Helen Constantine

Eve Patten

Paul Delaney

Dublin Tales

Second Volume of Papers from the John Hewitt International Summer School

Returning to Ourselves

This book asks how English authors of the early to mid twentieth-century responded to the nationalist revolution in neighbouring Ireland in their work, and explores this response as an expression of anxieties about, and aspirations within, England itself. Drawing predominantly on novels ofthis period, but also on letters, travelogues, literary criticism, and memoir, it illustrates how Irish affairs provided a marginal but pervasive point of reference for a wide range of canonical authors in England, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and EvelynWaugh, and also for many lesser-known figures such as Ethel Mannin, George Thomson, and T.H. White.The book surveys these and other incidental writers within the broad framework of literary modernism, an arc seen to run in temporal parallel to Ireland's revolutionary trajectory from rebellion to independence. In this context, it addresses two distinct aspects of the Irish-English relationship asit features in the literature of the time: first, the uneasy recognition of a fundamental similarity between the two countries in terms of their potential for violent revolutionary instability, and second, the proleptic engagement of Irish events to prefigure, imaginatively, the potential course ofEngland's evolution from the Armistice to the Second World War. Tracing these effects, this book offers a topical renegotiation of the connections between Irish and English literary culture, nationalism, and political ideology, together with a new perspective on the Irish sources engaged by Englishliterary modernism.

Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination

This volume explores the history of Irish writing between the Second World War (or the 'Emergency') in 1939 and the re-emergence of violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It situates modern Irish writing within the contexts of cultural transition and transnational connection, often challenging pre-existing perceptions of Irish literature in this period as stagnant and mundane. While taking into account the grip of Irish censorship and cultural nationalism during the mid-twentieth century, these essays identify an Irish literary culture stimulated by international political horizons and fully responsive to changes in publishing, readership, and education. The book combines valuable cultural surveys with focussed discussions of key literary moments, and of individual authors such as Seán O'Faoláin, Samuel Beckett, Edna O'Brien, and John McGahern.

Irish Literature in Transition, 1940-1980:

Richard Pine

“The most terrible disaster that one group of human beings can inflict on another is war. Wars cause misery on an indescribable scale. Yet we go on doing it to one another, generation after generation. Why? Warfare is a recurrent and universal characteristic of human existence. The mythologies of practically all peoples abound in wars and the superhuman deeds of warriors, and pre-literate communities apparently delighted in the recital of stories about battles. Since our species became literate a mere 5,000 years ago, written history has mostly been the history of wars. Thousands who knew war evidently sickened of it and dreamt of lasting peace, expressing their vision in literature and art, in philosophy and religion. They imagined Utopias freed of martial ambition and bloodshed which harked back to the Golden Age of classical antiquity, to the Christian vision of a paradise lost, and to the Arcadia of Greek and Latin poetry, so richly celebrated in the canvases of Claude and Poussin. All these things bear eloquent testimony to the human longing for peace, but they have not triumphed over our dreadfully powerful propensity to war.” —from the Introduction by Anthony Stevens In this multi-disciplinary collection of essays on the manifestations of war in poetry, fiction, drama, music and documentaries, scholars and practitioners from an international context describe the transformation of the war experience into chronicles of hope and despair, from Herodotus up to the present day.

Literatures of War

Irish Literature in Transition, 1940–1980: Volume 5

Olivia Manning's reputation as a difficult personality often threatens to obscure her reputation as a writer. Few twentieth century novelists can have inspired such consistent dislike. The publisher Dan Davin, for example, who was devoted to Manning's gregarious husband Reggie Smith, complained of her as a shrewish woman whose aim was to be as unpleasant to as many people as possible, while the legendary denizen of Fitzrovia, Julian Maclaren-Ross, recalled among his Stag's Head drinking circle the taciturn, undemonstrative and physically unattractive Olivia Manning who, from the vantage point of her bar-stool regarded the others with an expression of amusement, mingled with contempt. Fellow writer Inez Holden christened her "whiney" Manning; Anthony Powell, her otherwise generous editor at Punch, admitted her to be the world's worst grumbler and her publishers at Heinemann were forced to conclude that she was never an easy artist to handle. Even Kay Dick, her lifelong friend and correspondent, depicted Manning in her 1984 novel The Shelf as the spiteful gossip Sophie, who, with her wry fragility, delicate hands and penetrating voice . . . often reminded me of a goshawk about to bite.

Eve Patten

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