Troubled Histories Troubled Fictions

Twentieth-century Irish fiction powerfully reflects the intensely political nature of the Irish experience for the last hundred years, and earlier. The essays in Troubled Histories, Troubled Fictions: Twentieth Century Anglo-Irish Prose focus upon the various ways in which the work of authors otherwise as diverse as James Joyce, James Stephens, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, Eimar O'Duffy, Jennifer Johnston, William Trevor, Julia O'Faolain, and a number of recent women writers, synchronizes with items that are, or were, high on the agenda of Irish politics. Discussion ranges from the political and ideological use to which Joyce puts etymology, sex, and early Irish history, the symbolical importance of the Big House, and the politics of sexuality in the immediate post-independence period, to representations of the recent Troubles.

Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction offers a comprehensive examination of Irish short stories written over the last eighty years that have treated the Troubles, Ireland's intractable conflict that arose out of its relationship to England.

Troubling Tricksters is a collection of theoretical essays, creative pieces, and critical ruminations that provides a re-visioning of trickster criticism in light of recent backlash against it. The complaints of some Indigenous writers, the critique from Indigenous nationalist critics, and the changing of academic fashion have resulted in few new studies on the trickster. For example, The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005), includes only a brief mention of the trickster, with skeptical commentary. And, in 2007, Anishinaabe scholar Niigonwedom Sinclair (a contributor to this volume) called for a moratorium on studies of the trickster irrelevant to the specific experiences and interests of Indigenous nations. One of the objectives of this anthology is, then, to encourage scholarship that is mindful of the critic’s responsibility to communities, and to focus discussions on incarnations of tricksters in their particular national contexts. The contribution of Troubling Tricksters, therefore, is twofold: to offer a timely counterbalance to this growing critical lacuna, and to propose new approaches to trickster studies, approaches that have been clearly influenced by the nationalists’ call for cultural and historical specificity.

A comprehensive and thematic exploration of representations of madness in postwar British and American Fiction, this book is relevant to those with interests in literary studies and is a vital read for psychiatric clinicians and professionals who are interested in how literature can inform and enhance clinical practices.

Watkins’ Problematic Identities examines nine novels by women writers of the Sri Lankan diaspora. Her study reveals identity in this fiction as notably gendered and expressed through resonant images of mourning, melancholia, and other forms of psychic disturbance.

The elements of menace and terror are crucial aspects of Elizabeth Bowen's pervasive theme of betrayal in her investigation of human relationships. Bowen introduces menace into the familiar and predictable environment of her characters and threatens their sense of security and safety.