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A group of internationally recognized Joyce specialists probe James Joyce's complex language and trace political and ideological meanings in the text of his work, DUBLINERS, making REJOYCING an excellent introduction to the central issues in contemporary Joyce criticism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

I thought I had it down, more-or-less...
Dubliners is an easy read, probably easier than Portrait, but these essays sprout up new layers to these stories and surprises us that the very skeleton of Joyce's structure is a story on its own.As for myself, I figured I had a finely tuned understanding of all the stories (except for Grace, as that one ran dry for me, but as I will explain in just a bit, I have formed a new respect for the story), but Rejoycing gives us a new apprehension of each one.Each story may have a point, despite how inconclusive many of the endings are, yet with the explanations given by these essays we are given a stronger context that remarks on society, modes of writing, characters affecting the narrative, etc etc.

This is really helpful for understanding Ulysses as well, as many of the essays discuss the connections between the characters appearances in bothnovels.The essayists discuss the interesting behaviors of characters, such as Cunningham and Bloom, and the stasis of their reappearance in Ulysses.Also, the narrative structure is examined, in that, characters, who domineer the language of the narration are shown to do so as well in Ulysses.

I may not be a Joycean scholar, but I couldn't imagine that these essays wouldn't shed a new light on Dubliners.As for students or first-timers, I'd wager this is a fantastic source for writing papers.I wish I had this last semester when I was actually assigned to read "the Dead" and Portrait of the Artist.

Your first and final commentary opening these deceptively simple yet infinite and fathomless short stories.
Your first and (never) final friend and companion to the Dubliners,

This collection of fourteen scholarly essays (plus introduction and preface) provides not only the best basis for beginning appreciation of these still revolutionary short stories, but remains solid assistance for advanced readings of these subtle, elusive, shifting tales.

The Dubliners are called the most accessible of Joyce's work, yet the first essay in this collection quickly dispels this error in judgment, as it unfolds the hidden depths and embryonic techniques which bloomed in his later work. What we see upon the surface of these tales is not trustworthy, but open to a myriad of interpretation. Joyce's clever ambiguity has provided a wide spectrum of readings of his short stories, according to the reader's sense and sensibilities, prejudices and presumptions, of which the reader herself may not be fully conscious. As with Wilde's criticism, we often see in Joyce, particularly in these sparse stories, our own image and likeness believing we are reading as the author wrote. This collection of commentary well relieves us of this accident of parallax.

Please review these commentaries for a brilliant glimpse at Joyce's early writings and his tentative trial of narrative techniques later so maturely elaborated in Ulysses. Even a long time reader of Joyce learns much from this collection of essays, as the work of Joyce always holds more to reveal, and these studies are excellent in opening for us further dimensions in this deceptively complex early tales.

Highly recommended for beginning and advanced readers of Joyce, most recent, valuable and substantial of any commentary upon this collection of tales, and indicator of further study.
... Read more

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This anthology traces the history of modern Irish literature from the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century to the early years of political independence. It covers 150 years, from the writings of Charlotte Brooke and Edmund Burke to those of Elizabeth Bowen and Louis MacNeice, and it shows how these writings continually challenge and renew the ways in which Ireland is imagined and defined. The anthology includes a wide-ranging and generous selection of fiction, poetry, and drama. Three plays by W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and J.M. Synge are printed in their entirety, along with the opening episode of James Joyce's Ulysses.
The volume also includes letters, speeches, songs, memoirs, essays, and travel writings, many of which are difficult to obtain elsewhere. ... Read more

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A unique anthology expressly designed to give interested readers access to the immense variety and richness of literature written in Ireland.

In a volume that has become a standard text in Irish studies, editors Maureen O'Rourke Murphy and James MacKillop survey thirteen centuries of Irish literature, including old Irish epic and lyric poetry, Irish folksongs and a selection of nineteenth-century prose and poetry. For each author the editors provide a biographical sketch, a brief discussion of how his or her selections relate to a larger body of work, and a selected bibliography. In addition, this new volume also includes a larger sampling of women writers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A complete and comprehensive look at Irish creative writing through the ages
Ireland has more to offer the literary world than just limericks (although those are good too). "An Irish Literature Reader: Poetry, Prose, Drama" is a complete and comprehensive look at Irish creative writing through the ages, with countless samples and examinations of their creators. Now in a brand new edition, "An Irish Literature Reader" features a larger focus on Irish women writers and their contributions to the craft. A top pick for community library world literature collections.

new edition, a big step up
This has always been a good anthology, especially for teaching, but the new edition makes it even stronger.Contemporary poets get fuller treatment (for example, Heaney gets 12 poems, instead of 5, ni Dhomhaill gets 9, instead of 2).And the final new section of "Late Twentieth-Century Fiction and Drama" adds several great pieces.Still no Joyce or Yeats or several other luminaries, under the theory that people who would read this book already have those authors at hand.The result is a really good book for supplementing single-author texts. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent!
This is a "must-read" for anyone interested in early Irish history, Irish/Celtic mythology, and in particular the transition from paganism to Christianity in Ireland. McCone demolishes the notion that the Irish sagas are accurate guides to ancient Celtic beliefs, and shows how supposedly "pagan" elements in early Irish writings have more to do with the Bible than with myths from the pre-Christian period. Early Irish literature was written largely by Christians for Christians, despite the widespread assumption that it preserves real pagan beliefs and practices. ... Read more

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Not an anthology, but the first book of criticism to engage Irish writing across the whole of the twentieth century, from Maria Edgeworth to Seamus Heaney, and including post-Troubles Ulster. The author gives the reader an up-to-date sense of the variety and vitality of Irish writing and indicates some of the ways in which it has been described and discussed. The text begins with a brief outline of Irish history, of Irish writing in Irish and Latin, and of writing in English before 1800. Later chapters consider Irish romanticism, Victorian Ireland, W.B.Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, new directions in Irish writing after Joyce and the literature of contemporary Ireland, north and south, from 1960 to the present.For those interested in Irish literature. ... Read more

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This collection of essays by renowned literary scholars offers a sustained and comprehensive account of the relation of British and Irish literary modernism to colonialism. Bringing postcolonial studies into dialogue with modernist studies, the contributors move beyond depoliticized appreciations of modernist aesthetics as well as the dismissal of literary modernism as irredeemably complicit in the evils of colonialism. They demonstrate that the modernists were not unapologetic supporters of empire. Many were avowedly and vociferously opposed to colonialism, and all of the writers considered in this volume were concerned with the political and cultural significance of colonialism, including its negative consequences for both the colonizer and the colonized.

Ranging over poetry, fiction, and criticism, the essays provide fresh appraisals of Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, E. M. Forster, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Evelyn Waugh, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson and Rider Haggard. The essays that bookend the collection connect the modernists to their Victorian precursors, to postwar literary critics, and to postcolonial poets. The rest treat major works written or published between 1899 and 1939, the boom years of literary modernism and the period during which the British Empire reached its greatest geographic expanse. Among the essays are explorations of how British imperialism inspired Conrad, Woolf, and Eliot to seek new aesthetic forms appropriate to the sense of dislocation they associated with empire; how primitivism figured in the fiction of Lawrence and Lewis; and how, in Ulysses, Joyce used modernist techniques toward anticolonial ends.

Contributors. Nicholas Allen, Rita Barnard, Richard Begam, Nicholas Daly, Maria DiBattista, Ian Duncan, Jed Esty, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Declan Kiberd, Brian May, Michael Valdez Moses, Jahan Ramazani, Vincent Sherry ... Read more

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This title has fewer than 24 printed text pages. All That Goes Up is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Kirby Brooks is in the English language. If you enjoy the works of Kirby Brooks then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection. ... Read more

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The essays in this collection cover the entire range of Irish drama, from the late nineteenth-century melodramas (anticipating the rise of the Abbey Theatre) to the contemporary Dublin of theater festivals.In addition to studies of individual playwrights, the collection includes an examination of the relationship between the theater and its political context as reflected through its ideology, staging and programming.Including a complete chronology and bibliography, this collection will be an important introduction to one of the world's most vibrant theater cultures. ... Read more

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Over the past twenty years, interest in Irish literature has risen dramatically across the globe. Irish Literature, 1750-1900: An Anthology presents in one volume the rich body of Irish writing between the Enlightenment and Modernism.

• Provides the full text of short plays, fiction, and poetry by a wide selection of prominent writers, including Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Moore, James Clarence Mangan, Samuel Ferguson, Lady Jane Wilde, and Oscar Wilde
• Features a selection of collaboratively authored works by the Edgeworths, the Banims, and the Kavanaghs, as well as excerpts from collaborative publications such as Paddy’s Resource and The Nation
• Includes substantial selections from Ireland's women writers, as well as Ulster poets and writers who emigrated to North America during this period
• Offers a variety of helpful features for students, including a chronology of historical events and major literary works of the era

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Cultural Writing. The great Irish humorist and writerFlann O'Brien, aka Brian O'Nolan, aka Myles na Gopaleen, also wrote anewspaper column called "Cruiskeen Lawn." THE BEST OF MYLES collectsthe best and funniest, covering such subjects as plumbers, the justicesystem, and improbable inventions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

The real thing.
Before there was Monty Python, there was Myles.He was by far the crankiest, most learned and original comic genius of 20th-century English prose; there's simply nothing else like him.(Well, maybe there are 3 or 4 moments in "Duck Soup" that are like him.) And when you realize that this is the same guy who, under a different name, wrote "At Swim-Two-Birds" (one of the five or so funny novels for whose sake the Lord does not destroy the Earth)-- well, it's time to just surrender and enjoy.

Plus, the current Dalkey Archive edition (the publisher's name is itself a Myles reference) is handsomely made... good-quality paper and so on, don't you know.It makes a difference.

Mise, le mas, ....

Brilliant
Flann O'Brian is absolutely one of the greatest practitioners of language. This collection of his work, "The Best Of Myles", is some of the finest writing I have ever had the pleasure to read. Gaelic, English, French, German, and Latin, are 5 languages he writes fluently. He is the personification of all that is famous of Irish Wit. There appear to be few topics he did not comment upon or release a withering appraisal with pinpoint precision.

Mr. O'Brian wrote for a daily newspaper until his death in 1966. The volume and quality of the written material he produced is amazing. This 400-page book is one of five that are available and that I intend to read. There is virtually nothing about his personal history in this volume, so hopefully there is a biography in print documenting the time he spent learning and practicing his craft. The only downside to this book is that some is in Gaelic with no translation, and there are many articles that will seem to exist in isolation if the reader does not have some knowledge of Irish History. Even if these commentaries were removed, the balance of the work would still be a remarkable literary performance.

Some of the best pieces were his comments on the affectation in so many facets of daily life. And his specific attacks on, "bores", and all the pretensions of the world of modern art, and those who would pretend to posses knowledge of which they are bereft. He creates institutes and foundations and companies dedicated to servicing frauds and exposing the truth. Much is for pure fun, but like all humor contains truth. He offers the services of a company that will come to the home of any illiterate with a library, and his people will either rummage through your books for a pittance, or for a more substantial sum, will dog-ear pages, write brilliant marginalia, and leave tickets and programs to various cultural events as though they were misplaced bookmarks. And for those who have the funds, books will receive forged inscriptions from their authors, and letters of thanks to the book's owner for their help with a particularly difficult passage.

This book came at the end of 2001 for me. I hate lists of the best of the year; however nothing I have read this year surpasses this book, absolutely nothing!

The best of Flann
Good humour is something everybody likes and I yearn for. For quite a long time I thought that there could hardly be anything better, or at least as good as Ephraim Kishon's short satires or Douglas Adams' space phantasmagories. It was hard even to imagine something like that because I was sure my stomach would disintegrate after something like that. And than I ran into Flann O'Brien's The Best of Myles. Indeed, that was the first time for me to get familiar with him and certainly the best possible. His columns are far than hillarious, obviously because he plays with things we consider as common, everyday problems, and maybe not even problems. All the wild thoughts one could get in moments of being very bored O'Brien would write down and bring to their final reductio ad absurdum. He wouldn't wait to be stopped, he would just carry on scribbling complete nonsense, dipping even into some other languages like Latin or Gaelic in a wild rage of an admirable inspiration.
Yes, one more thing that admire him for. He would deal with Gaelic and even write in it, he would mock with politics and politicians, with history and society and even so, he managed to stay completely non-political. At least he left his columns that way. The Best of Myles is best to read before his longer and more ambitious works like The Third Policeman or At Swim-Two-Birds. And also after them.

Five for peerless Myles; zero for the editing.
this compilation contains, without qualification, THE funniest writing of the twentieth century, so it seems churlish to list complaints.Some of these are unavoidably the nature of the material - Myles na Gopaleen wrote a regular column for an Irish newspaper for a quarter of a century, so the very local concerns discussed in some of the pieces render them impenetrable to all but Irish historians.

The biggest problem is with the editing, or lack thereof.There are no explanatory notes offering historical, social or political context; there are no translatoins of the many German, Latin, Irish etc. interpellations.One could argue that this leaves us in the same position as those first newspaper readers, but Myles' predominantly middle-class audience could boast a sound classical education and a greater familiarity with the allusions so liberally scattered here than we do today.

Finally, the decision not to print the pieces chronologically (none of them are dated), but by subject, distorts the work, handicaps its versatility and can lead to repetition and tedium.

That 'the Best of Myles' remains one of the last century's few genuinely important books is entirely due to the indestructible persona(e) of Myles himself, hypercultured, alcoholic, visionary verbal contortionist with pretensions to aristocraticheritage.His phlegmatic invective at local problems such as sewage systems and the civil service are less valuable than his assault on language as it had (has?) degenerated into cliche and received opinion in the culturally sterile Ireland of the 1940s and 50s; and in his post-modern project of demolishing hierarchies of linguistic and artistic endeavour.Reading Myles has a bracing effect - he forces you out of habitual mental laziness; forces you to think HARDER.

YES! I Can Finally Own My Own Copy!
A friend lent me his copy (an Irish edition) of this book five or more years ago, and I've been searching for my own copy ever since.I'mdelighted to find it's been reprinted and I just placed my order.

I envyanyone who has not yet read this book of collected columns and essays --the outrageous details ofthe Ventriloquists' War, the intricacies of theCatechism of Cliche, and the wisdom of the Brother all await your delighteddiscovery.

Have a blast. ... Read more

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The impact of the Irish famine of 1845-1852 was unparalleled in bothpolitical and psychological terms.The effects of famine-related mortality and emigration were devastating, in the field of literatureno less than in other areas.In this incisive new study, MelissaFegan explores the famine's legacy to literature, tracing it in thework of contemporary writers and their successors, down to 1919.DrFegan examines both fiction and non-fiction, including journalism,travel-narratives and the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope.Sheargues that an examination of famine literature that simplycategorizes it as 'minor' or views it only as a silence or an absence misses the very real contribution that it makes to our understandingof the period. This is an important contribution to the study of Irishhistory and literature, sharply illuminating contemporary Irishmentalities. ... Read more

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"An extraordinary work of collaborative scholarship that succeeds spendidly in providing 'a set of contexts for understanding how women have lived in Ireland.'An essential purchase."
—Library Journal

"A monumental and heroic work of collective scholarship that will transform our understanding of the Irish literary tradition. Yes she said yes yes."
—Elaine Showalter, Princeton University

"The literary event of the year..."
—Caroline Walshe, Irish Times

"These new volumes are a mighty achievement: the texts and contexts of more than a thousand years of Irish women's writing brilliantly, abundantly presented and comprehended. The editors have redefined the curriculum of studies."
—Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate

"The long-anticipated, two-volume publication of Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions will...redress the traditional exclusion of women's voices from Irish literature."
—Los Angeles Times

"One looks at these two huge volumes of women's writings and traditions and it's difficult not to suspect that this compilation is not a monument to the culmination of the power and creativity of Irish women but rather a signal of almost the beginning of it. It took invincibleness to produce the stories in these 3,200 pages and even to bring the pages together."
—The New York Times

Eleven years in the making, harnessing the skills and expertise of dozens of scholars, Irish Women's Writing and Traditions, Volumes IV and V of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing is a true publishing landmark. It represents the most comprehensive volume of Irish women's writing ever published, including more than 900 female writers, from poets of the middle ages to contemporary writers whose work graces international bestseller lists.

Spanning a period from 600 AD to the end of the twentieth century, these two volumes provide a unique resource for the study of Irish society from the perspective of Irish women's writing. This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary work covers literature, journalism, history, and criticism, as well as legal, medical, theological, and scientific writings, and includes sections on oral traditions, sexuality, religion and theology, and contemporary writing.

Within these pages, readers will find the work of both familiar and undiscovered or under-appreciated writers, much of which is previously unpublished or translated from the Irish language for the first time. There are extensive author biographies and bibliographies facilitating further reading and research. Both volumes are fully cross-referenced—including an index to first lines of poetry—with Volumes I-III, which focused on Irish men's writing.

An indispensable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in Irish culture, literature, history, or politics.The publication of the final two volumes of the Field Day Anthology is a watershed moment in scholarship and publishing.

Customer Reviews (1)

An essential extension of the original Field Day Anthology
By the time of the original Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Field Day had come to stand for a vitally brave, visionary and complex reframing of Irishness which, under Seamus Deane's direction, had produced the deepest collection of Irish writing ever published. Magnificent but deeply wanting in its coverage of Irish women's writing.

Understandably this caused great anger and disappointment. Fortunately for us all heat turned into light and Field Day's response was to commission this brilliant extension. Its impossible to underestimate its breadth and impact on the way we understand Irish writing. But setting aside the cultural analysis, these volumes contain masses of - previously inaccessible - great writing.

Suffice to say, everyone who has the first three volumes needs to have these two. ... Read more

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Contains selections of Irish prose and poetry which represent this nation's literary heritage. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Up the Irish
This is the only anthology of Irish Literature that I'm aware of that encompasses the scope of Irish writing from its earliest to its most recent. It is an outstanding collection that will give a reader a taste of the quality of Irish writing through the centuries. It is also an excellent text for a survey course in Irish Literature. It went out of print, but I'm glad it's back and NYU should be congratlated for bringing it back. ... Read more