The essays reflect a variety of issues which are of great relevance to an understanding of the world of Irish Studies at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.