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Yeats scholarship has remained largely embedded in traditional modes of critical theory. For the first time, this collection of original essays applies a wide spectrum of contemporary critical theories to major works in the Yeats canon, serving as models of how to read and work with Yeats from a postmodernist/poststructuralist perspective.

Here is one of the classics of modern Gaelic literature-the autobiography of Peig Sayers, a remarkable woman who lived forty years at the edge of survival on barren Great Blasket Island, and who came to be recognized as one of the last of Ireland's traditional storytellers.Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. It reveals with fidelity, humor, and poignancy a woman's life in a bleak world where survival itself was a triumph and death as familiar as life. Peig said of her son Tomás, who was killed in a fall from a clifftop: "Instead of his body being out in the broad ocean, there he was on the smooth detached stone. . . . laid out as expertly and as calmly as if twelve women had tended him." Her own farewell to life had the same clear-eyed simplicity: "People will yet walk into the graveyard where I'll be lying; I'll be stretched out quietly and the old world will have vanished."Peig died in 1958, when she was 85. She is buried a short distance from the townland where she was born, above the sea on the Dingle Peninsula, within sight of the Great Blasket Island.Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. As Eoin McKiernan, President of the Irish American Cultural Institute, notes in his introduction, Peig has the "quality of honesty and sincerity, of life lived at the bone." Long loved in Ireland, this autobiography will now be seen for what it truly is-one of the great heart-cries of the Irish people.

Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Philip Roth and Edna O'Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In this book Dan O'Brien investigates these shared concerns of the two authors.

With its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, this book retrieves the remarkable travel accounts of Kathleen M. Murphy from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.

In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheal mac Liammoir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate became a site of avant-garde nationalism in the Ireland's tumultuous first post-independence decades.

In the early twentieth century, publicly staged productions of significant historical, political, and religious events became increasingly popular - and increasingly grand - in Ireland. Dean explores the historical significance of these pageants, explaining how their popularity correlated to political or religious imperatives in twentieth-century Ireland.

Between 1878 and 1881, Standish O'Grady published a three-volume History of Ireland. At the heart of this history was the figure of Cuculain, the great mythic hero who would inspire a generation of writers and revolutionaries. This critical edition of the Cuculain legend offers a concise, abridged version of the central story in History of Ireland.

Mary Helen Thuente pushes the clock back, some fifty years, as she demonstrates in The Harp Re-strung that Irish literary nationalism actually began in the 1790s, with the United Irish movement, rather than in the 1840s, as has been generally accepted.

This work provides an overview of Irish theatre, read in the light of Ireland's self-definition. Mediating between history and its relations with politics and art, it attempts to do justice to the enabling and mirroring preoccupations of Irish drama.

Sheds new light on death and dying in twentieth- and twenty-first century Irish literature. The author examines the ways that Irish wake and funeral rituals shape novelistic discourse. She argues that the treatment of death in Irish novels offers a way of making sense of mortality and provides insight into Ireland's cultural and historical experience of death.

Genesis of the Rising 1912-1916

Suitable for courses in Irish theatre, women in theatre, gender and performance, dramaturgy, and Irish drama in the twentieth century, this book examines the plays of five women, placing their work for theatre in co-relation to suggest a parallel tradition that reframes the development of Irish theatre into the present day.

Frank McGuinness's Dramaturgy of Difference and the Irish Theatre

Brings together scholars of Irish modernism to challenge the stereotype that Irish literature has been unconcerned with scientific and technological change. By focusing on writers' often-ignored interest in science and technology, this book uncovers shared concerns that challenge us to rethink how we categorize and periodize Irish literature.

This work is a portrait of the life of the elder Yeats and his family, showing that J.B. Yeats was as worthy of his sons as they were of their father.