This edited collection presents a selection of essays on the history of Irish masculinities. Beginning with representations of masculinity in eighteenth-century drama, economics, and satire, and concluding with work on the politics of masculinity post Good-Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, the collection advances the importance of masculinities in our understanding of Irish history and historiography. Using a variety of approaches, including literary and legal theory as well as cultural, political and local histories, this collection illuminates the differing forms, roles, and representations of Irish masculinities. Themes include the politicisation of Irishmen in both the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland; muscular manliness in the Irish Diaspora; Orangewomen and political agency; the disruptive possibility of the rural bachelor; and aspirational constructions of boyhood. Several essays explore how masculinity is constructed and performed by women, thus emphasizing the necessity of differentiating masculinity from maleness. These essays demonstrate the value of gender and masculinities for historical research and the transformative potential of these concepts in how we envision Ireland’s past, present, and future.

This book is a comparative study of masculinity and white racial identity in Irish nationalism and Zionism. It analyses how both national movements sought to refute widespread anti-Irish or anti-Jewish stereotypes and create more prideful (and highly gendered) images of their respective nations. Drawing on English-, Irish-, and Hebrew-language archival sources, Aidan Beatty traces how male Irish nationalists sought to remake themselves as a proudly Gaelic-speaking race, rooted both in their national past as well as in the spaces and agricultural soil of Ireland. On the one hand, this was an attempt to refute contemporary British colonial notions that they were somehow a racially inferior or uncomfortably hybridised people. But this is also presented in the light of the general history of European nationalism; nationalist movements across Europe often crafted romanticised images of the nation’s past and Irish nationalism was thus simultaneously European and postcolonial. It is this that makes Irish nationalism similar to Zionism, a movement that sought to create a more idealized image of the Jewish past that would disprove contemporary anti-Semitic stereotypes.

The forty-two chapters in this book consider Yeats's early toil, his practical and esoteric concerns as his career developed, his friends and enemies, and how he was and is understood. This Handbook brings together critics and writers who have considered what Yeats wrote and how he wrote, moving between texts and their contexts in ways that will lead the reader through Yeats's multiple selves as poet, playwright, public figure, and mystic. It assembles a variety of views and adds to a sense of dialogue, the antinomian or deliberately-divided way of thinking that Yeats relished and encouraged. This volume puts that sense of a living dialogue in tune both with the history of criticism on Yeats and also with contemporary critical and ethical debates, not shirking the complexities of Yeats's more uncomfortable political positions or personal life. It provides one basis from which future Yeats scholarship can continue to participate in the fascination of all the contributors here in the satisfying difficulty of this great writer.

A History of Irish Women's Poetry is a ground-breaking and comprehensive account of Irish women's poetry from earliest times to the present day. It reads Irish women's poetry through many prisms – mythology, gender, history, the nation – and most importantly, close readings of the poetry itself. It covers major figures, such as Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, as well as neglected figures from the past. Writing in both English and Irish is considered, and close attention paid to the many different contexts in which Irish women's poetry has been produced and received, from the anonymous work of the early medieval period, through the bardic age, the coterie poets of Anglo-Ireland, the nationalist balladeers of Young Ireland, the Irish Literary Revival, and the advent of modernity. As capacious as it is diverse, this book is an essential contribution to scholarship in the field.

Banned and beloved in equal measure, The Midnight Court is a canonical eighteenth-century text widely considered to be one of the greatest comic Irish poems. Despite its simple storyline, Merriman’s poem addresses a wide range of themes from its satirical treatment of sexuality to its biting social commentary. This volume, the first critical edition, offers readers a fluid translation and five essays that contextualize the poem, making it an ideal text for any student of the poem and eighteenth-century Irish literature.

Even though the Irish child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church have appeared steadily in the media, many children remain in peril. In The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature, Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus examine modern cultural responses to child sex abuse in Ireland. Using descriptions of these scandals found in newspapers, historiographical analysis, and 20th- and 21st-century literature, Valente and Backus expose a public sphere ardently committed to Irish children's souls and piously oblivious to their physical welfare. They offer historically contextualized and psychoanalytically informed readings of scandal narratives by nine notable modern Irish authors who actively, pointedly, and persistently question Ireland's responsibilities regarding its children. Through close, critical readings, a more nuanced and troubling account emerges of how Ireland's postcolonial heritage has served to enable such abuse. The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature refines the debates on why so many Irish children were lost by offering insight into the lived experience of both the children and those who failed them.

This groundbreaking book shatters historical stereotypes, demonstrating that, in the century before 1870, Ireland was not an anglicized kingdom and was capable of articulating modernity in the Irish language. It gives a dynamic account of the complexity of Ireland in the nineteenth century, developments in church and state, and the adaptive bilingualism found across all regions, social levels, and religious persuasions.

This book engages with ageing masculinities in Irish literature and visual culture, including fiction, drama, poetry, painting, and documentary. Exploring the shifting representations of older men from the early twentieth century to the present, the contributors analyse how a broad range of literary and visual texts construct, reinscribe, or challenge perceptions of older age. In doing so, they trace a shift from depictions of authority figures - often symbolising patriarchal dominance and oppression - to more nuanced, complex, and heterogeneous explorations of older men’s embodied subjectivities and vulnerabilities. Exploring artists and writers such as Seán Keating, J.M. Synge, Teresa Deevy, Marina Carr, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Kate O’Brien, John Banville, Colm Tóibín, Bernard MacLaverty, Mike McCormack, Anne Griffin, and Claire Keegan, the chapters in this book attend to the symbolic as well as social significance of older men in Irish cultural expression.

Imprisonment is a central trope of Irish nationalism, often deployed to portray the injustice of an Ireland occupied by foreign rule. Irish nationalism celebrates people jailed for resistance to British forces. While such a celebratory history resists colonialist images of Irish brutality, it also generates nationalist amnesia and nostalgia. Rethinking Occupied Ireland takes this history as its point of departure, arguing that the potent visual language generated to represent national heroes facilitates a narrow conceptualization of “occupation” and “resistance.” Irish cinema has long offered a double critique—against both colonialist and nationalist historiography. Through a study of incarceration in film, Scarlata critiques state-of-emergency discourses and reveals the global relevance of Irish history to questions of terrorism, security, and sexual and gender transgression in an ever-lengthening list of crimes against the nation. The films included in this book, ranging from 1980 to 2010, explore Irish history from the perspective of those marginalized within or ejected from Irish and British national narratives, providing an ideal occasion to interrogate the legacy of colonialism and post/anticolonial nationalism. Examining Ireland’s past in relation to its present, these films become a mode of postcolonial historiography, and, Scarlata argues, they are an important component in the reevaluation of what constitutes political cinema and political resistance.