Irish Studies in Europe (ISE) Volumes

Ondřej Pilný, Radvan Markus, Daniela Theinová, James Little (eds.) 2022

Ranging across the fields of history, literary studies, music studies, theatre and performance studies, film studies, media studies, and the study of material culture, this volume provides a snapshot of some of the most exciting emerging European research on Ireland. The essays gathered here approach Ireland as an interface, a locus that allows intercultural exchange, examining contact zones with other cultures as sites of productive and mutually enriching dialogue. Featuring three sections – Transnational and Intercultural Interactions, Dialogues with the Past, and Hauntings and Traumas – the collection aims at a discussion and further development of interdisciplinary dialogues in Irish studies, treating the frontiers of disciplines, research areas, and methodologies as interfaces that are changing how we understand Ireland past, present, and future. This dimension of the book is enhanced by two extensive interviews with renowned Irish documentary film-makers (Alan Gilsenan, Gillian Marsh, and Pat Collins) and leading performance practitioners and activists (Lian Bell and Maeve Stone). 

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Fagan, Paul. Fuchs, Dieter. Radak, Tamara (eds). 2021

Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulaton brings together chapters which revisit and reconsider diverse modes of (mis)representing, performing, articulating, witnessing, constructing, and deconstructing ‘Irishness’ from a twenty-first-century vantage. The time is ripe for such a inquiry. The Celtic Tiger and Brexit, the Marriage Equality referendum and the #Repealthe8th and #WakingTheFeminists campaigns compel us to turn to history and representation (in literature, drama, art, music, film, television, non-fiction, popular, and digital culture) to reassess how ‘Irishness’ has been shaped and reshaped through parochial, national, and international performances and gazes as a variously class-coded, gendered, sexual, religious, national, and artistic identity. This focus on the cultural, societal, historical, and political interfaces between performance, performativity, spectatorship, and identity in diverse Irish and international contexts reveals tensions between self-image and Othering, innovation and cliché, cultural production and negotiated reception.

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Becker, Daniel. (2021)

Whether in the form of idealised ancient times or the representation of more recent political events, Irish national history often obtained a central position in the work of many Irish poets throughout the twentieth century. In more recent years, however, these strong ties between poetry and history appear to have been severed: As current research suggests, many contemporary Irish poets, who started publishing their works around the year 2000, have turned their poetic focus away from national concerns and, thus, have exchanged the topic of Irish national history for a more 'post-national' present-day perspective. Yet, this impression is misleading, as the present book will show. By analysing selected poems by Iggy McGovern, Tom French, Vona Groarke, Martina Evans, Leanne O’Sullivan, Paul Perry, Lorna Shaughnessy, Paula Cunningham, as well as the more intensively researched writers Paula Meehan and Paul Durcan, this study will argue that Irish history still finds its proper place in the work of contemporary Irish poets. More specifically, this book will focus on one of the most dominant ways of remembering Ireland's past in recent poetry: the negotiation of history via liminal remembrance, which refers to the observation that many contemporary Irish poems represent aspects of Irish history in between being remembered and being forgotten at the same time.

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