Derry~Londonderry has a distinctive cultural history which reflects its unique position in the history of Ireland. This ground-breaking book examines three centuries of music and theatre in the city highlighting the key figures and turning points in its cultural life. It documents the rich diversity of drama and concerts played out in the city’s theatres and concert halls, from the birth of playwright George Farquhar in 1677 to performances by the Field Day Theatre Company and the cultural revival of the 1990s and beyond.

County Down, where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea, has a rich heritage of myths and legends which is uniquely captured in this collection of tales by local storyteller Steve Lally. Discover the trails were the outlaw Redmond O'Halon was said to once roam, the road where you might come across the Ghost Girl of Ballymullan, and the cliffs from which a young girl called Maggie once made a desperate and death-defying leap. Along with the tales of the changeling of Glascar, the Giant of Lisburn and the visit old Auld Nick once paid to an old woman in Downpatrick. These stores, illustrated with twenty-five line drawings, bring alive the counties dramatic landscape and is sure to appeal to both residents and tourists alike.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 New Year’s is a day filled with new hope and fresh starts, except for those who are unfortunate enough to live during the New Year. For some people, January 1 was a dead end. #2 Timothy Pickering was an early American pest. He was so obnoxious that even his own biographer couldn’t stand him. But he was the first senator to be censured for telling the truth. #3 Ronald Wayne, the co-founder of Apple Computers, was a lucky man when he was set free from the company in 1977. He had been given a 10 percent stake to serve as Apple’s parent, but he felt that the risk was too great. Instead, he sold stamps and coins out of his mobile home in Nevada. #4 The War of Currents was a fight between Edison’s direct current system and Nikola Tesla’s alternating current system. It was a vicious campaign to discredit the rival system, and it culminated in the public execution of a convicted ax murderer named William Kemmler in 1890.

“Clearing the Ground”–The Field Day Theatre Company and the Construction of Irish Identities studies the Field Day Theatre Company, with special focus on the plays that they put on stage between 1980 and 1995; it attempts to dissect their policy and observe the way in which this policy influences the discourse of the theatrical productions. Was Field Day simply the “cultural wing” of Sinn Fein and the IRA, or did they try to give voice to a new critical discourse, challenging the traditional frames of representation? This book focuses on a thorough analysis of the way in which Field Day applied the concepts of postcolonial discourse to their own needs of creating a foundation for the ideological manifesto of the company. This study is a critique of the successes and failures of a theatre company that, in a period of political and cultural crisis, engaged in innovative ways of discussing the sensitive issues of identity, memory and history in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

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 series contains what no other study guides can offer - extensive first-hand interviews with the playwrights and their closest collaborators on all of their major work, put together by top academics especially for the modern student market. As well as invaluable synopses, biographical essays and chronologies, these guides allow the student much closer to the playwright than ever before! In About Friel, teacher and playwright Tony Coult has selected an extensive and stimulating range of documents and interview material that explores Friel's life, work and the experiences of his collaborators and fellow artists who put that work on stage, including Patrick Mason, Connall Morrison, Joe Dowling and actors Catherine Byrne and Mark Lambert. If you want to read just one book on Brian Friel and the titanic power of his work, this is it.

Forgetful Remembrance examines the paradoxes of what actually happens when communities persistently endeavour to forget inconvenient events. The question of how a society attempts to obscure problematic historical episodes is addressed through a detailed case study grounded in the north-eastern counties of the Irish province of Ulster, where loyalist and unionist Protestants—and in particular Presbyterians—repeatedly tried to repress over two centuries discomfiting recollections of participation, alongside Catholics, in a republican rebellion in 1798. By exploring a rich variety of sources, Beiner makes it possible to closely follow the dynamics of social forgetting. His particular focus on vernacular historiography, rarely noted in official histories, reveals the tensions between professed oblivion in public and more subtle rituals of remembrance that facilitated muted traditions of forgetful remembrance, which were masked by a local culture of reticence and silencing. Throughout Forgetful Remembrance, comparative references demonstrate the wider relevance of the study of social forgetting in Northern Ireland to numerous other cases where troublesome memories have been concealed behind a veil of supposed oblivion.