Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture – serie

Technology in Irish Literature and Culture shows how such significant technologies-typewriters, gramophones, print, radio, television, computers-have influenced Irish literary practices and cultural production, while also examining how technology has been embraced as a theme in Irish writing. Once a largely rural and agrarian society, contemporary Ireland has embraced the communicative, performative and consumption habits of a culture utterly reliant on the digital. This text plumbs the origins of the present moment, examining the longer history of literature's interactions with the technological and exploring how the transformative capacity of modern technology has been mediated throughout a diverse national canon. Comprising essays from some of the major figures of Irish literary and cultural studies, this volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive account of how Irish literature and culture have interacted with technology.

Contrary to the widespread belief in Ireland's rapid secularisation, religion continues to play a significant role in twenty-first-century Irish culture, though not in the familiar forms of Catholicism and Protestantism. This volume seeks to redress the balance and demonstrate that religion intersects with and informs past and present Irish culture. While writers from Sean O'Casey to Edna O'Brien have challenged religious oppression, Joyce's heresy, Patrick Pearse's fusion of Christian and pagan sacrifice, and Yeats's pan-Asian eclecticism are among the manoeuvres by which the Irish have sought to push beyond the prescribed limits of spirituality. This book takes an interdisciplinary and global approach that encompasses the affinities of Celtic thought with Asian philosophy, the legacy of Irish missions in Africa, new ways to see the religiosity of canonical works, and Irish cultural engagement with traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism, Judaism, and Shinto.

The Revival in Irish Literature and Culture offers a wide variety of new work on the Revival and the ideals, attitudes and perspectives that animate it, from the late-nineteenth century to the present day. The contributors to the volume, each in their own fashion, explore the social, political and cultural expressions of revivalism in literature but also in film, music, dance, commemorations, museum exhibits, social movements, and political activism. The volume offers new perspectives on established figures and ideas as well as new research on forgotten or under-represented revivalists, particularly women, whose cultural and political activities were instrumental in forming the foundations of the Revival and whose ongoing involvement shapes revivalism in new social and cultural contexts. One of the most important thematic strands linking the chapters is the function of time-our understanding of the historical "sense of the past" but also the efficacy of new temporal frameworks.

Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging set of essays exploring the travels of Irish literature and culture over the last century and more. The essays focus on writers and artists whose work has been taken up and re-read overseas; on cultural producers who have engaged with transnational scales in their work; and on critical practices that pay attention to comparative, global, and planetary dimensions of Irish literature and culture. Nation and territory have long been central to cultural production in Ireland, especially as both remain significantly contested, but a continued focus on these inherited scales has hindered critical attention to transnational routes and roots that exist alongside and challenge the nation. This volume sets agenda for the future of study of transnationalism in Irish literature and culture, recognizing the need for a new set of theories and methodologies that are adequate to our emerging world.