Liverpool Studies in Irish Literature – Serie

Subjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellations reconceptualises Friedrich Nietzsche’s position in the intellectual history of modernism and substantively refigures our received ideas regarding his relationship to these Irish modernists. Building on recent developments in new modernist studies, the book demonstrates that Nietzsche is a modernist writer and a modernist philosopher by drawing new parallels between his engagement with established philosophical theories and the aesthetic practices that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot identified as quintessentially modernist. With specific reference to key Nietzschean philosophemes – eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, transnationalism, cultural paralysis, and ethical perspectivism – it challenges the longstanding assumption that Yeats, who repeatedly acknowledged his admiration for Nietzsche, is the most 'Nietzschean' of these Irish modernists.While showing how both Joyce and Beckett are in many important ways more 'Nietzschean' than Yeats, this interdisciplinary study makes a number of significant and timely contributions to the fields of Irish studies and modernist studies.

For more than a century, Irish poetry has enjoyed a privileged relationship with the visual arts. This book shows how intensely this creative rapport has been cultivated. Its importance for our age becomes apparent from an in-depth discussion of the work of nine poets whose combined output extends from the 1960s to the first quarter of the new millennium: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Paul Durcan, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon and Sinéad Morrissey. The focus falls on the ways in which the images addressed in their poems are thematically framed by particular pictorial genres or modes: the portrait, the still life, the conversation piece, history painting and abstraction. These creative frameworks provide the thematic rationale for the book’s five chapters, cumulatively demonstrating how a consistent engagement with the visual arts has bolstered the appeal of contemporary Irish poetry in global cultures.

Honorable Mention in the ACIS Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature, 2024An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Engaging with previously overlooked diaries by women in Ireland, written between 1760 and 1810, this book opens new avenues concerning authorship and female agency, transforming our understanding of women’s contributions to both literature and culture. The result of extensive archival research across multiple international archives, this book presents an entirely new corpus that demonstrates the creativity and literary capabilities of women in this period.The surviving diaries showcase these women’s engagement with a form that allowed them to explore their subjectivity and to experiment with the presentation of self. This book demonstrates how these ‘bagatelles’ should be treated as literary works that were shaped by, and in turn influenced, wider cultures of reading and writing, underlining the generic fluidity at play. The diary form forces a dismantling of the neat binaries of public and private, of imaginative and non-imaginative prose writing, complicating our understandings of each. The content of these diaries prompts a re-evaluation of the very contours of Irish writing and what we consider as literature, while allowing us to rediscover the importance of manuscripts to our explorations of literary culture.

Official Voices: Poets and the Irish State examines the poet-politicians and bureaucrats who shaped the twenty-six-county Irish state, from its pre-history in the revolutionary period through its foundation in 1922 and complicated modernisation in the 1960s to the outbreak of the Troubles. Poet-officials juggled writing the state and navigating the force-field between poetry and politics, with poetic form registering the aftershocks of this collusive antagonism. Combining political history, cultural history and literary criticism, the book grapples with major issues in the state’s history: revolution, state violence/insurgency against the state, patriarchy, partition, modernisation, as well as socialist and feminist alternatives to conservative nationalism. Poets examined in the book include W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Desmond FitzGerald, Denis Devlin, Joseph Campbell, Valentin Iremonger, Eithne Strong, Máire Mhac an tSaoi and Thomas Kinsella. It draws on new archival work in state archives and literary collections, and situates the Irish state and Irish poetry within a transnational frame. Taking up the relationship of poetry to politics, and poet-officials to state governance, it tackles a perennial question: what did poetry make happen (and not happen) in the twenty-six counties? This book is about acknowledged legislators, poetry’s formal vigilance, and how poets apprehended, consciously and unconsciously, the recalcitrant workings of power.

Irish Culture and Partition, 1920–1955 is the first study of the impact of partition on the culture of Ireland. Examining the island’s literature, art, history and visual culture, it argues that the establishment and maintenance of partition had a deep impact on the ways that Irish culture was produced and interpreted. Drawing upon archives from both partition states, as well as the private papers of several authors, it resituates debates around Irish culture and politics within the polemics of state formation, including work from Evie Hone, St John Ervine, Michael McLaverty, William Conor, Flann O’Brien, Agnes Romilly White, Benedict Kiely, Dorothy Macardle and many others. It also places literature and culture within the context of literary congresses, art exhibitions, state festivals and World’s Fairs. In considering partition not as a past event but a process which continues in the present, this study recovers the networks of influence and production as well as the debates around partition that propelled Irish culture in these years. Placing the production of culture and the invention of tradition by the two Irish partition states in conversation with each other for the first time, Irish Culture and Partition, 1920–1955 argues for a reconsideration of the language, imagery and chronology of the island’s division.