The book focuses on the Irish and Irish diasporal involvement in the Olympic Games. It discusses in detail the sporting involvement but, even more so, the political and national battles which accompanied the Irish Olympic journey prior to independence. It challenges our traditional perceptions of sporting nationalism and places the Irish story in a quite unique international context, showing how decisions made in London, Lausanne and New York had a profound impact on the Irish sporting, and national, destiny.

Olivia Manning (1908-1980) had a reputation as a difficult personality and this has threatened to obscure her reputation as a writer. The book aims to recover Manning’s place as a pre-eminent novelist of British wartime experience. Manning belonged to a British literary generation which held tenaciously to its diverse Irish connections in the wartime years, but, as with Cyril Connolly or Lawrence Durrell, her claims on Irishness were intermittent and often distinctly pragmatic.The book deals in depth with a diverse range of biographical, historical and literary detail. It examines the troubled interface between public and domestic narratives” and the ways in which Manning developed, through her experiences of living in Romania, Athens, Egypt and Jerusalem, her creative methods of politicising the refugee experience. As well as looking at Manning’s novels within their diverse settings the book also examines the varied literary modes Manning deploys and adapts – the gothic, autobiography and writing the self, the serial novel, the wartime and epic and more.Although interest in World War II literature has been proliferating over the past twenty years a full length study of Manning will be of great interest to scholars of modern British literature and cultural history. In the fields of postcolonial and transnational studies, Manning should be a necessary presence as she crosses geographical, political, and cultural borders in her life and writing. Her experiments with ‘the serial form’ also provide critical gloss to studies of modernism and realism as well as being of great import to the now burgeoning study of the Middlebrow.

Second-generation Irish musicians have played a vital role in the history of popular music in England. This book explores the role of Irish ethnicity in the lives and work of these musicians, focusing on three high-profile projects: Kevin Rowland and Dexys Midnight Runners, Shane MacGowan and The Pogues, and Morrissey/Marr and The Smiths. The book locates these musicians in a hyphenated ‘Irish-Englishness’ marked by ‘in-between-ness’ and explores the different ways that they engaged with this in-betweenness through their creative work and their engagements with audiences, the media and the music industry.

Science and Roman Catholicism have both acted as powerful agents of change in Ireland and elsewhere. But the interaction between Catholicism and science in Ireland has received very little attention from historians to date. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to address this longstanding deficiency in Irish historical literature. There is a strong international dimension to this study. The period of interest is from the Famine to the “Celtic Tiger.”The subject matter encompasses a diverse range of topics. Issues indigenous to Ireland include recurring controversies about university education, the relative paucity of Catholic scientists in nineteenth-century Ireland, the perception of science as a trait of a Protestant and colonial mindset, anti-Catholicism and science, the economic and political conditions in the Irish Free State which worked against the growth of science in Ireland, and the impact of science and technology on Irish Catholicism in recent decades. These subjects are interwoven with topics which extend far beyond Irish interest - such as evolutionary debates, the question of whether or not Catholicism was compatible with science, anti-modernism in the Catholic Church, Vatican pronouncements on science, the theological implications of extra-terrestrial life and of Big Bang cosmology, whether human freewill is real or not, and the importance of science in arguments about the existence of God.

The increased visibility of the Irish novel in recent years has been one of the outstanding developments in contemporary Irish literature. This development has coincided with a period of significant change in Ireland as a whole. The Irish Novel 1960-2010 is the first book to study how the novel has been involved in discussing the seeds of change and the response to change as it evolved. The result is a wide-ranging survey, accessible and rewarding for both the student and the general public. Original and insightful it is written with a distinctive blend of sympathy and engagement. The Irish Novel 1960-2010 is an invaluable guide to an important cultural phenomenon.Authors covered:Edna O’Brien, Sam Hanna Bell, John Broderick, Michael Farrell, Samuel Beckett, Brian Moore, Aidan Higgins, Flann O’Brien, Anthony C. West, James Plunkett, J.G. Farrell,Francis Stuart, Jennifer Johnston, Vincent Banville, Ian Cochrane, Maurice Leitch, Caroline Blackwood, Benedict Kiely, Patrick McGinley, John McGahern, Julia O’Faolain, John Banville, Dorothy Nelson, Bernard MacLaverty, Desmond Hogan, Mary Leland, J.M. O’Neill, Carlo Gébler, William Trevor, Timothy O’Grady, Dermot Bolger, Hugo Hamilton, Patrick McCabe, Roddy Doyle, Dermot Healy, Emma Donoghue, Seamus Deane, Anne Haverty, Joseph O’Connor, Glenn Patterson, Mary Morrissy, Eoin McNamee, Deirdre Madden, Keith Ridgway, Colm Tóibín, Sebastian Barry, Gerard Donovan, Anne Enright, Joseph O’Neill, Colum McCann, Paul Murray

This new, expanded edition of the widely praised biography of the Booker Prize-winning author JG Farrell is timely. His literary achievement is still in the ascendent, as proved by the posthumous award in 2010 of the ‘Lost’ Booker for ‘Troubles’, decided by international e-vote. That made him a double Booker winner, and the publicity given to his renowned Empire Trilogy novels has left the general reading public wanting to know more. Lavinia Greacen has uncovered fresh material and additional photographs since the publication of the first edition, shedding further light on Farrell’s short life and tragic death, as well as the development of his writing career. The result is a fascinating and compelling story about the man described by the latest Estudios Irlandeses as ‘one of the English language’s most accomplished and enigmatic figures’.The life of the novelist J.G. Farrell (1935 – 1979) is almost stranger than fiction. He was a schoolboy sporting hero struck down by polio, a dedicated writer living on a shoestring who was awarded the Booker Prize in 1973, and, with his literary reputation secure and a newly-converted house on the scenic west Cork coastline, he was drowned at the age of 44 while fishing from rocks nearby. This expanded biography, interweaving letters and interviews from sources previously unknown, tells the moving story of his peripatetic life. It ranges from his childhood in Ireland to public school and university in England; from his base in London, where most of his novels took shape, to extended stays in France and the United States, and to periods spent in Mexico, India, Vietnam and Singapore. Readers will discover that Farrell’s celebrated Empire Trilogy, which includes Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip, reflects his own travels and personal experiences, as well as his unique wit and imagination. This biography reveals the very private man behind the celebrated literary novelist. ‘After reading it’, wrote Gerald Dawe, Senior Lecturer in English at Trinity College, Dublin, ‘I felt not only that I knew J.G. Farrell, but that I, too, mourned his loss as if he were a friend.’

The novelist J.G. Farrell – known to his friends as Jim – was drowned on August 11, 1979 when he was swept off rocks by a sudden storm while fishing in the West of Ireland. He was in his early forties. “Had he not sadly died so young,” remarked Salman Rushdie in 2008, “there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary.”

This interdisciplinary collection, which brings together new research on a range of patristic and medieval texts and visual materials, sets the cultural transformation of early medieval Ireland and Britain in the context of these islands’ inheritance from late antiquity and their engagement with the wider medieval world. It testifies to the imaginative ways in which scholars and artists assimilated and creatively re-interpreted the Christian and Mediterranean culture they encountered through the coming of Christianity, a central theme in the work of Dr Jennifer O’Reilly.

Oscar Wilde was the most famous gay Irishman and Oscar’s Shadow deals with Wilde and his homosexuality within the context of Ireland and of Irish cultural perceptions of his sexuality. The book investigates the questions: What was ‘Oscar’s shadow’, his influence on twentieth and twenty-first century Irish culture and literature? What has Oscar Wilde meant to Ireland from his disgrace in May 1895 up to the present?

Within the current climate of both literary and environmental studies “Out of the Earth”: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts is an unprecedented integration of Irish Studies and Ecocriticism that is both timely and necessary. The essays offer ecocritical readings of Irish literary and cultural texts of various genres, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, drama and the visual image.