Browse

Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult is a collection of essays examining the thought of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and particularly his philosophical reading and explorations of older systems of thought, where philosophy, mysticism, and the supernatural blend. It opens with a broad survey of the current state of Yeats scholarship and examination of Yeats’s poetic practice through a manuscript that shows the original core of a poem that became a work of philosophical thought and occult lore, “The Phases of the Moon.” The following essay examines an area where spiritualism, eugenic theory, and criminology cross paths in the writings of Cesare Lombroso, and Yeats’s response to his work. The third paper considers Yeats’s debts to the East, especially Buddhist and Hindu thought, while the fourth looks at his ideas about the dream-state, the nature of reality, and contact with the dead. The fifth essay explores Yeats’s understanding of the concept of the Great Year from classical astronomy and philosophy, and its role in the system of his work A Vision, and the sixth paper studies that work’s theory of “contemporaneous periods” affecting each other across history in the light of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. The seventh essay evaluates Yeats’s reading of Berkeley and his critics’ appreciation (or lack of it) of how he responds to Berkeley’s idealism. The book as a whole explores how Yeats’s mind and thought relate to his poetry, drama, and prose, and how his reading informs all of them.

Touchstones examines the ways in which John McGahern became a writer through reading. This reading was both extensive and intensive, and tended towards immersion in the classics. New insights are provided into McGahern’s use of writers as diverse as Dante Alighieri, William Blake, Stendhal, Albert Camus, W. B. Yeats and several others. Evidence for these claims is found both through close reading of McGahern’s published texts as well as via unprecedented sleuthing in his extensive archive of papers held at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The ultimate intention of this book is to draw attention to the very literary and writerly nature of McGahern as an artist, and to place him, not just as a great Irish writer, but as part of a long and venerable European tradition.

Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries is a new oral history of the loyalist backlash of the early 1970s in Northern Ireland. In the violent maelstrom of Belfast in 1971 and 1972 many young members of loyalist youth gangs known as ‘Tartans’ converged with fledgling paramilitary groups such as the Red Hand Commando, Ulster Volunteer Force and Young Citizen Volunteers. This fresh account focuses on the manner in which the loyalist community in Belfast reacted to an increasingly vicious Provisional IRA campaign and explores the violent role that young loyalist men played in the period from 1970 – 1975. Through the use of unique one-on-one interviews former members of Tartan gangs and loyalist paramilitaries explain what motivated them to cross the Rubicon from gang activity to paramilitaries. The book utilises a wide range of sources such as newspaper articles, loyalist newssheets, coroners’ inquest reports and government memorandums to provide the context for a dynamic new study of the emergence of loyalist paramilitarism.

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual brings together a collection of essays at the fore of the critical reassessment of Eliot’s life and work in light of the ongoing publication of his letters, critical volumes of his complete prose, the new edition of his complete poems, and the forthcoming critical edition of his plays. The volume features various approaches, but the dominant methodology is a historicist: essays reconsider Eliot’s work as a poet, critic, playwright, editor, and foremost exemplar of literary modernism in light of contemporary debate, contexts, and newly available primary materials. In addition to cutting-edge scholarship re-dating the chronology and genesis of Eliot’s poetry and plays, recasting longstanding scholarly debates, and reframing standard critical narratives, this volume contains two special forums. The first commemorates the centenary of the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Together, essays in this cluster reexamine the circumstances surrounding the poem’s original publication, recontextualize its allusions, and reconstruct its reception over the past century. The second essay cluster examines the annotations made in books from Eliot’s personal library, recently made available to researchers for the first time. The book concludes with a bibliography of recent Eliot scholarship, including book reviews, dissertations, journal articles, book chapters, and monograph publications.

Lawrence’s autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers was written in four drafts between August 1910 and November 1912. During that period Lawrence’s mother died, he finally broke with Jessie Chambers, the original of Miriam, had an affair with Alice Dax, the main model for Clara, had a year-long engagement to Louie Burrows, nearly died of pneumonia, gave up teaching, met Frieda Weekley and lived abroad with her in Germany and Italy. When he began Sons and Lovers he was a schoolteacher in south London writing after work in the evenings; when he completed it he was a full-time professional writer living with Frieda in Italy. The writing of the novel and the life on which it was based were closely intertwined. Moreover, Frieda and Jessie crucially influenced the writing of the book. Jessie wrote sections of it herself and encouraged Lawrence to make it more directly autobiographical. Frieda introduced Lawrence to the concept of the Oedipus Complex. In many ways the book is the result of dialogues with Jessie and Frieda. Jessie was devastated with the outcome, which she considered a slander and a betrayal. But Lawrence incorporated her answering voice, as well as Frieda’s, in the text. This book combines biography and textual scholarship to bring to life the dramatic story of the writing of Sons and Lovers.

The romances of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, Sailor, are usually examined from some setting almost exclusively American. European or other planetary contexts are subordinated to local considerations. But while this isolated approach plays well in an arena constructed on American exclusiveness, it does not express the reality of the literary processes swirling around Melville in the middle of the nineteenth century. A series of expanding literary and technological networks was active that made his writing part of a global complex. Honoré de Balzac, popular French writer and creator of realism in the novel, was also in the web of these same networks, both preceding and at the height of Melville’s creativity. Because they engaged in similar intentions, there developed an almost inevitable attraction that brought their works together. Until recently, however, Balzac has not been recognized as a significant influence on Melville during his most creative period. Over the last decade, scholars began to explore literary networks by new methodologies, and the criticism developed out of these strategies pertains usually to modernist, postcolonial, contemporary situations. Remarkably, however, the intertextuality of Melville with Balzac is quite exactly a casebook study in transcultural comparativism. Looking at Melville’s innovative environment reveals meaningful results where the networks take on significant roles equivalent to what have been traditionally classed as genetic contacts. Intervisionary Network explores a range of these connections and reveals that Melville was dependent on Balzac and his universal vision in much of his prose writing.

The Knights of Labor became the first national movement of American workers between 1869 and 1917. They also established branches of their movement across the world. This book explores the history of the Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland, where between 1883 and the end of the century they organised upwards of 50 individual assemblies (branches) and 10,000 members across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It treats the Knights as an important but under-recognised part of the great changes taking place within the British labour movement at the end of the nineteenth century, whether in terms of the growth of labour politics (and ultimately the Labour Party) or the transformation of the trade unions from the movement of a minority of wage earners to a majority of them. This book looks at the approaches that British and Irish Knights took to politics, industrial relations, race, culture and gender, drawing on and making comparisons with the well-established historiography of the Knights in Canada and the United States, and shows how British and Irish Knights tried and ultimately failed to make their American movement a permanent part of the British and Irish industrial landscape.

For at least fifteen years, any keen observer of European society has been aware that antisemitism is no longer a matter of racial theory, nationalism, or exclusion of the “other.” While in the past antisemites saw Jews as all too modern “rootless cosmopolitans” today's European antisemitism construes them as obsolete precisely because they are attached to their roots, their land, their community, their origin. The Jews are now perceived as a reactionary force that hinders the progress of humankind toward multiculturalism, understood as the peaceful, infinitely enriching coexistence of ethnicities, races, religions, and cultures within the same territory. The antisemite of yore viewed the Jews as an inferior race; today he views them as racist. By looking back to the emergence of a postwar theoretical discourse on trauma, memory, victims, suffering, the Holocaust and the Jews, Is Theory Good for the Jews? explores how “French thought” is implicated in intellectual, literary and ideological components of the global and local upsurge of antisemitism. The author probes the legacy of Heidegger in France and exposes the shortcomings of radical social critique and postcolonial theory confronted to the challenge of Islamic terrorism and Jew hatred. This book is the first effort to analyze French responses that have regrettably played their part in generating the new antisemitism.

Over the last decade Spain and Mexico have both produced an extraordinary wealth of television drama and are among the leaders in their respective continents. The new dramas have high production values (easily the equal of cinema), intricately plotted narratives, and compellingly ambivalent characters. They are thus clearly worthy of the close textual analysis they have not yet received. Drawing on both national practices of production and reception (based on archival research in Madrid and Mexico City) and international theories of textual analysis, this book offers the first study of contemporary quality TV drama in two countries where, unlike elsewhere, it is not yet recognized that television has displaced cinema as the creative medium that shapes the national narrative. As dramatized societies, Spain and Mexico are thus at once reflected and refracted by the new series on the small screen. Social issues treated include historical memory, youth, drugs, race, and gender.

This book examines the grass-roots relationship between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the civilian population during the Irish Revolution. It is primarily concerned with the attempts of the militant revolutionaries to discourage, stifle, and punish dissent among the local populations in which they operated, and the actions or inactions by which dissent was expressed or implied. Focusing on the period of guerilla war against British rule from c. 1917 to 1922, it uncovers the acts of ‘everyday’ violence, threat, and harm that characterized much of the revolutionary activity of this period in the Irish town or parish. It begins by treating the IRA’s challenge to the British state through the campaign against servants of the Crown – policemen, magistrates, civil servants, and others – and IRA participation in local government and the republican counter-state. The book then explores the nature of civilian defiance and IRA punishment in communities across the island before turning its attention specifically to the year that followed the ‘Truce’ of July 1921. This study argues that civilians rarely operated at either extreme of a spectrum of support but, rather, in a large and fluid middle ground. Behaviour was rooted in local circumstances, and influenced by local fears, suspicions, and rivalries. IRA punishment was similarly dictated by community conditions and usually suited to the nature of the perceived defiance. Overall, violence and intimidation in Ireland was persistent, but, by some contemporary standards, relatively restrained.