The Gates Flew Open

Peadar O'Donnell became involved in Irish Republicanism through his initial involvement in socialism, as an organiser for the ITGWU. When he was unsuccessful in establishing a branch of the Irish Citizen Army in Derry he joined the IRA and led Guerilla activities in Donegal and Derry during the War of Independence. He was firmly opposed to the treaty signed at the end of the war and wrote 'The middle class was getting all they wanted, namely the transfer of patronage from Dublin Castle to the Irish parliament. The mere control of patronage did not seem to me sufficient reason for the struggle we had been through.' He was a member of the executive of the anti-treaty IRA, and was in the Four Courts when it was attacked by the Free State forces. He was arrested shortly afterwards and was involved in organising a hunger strike among the anti-treaty Republicans which lasted 41 days. It was while in prison that he began writing 'to escape the bare walls of the prison cell' and this is a story of prison life in the midst of Civil War in Ireland that combines glimpses of humour with moments of tragic poignancy as he describes games of handball and bridge with men who faced the firing squad withing twenty-four hours. O'Donnell was one of the last survivors of the Independece struggle in Ireland, retaining his radicalism and idealism right up to his death in 1986 at the age of 93.

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The first comprehensive examination of one of Ireland's leading social novelists of this century. No other Irish novelist has succeeded so completely in rendering rural Irish life as Peadar O'Donnell. From the minutest details of life on tiny islands to the broader sweep of townland life in mainland Donegal, O'Donnell manages to re-create rural Ireland in a deeply intimate and moving way. Gonzalez's "reader's guide" provides the first thorough assessment of O'Donnell's complete literary output, both the fiction and non-fiction. He also places O'Donnell in the context of Irish literature in general, showing how his fiction relates to that of his contemporaries, including George Moore and James Joyce, as well as to that of modern Irish literature in general. His novels, The Knife, about the Civil War, The Big Windows, about rural Donegal, and Islanders, about the poverty and struggles of a small island community, probably provide the most unsentimental and honest portrait of Irish life written by any Irish writer this century. His vision of his homeland is complex and many-layered, affectionate yet unsentimental, and always honest. Alexander G. Gonzalez is Professor of English at Cortland College of the State University of New York and has published extensively on contemporary Irish literature.

Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840 provides the first sustained scholarly account of the relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature (fiction; poetry; drama) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the relationship between literature and architecture is a topic that has long preoccupied scholars of the literary Gothic, there remains, to date, no monograph-length study of the intriguing and complex interactions between these two aesthetic forms. Equally, Gothic literature has received only the most cursory of treatments in art-historical accounts of the early Gothic Revival in architecture, interiors, and design. In addressing this gap in contemporary scholarship, Gothic Antiquity seeks to situate Gothic writing in relation to the Gothic-architectural theories, aesthetics, and practices with which it was contemporary, providing closely historicized readings of a wide selection of canonical and lesser-known texts and writers. Correspondingly, it shows how these architectural debates responded to, and were to a certain extent shaped by, what we have since come to identify as the literary Gothic mode. In both its 'survivalist' and 'revivalist' forms, the architecture of the Middle Ages in the long eighteenth century was always much more than a matter of style. Incarnating, for better or for worse, the memory of a vanished 'Gothic' age in the modern, enlightened present, Gothic architecture, be it ruined or complete, prompted imaginative reconstructions of the nation's past—a notable 'visionary' turn, as the antiquary John Pinkerton put it in 1788, in which Gothic writers, architects, and antiquaries enthusiastically participated. The volume establishes a series of dialogues between Gothic literature, architectural history, and the antiquarian interest in the material remains of the Gothic past, and argues that these discrete yet intimately related approaches to vernacular antiquity are most fruitfully read in relation to one another.