This is the first collection of essays solely dedicated to the achievement of this remarkable Irish poet. The book contains eleven essays by internationally known scholars, a new interview with McGuckian herself, and a detailed bibliography. McGuckian’s critical reputation has grown dramatically over the last decade and she is now a poet with an international reputation. This collection provides a timely and engaging appraisal of her work.

Queer Notions is a seminal anthology of new plays and performance documentation from Ireland. This collection is a record of some of the most important performative ideas and embodied interventions that have shaped queer culture and theatre and performance practice in Ireland in recent times, principally in the years following the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1993, up to and including the present. The anthology includes plays, experimental performance documentation, and a visual essay that reveal the impassioned creativity that illuminates and invigorates the margins of culture.

Roll Away the Reel World traces Joyce’s involvement in early modern cinema, his thematic and formal borrowing from this genre, and the impact of his writings on later avant-garde and mainstream cinema ranging from Godard to Rossellini to Scorsese. Written by an international group of leading Joyce and film studies scholars, the first section of the book provides a revealing account of the writer’s central involvement in 1909-10 in setting up the Volta cinema, the first specifically-designated cinematic space opened in Dublin.

This study is the first book-length academic treatment of rugby football in Ireland. Covering the period from the game’s origins in Ireland in the 1870s through to the onset of professional rugby in the twenty-first century, this book seeks to examine Munster rugby within the context of broader social, cultural and political trends in Irish society. As well as providing a thorough chronological survey of the game’s development, key themes such as violence, masculinity, class and politics are subject to more detailed treatment.

In the wake of the Counter Reformation and more intensely after the French Revolution, religious communities of women sprang up with astonishing rapidity in France. Today their form of life is coming to an end, at least in Europe, and it is the culmination of more than three hundred years of religious life, which provided companionship for women and enabled them contribute effective social activity in society. Such a phenomenon invites analysis, both of the origins and the motivations for such an upsurge of women’s communities.The aim of this book is to bring together aspects of the private and public life of members of the Society of the Sacred Heart in 19th century France by using the extensive community and personal archives of the Society, as well as the collection of 14,000 letters of Madeleine Sophie Barat. By combining rigorous research and writing within the perspective of women’s history, the lives and achievements, the successes and failures, of these French women are shifted out of hagiography into history. This book is unique. It breaks with the tradition of religious hagiography so prevalent when writing the history of religious women in the Catholic Church. It addresses the complexity of their personal/ community lives along with their public contribution to society.

The fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising has been held responsible for everything from the outbreak of conflict in Northern Ireland to the alienation of an entire generation in the Republic of Ireland. This book examines the myths behind the most elaborate commemoration of the Rising to date.Transforming 1916 explores the meaning and memory of the Easter Rising in 1966 and the way in which history operated in Ireland at a moment of rapid change. Transforming 1916 looks at the commemorative process through parades, statues, pageants, television programmes, exhibitions and documentary film; and considers the tensions present north and south of the border. It argues that the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising was not, in fact, an unrestrained celebration of Ireland’s past but represented instead an attempt by the Irish government to convey a message of modernisation and economic progress. Transforming 1916 casts light on what 1916 means in Ireland and illuminates the politics of commemoration as the centenary of the Rising approaches.

Understanding Limerick is an edited collection featuring contributions from leading Irish scholars in the fields of Sociology, Social Policy, Criminology and Urban Geography. Limerick city has some of the most severely disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the Republic of Ireland. The city has also experienced a range of problems in relation to organized crime, gangland feuding and community violence. This collection seeks to explore how profound social exclusion and poverty-related criminality emerged in Limerick city.

This handbook will provide the reader with a clear and reliable means of identifying those plants which grow wild in Ireland. This book is a comprehensive re-working of the classic and standard Flora of Ireland which was last published 16 years ago: this will be the eighth edition of that work. It has been brought fully up to date through incorporating the latest in botanical research and it reflects contemporary and modern approaches to plant classification based on recent advances in genetics. Trees, shrubs and climbers in winter are now covered for the first time. Also included is a list of plants that have legal protection in Ireland. Webb’s an Irish Flora is illustrated throughout with hand-coloured drawings. This handy reference book for botanists both amateur and professional, gardeners, hill walkers, students, farmers and naturalists. It is about the higher plants that grow wild and which are commonly naturalised or otherwise encountered in Ireland. It is designed to help you identify and provide you with background information on plant morphology, distribution and rarity and to educate all those interested in recognising the species of the flora of Ireland. Previous editions of the book have been used by workers outside of the specific field of study of plant identification – such as environmental consultants, the general public, students, professional and amateur botanists etc. There is a genuine demand for a Flora whose subject matter refers explicitly to Ireland whilst placing that flora in a wider context. Furthermore, a concise flora of a discrete geographical area is of interest internationally to many professional and amateur botanists and gardeners. The book has, is and will be used in student training (it is used as a basic botanical text book in some Universities in Ireland) and on training courses for professionals wishing to improve their skills and for all those needing to improve their levels of botanical expertise.