Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays and Monographs – Serie

This innovative collection of essays views Irish culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, covering a wide range of Irish topics and authors. Bishop Berkeley, Thomas Moore, Oliver Goldsmith, Francis Hutcheson, Laurence Sterne, Richard Steele, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, James Stephens, Charles Lever, Austin Clarke, Kate O'Brien, and Francis Stuart are among the more familiar writers, but the author also sets out to retrieve a range of valuable yet neglected Irish writers including William Dunkin, John Toland, Frederick Ryan, Father Prout, William McGinn, Shan Bullock, Canon Sheehan, and George Birmingham.The book's topics range from eighteenth-century satire and sentimentalism to the modern Irish novel, and from the carnivalesque in early nineteenth-century Cork to the philosophy of Toland and Berkeley. In moving from celebrated reputations to some lesser-known writers, the book also breaches the boundaries between literary criticism, and intellectual and political history. It concludes with a vigorous intervention into the ongoing debate surrounding revisionism in Irish Studies.

This is the first study to survey the development of musical thought in modern Irish cultural history. It registers the function of music as a dynamic agent in the history of Irish ideas in the period 1770 - 1970. Ireland's verbally dominated culture has depended on music throughout its evolution, but the presence of music - to say nothing of its impact on the formation of Irish cultural thought - has been hitherto scarcely recognised. The Keeper's Recital attempts to redress this neglect by examining the role of music in Ireland's notably polarised cultural matrix by means of three prevailing themes: the integrity of sectarian culture, the political expression of cultural autonomy and the symbolic force of celticism. The book traces the development and cultural dislocation of music in Ireland from the late eighteenth century to the death of Sean Ó Riada and it thereby identifies the function and status of music in those cultural and political ideologies of nationalism, colonialism and revival which it helped to foster. Although The Keeper's Recital is primarily concerned with such figures as Turlough Carolan, Edward Bunting, Thomas Moore, Thomas Davis, George Petrie, Douglas Hyde, Heinrich Bewerunge, Charles Villiers Stanford, Arnold Bax and Sean Ó Riada, its scrutiny of the condition of music in Irish cultural history notably embraces Irish political and literary thought throughout the period 1770-1970. While not offered as a history of music in Ireland, it engages with the principal themes of that history in order to identify and distinguish between the symbolic power of Irish music (particularly in terms of its preservation) and its failure to generate a durable aesthetic of comparable significance to that which infused the Literary Revival.

Circe's Cup is a collection of eight essays that investigate the role writing played in transforming early modern Irish culture. This radical new assessment of culture and conflict in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland covers a wide range of topics, including ethnography, translation practices, and political philosophy. Taking its title from the metaphor of "Circe's Cup,"which was used by Old and New English writers to describe the corrupting influence they attributed to Irish culture, this collection presents a new perspective on colonial theory.Clare Carroll's essays cross disciplines, cultures, and languages to examine various modes of discourse, such as those of gender, religion, and ethnicity. History, poetry, philology, and political science are read side by side to ferret out examples of cultural change. Carroll's account considers both English and Irish language sources, and contrasts them to French, Spanish, and Italian texts. Circe's Cup argues for the need to see similarities between Irish and English texts, while at the same time focusing on the sharp, and often irreconcilable, difference between the two.

This intriguing collection of essays is dominated by the figure of Edmund Burke and by accounts of the ways in which he and some of those he influenced understood the revolutionary changes that produced the modern world. The issues of liberty and empire, faction and revolution, universality, equality, authority, sectarian vice and democratic virtue are central here. Dominating them all is the question of how traditional feeling and affection can be retained within the revolutionary and colonial worlds that emerged at the close of the eighteenth century. The answers to these questions emerge from the different interpretations of the American and French Revolutions that were to be so influential for generations after Burke. In addition, he posed the colonial question in Ireland before it was posed more generally. Was liberty compatible with colonial rule? Ultimately, Burke secured his position by his condemnation of colonial as well as revolutionary violence. But in the works of Burke's contemporaries, especially deTocqueville and Acton, colonial atrocity is condoned or supported while revolutionary violence is condemned out of hand. This, it is argued here, is constitutive of the European anti-revolutionary position which Burke helped to create but to which he nevertheless remains alien.

Ireland's Others is a collection of essays by noted literary and cultural critic Elizabeth Butler Cullingford. In this volume, Cullingford assesses attempts by Irish writers to reverse hostile colonial stereotypes by creating analogies between their situations and those of other oppressed people. She analyzes the political costs and benefits of these analogies, and considers the plight of "others" within Ireland, including women, gays, travelers, and abused children. Cullingford illuminates the connection between gender, sexuality, and national identity by comparing modern Irish literature with contemporary Irish and American popular culture. Exploring the work of Boucicault, Shaw, Friel, Jordan, McGuinness, and others, she considers the impact of globalization on Irish culture.

P. J. Mathews argues against the received opinion that the Irish Revival was a purely mystical affair of high culture characterized by a preoccupation with a backward-looking Celtic spirituality, nostalgia for Gaelic Ireland, and anti-modern traditionalism. Instead, he claims, the time of the Irish Revival was a progressive period that witnessed the cooperation of various self-help movements—the Abbey Theatre, the Gaelic League, and the Irish Agricultural Organization Society—which encouraged local modes of material and cultural development.These different groups were bound together by their willingness to use traditional cultural forms as the basis for an alternative modernization project. Mathews points out that these self-help initiatives were so successful that they very quickly opened up a sphere of influence rivaling that of parliamentary politics. Much of this activity laid the groundwork for the emergence of the Sinn Fein in 1905. Making use of important theater productions of the period, Mathews skillfully traces the connections and overlaps among these radical movements and demonstrates that the self-help idea was crucial to the decolonization and modernization of Irish society during the early years of the twentieth century.