This collection of new essays addresses a key debate in Irish studies. While it is important that new research endeavours to accommodate the new and powerful manifestations of Irishness that are evident today in our globalised economy, these considerations are often overlooked. The writers in this book seek to reconcile the established critical perspectives of Irish studies with a forward-looking critical momentum that incorporates the realities of globalisation and economic migration. The book initiates this vital discussion by bringing together a series of provocative and thoughtful essays, from both renowned and rising international scholars, on the vicissitudes of cultural identity in a post-modern, post-colonial and post-national Ireland. By including work by leading scholars in the fields of film studies, migration and Diaspora studies, travel literature and gender studies, this collection offers a thorough twenty-first-century interrogation of Irishness and provides a timely fusion of international perspectives on Irish cultural identity.
Contents: Raphaėl Ingelbien: Irish Studies, the Postcolonial Paradigm
and the Comparative Mandate Oona Frawley: Whos he when hes at home?
Spenser and Irishness Anne-Catherine Lobo: Irishness and the Body: The
Presence of the Body in the Debates on Poverty in the Early Nineteenth
Century Linda M. Hagan: The Ulster-Scots and the Greening of Ireland: A
Precarious Belonging? Niall OGallagher: Ma Right Insane Yirwanny Us
Jimmy?: Irishness in Modern Scottish Writing Carol Baraniuk: The Leid, the
Pratoe and the Buik: Northern Cultural Markers in the Works of James Orr
Aoileann Nķ Éigeartaigh: No Rootless Colonist: John Hewitts Regionalist
Approach to Identity Maureen T. Reddy: Representing Travellers Jason
King: Irish Multicultural Fiction: Metaphors of Miscegenation and Interracial
Romance Iris Lindahl-Raittila: Subversive Identities: Femininity, Sexuality
and Irishness in Novels by Edna OBrien Justin Carville: A Sympathetic
Look: Documentary Humanism and Irish Identity in Dorothea Langes Irish
Country People Thomas W. Ihde: Irish-American Identity and the Irish
Language William H. Mulligan, Jr: Shades of Green and Orange: Irish
Identity in Diaspora Florence Schneider: Muldoons Palimpsestic Irishness
Ruth Barton: The Voice of Pierce Brosnan Daniel Tobin: Shades, Minstrel and
Majestic Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem: Self-Contradiction in a Small Place:
Anne Devlins Other at the Edge of Life.
The Editors: James P. Byrne is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Emerson College, Boston. He was a Fulbright Scholar to the University of Massachusetts in 2000. He has recently co-edited the three-volume work Ireland and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History (2008). Padraig Kirwan is currently Lecturer in the Literature of the Americas at Goldsmiths, University of London. He was a Fulbright Scholar to the University of California in 2002 and an Irish Research Council Scholar from 2000 to 2001. His work has appeared in a number of journals including the Journal of American Studies. Michael OSullivan is Assistant Professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His recent publications include Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism and Belief (published by Peter Lang in 2006) and The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a Philosophy of the Flesh (2008).