Brian Cliff – författare

The dramatic career of the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, from his first plays in 1902 to his premature death in 1909, almost exactly coincided with the years of Edward VII's reign. Those years have long been studied in a British context, but Synge and Edwardian Ireland is the first book to explore the cultural life of Edwardian Ireland as a distinctive period. By emphasizing several less familiar Irish contexts for Synge's work - including a new sociological awareness, the rise of a local celebrity culture, an international theatre context, the arts and crafts movement, Irish classical music, and comedic writing by Somerville and Ross - this collection shows how the Revival's preoccupation with folk culture intersected with the new networks of mass communication in the late imperial world. Although Synge is best known as a dramatist, this book concentrates on his prose and the ethnography of his photographs, the work in which his engagement with Edwardian Ireland can be most significantly seen. Often misunderstood as apolitical, Synge's writings and photography display a romantic resistance to modernity alongside their more accurate observations of contemporary conditions. It is through this ambivalent modernity that his work continued to haunt not just advocates like W.B. Yeats but even Synge's critics, including Padraig Pearse and James Joyce, all of whom were forced to come to imaginative terms with Synge through their own work.This book aims to change readers' sense of Synge's significance, and by doing so to illuminate in a quite new way the era of Edwardian Ireland during this period of rapid modernization.

Irish crime fiction, long present on international bestseller lists, has been knocking on the door of the academy for a decade. With a wide range of scholars addressing some of the most essential Irish detective writing, Guilt Rules All confirms that this genre has arrived. The essays collected here connect their immediate subjects - contemporary Irish crime writers - to Irish culture, literature, and history. Anchored in both canonical and emerging themes, this collection draws on established Irish studies discussions while emphasizing what is new and distinct about Irish crime fiction. Guilt Rules All considers best-sellers like Adrian McKinty and Liz Nugent, as well as other significant writers whose work may fall outside of traditional notions of Irish literature or crime fiction. The essays consider a range of themes - among them globalization, women and violence, and the Troubles - across settings and time frames, allowing readers to trace the patterns that play a meaningful role in this developing genre.

Irish crime fiction, long present on international bestseller lists, has been knocking on the door of the academy for a decade. With a wide range of scholars addressing some of the most essential Irish detective writing, Guilt Rules All confirms that this genre has arrived. The essays collected here connect their immediate subjects - contemporary Irish crime writers - to Irish culture, literature, and history. Anchored in both canonical and emerging themes, this collection draws on established Irish studies discussions while emphasizing what is new and distinct about Irish crime fiction. Guilt Rules All considers best-sellers like Adrian McKinty and Liz Nugent, as well as other significant writers whose work may fall outside of traditional notions of Irish literature or crime fiction. The essays consider a range of themes - among them globalization, women and violence, and the Troubles - across settings and time frames, allowing readers to trace the patterns that play a meaningful role in this developing genre.

This book examines the recent expansion of Ireland's literary tradition to include home-grown crime fiction. It surveys the wave of books that use genre structures to explore specifically Irish issues such as the Troubles and the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, as well as Irish experiences of human trafficking, the supernatural, abortion, and civic corruption. These novels are as likely to address the national regulation of sexuality through institutions like the Magdalen Laundries as they are to follow serial killers through the American South or to trace international corporate conspiracies.This study includes chapters on Northern Irish crime fiction, novels set in the Republic, women protagonists, and transnational themes, and discusses Irish authors’ adaptations of a well-loved genre and their effect on assumptions about the nature of Irish literature. It is a book for readers of crime fiction and Irish literature alike, illuminatingthe fertile intersections of the two.