This collection of fourteen essays covers a wide range of material that reflects the current range of enquiry within the traditional discipline of folklore, the range of interaction between it and various other disciplines, and indeed the breadth of Gearóid Ó Crualaoich’s own interests. Areas covered include the history and practice of fieldwork / collection, the historical and current interaction between the oral and written traditions in Ireland, the use of oral sources for historiography, the ideologies underlying the establishment of museums in Ireland and internationally, and individual studies of oral and material phenomena, an Ghaeilge agus an idé-eolaíocht pholaitiúil .

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.

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.