Explores concepts of performance, modernity and progress by combining performance studies and historical research with contextualised readings of Synge's plays.

Explores the outlook of certain important classes in late 19th- and early 20th-century Ireland through an assessment of Irish Catholic fiction.

This groundbreaking book explores the role 19th century Irish Catholic authors played in forging the creation of modern Irish literature. As such it offers a unique tour of Ireland’s literary landscape, from early origins during the Catholic political resurgence of the 1820s to the transformative zenith wrought by James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. Emer Nolan observes that contemporary Irish literature is steeped in the ambitions and internal conflicts of a previously captive Irish Catholic culture that came into its own with the narrative art form. He revisits, with keen insights, the prescient and influential songs, poems, and prose of Thomas Moore. He also points out that Moore’s wildly successful work helped create an audience for authors to come, i.e. John and Michael Banim, William Carleton and the popular novelists Gerald Griffin and Charles Kickham. An innovative aspect of this study is the author’s exploration of the relationship between James Joyce and Irish culture and his nineteenth-century Irish Catholic predecessors and their political and national passions. It is, in effect, a telling look at the future history of Irish fiction.

This is the first full-length study of the life and work of novelist Gerald O’Donovan (1871–1942), a Catholic priest and social and cultural activist who, having abandoned the priesthood, became a writer and publisher. As a priest in Loughrea, Co. Galway, he was a very public figure in Irish life in several different areas. He was friendly with W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and George Moore and actively promoted the ‘Celtic Revival’. He was also a friend of Douglas Hyde and Sir Horace Plunkett and, for a number of years, he was a national figure in their respective organizations, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement. After his marriage to Beryl Verschoyle, he moved to England and subsequently published six novels, the best-known and most controversial of which was Father Ralph (1913), a portrait of the artist as a priest. He also spent time working in the British Department of Propaganda under Lord Northcliffe, where H.G. Wells was one of his colleagues. This biography of an important and strangely neglected figure allows us new insights into a whole range of interesting cultural moments in twentieth-century Irish life, including the beginnings of literary modernism, the flourishing of the Irish literary revival and the emergence of a dissident strand within the Catholic clergy. Based on a rich and previously untapped array of archival material in Ireland, Britain and the US, the book provides both a much-needed reassessment of O'Donovan's work and also a history of Irish writing during those early decades of the twentieth century that saw the development of a new and powerful national literature.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The introduction of co-operative societies into the Irish countryside during the late-nineteenth century transformed rural society and created an enduring economic legacy. Civilising rural Ireland challenges predominant narratives of Irish history that explain the emergence of the nation-state through the lens of political conflict and violence. Instead the book takes as its focus the numerous leaders, organisers, and members of the Irish co-operative movement. Together these people captured the spirit of change as they created a modern Ireland through their reorganisation of the countryside, the spread of new economic ideas, and the promotion of mutually-owned businesses. Besides giving a comprehensive account of the co-operative movement’s introduction to Irish society the book offers an analysis of the importance of these radical economic ideas upon political Irish nationalism.

Comprehensive account of the role of religion in the divisions of Ireland, North and South, beginning with a social and historical survey and proceeding to a thorough cultural and structural analysis of contemporary divisions in the context of Ireland as a whole.