This collection gathers together 12 essays by Irish intellectuals and international postcolonial critics as they engage in the debate over how postcolonial Ireland was and is. The approach in all the essays is theoretical, historical and comparative.

A pioneering study of the development of one of the key critical discourses in contemporary Irish studies, this book covers all the major figures, publications and debates within Irish postcolonial criticism, delivering a commentary on this diverse body of work as well as positioning Irish postcolonial criticism within the wider postcolonial field.

This ground-breaking analysis of the cultural trajectory of England's first colony constitutes a major contribution to postcolonial studies, offering a template relevant to most cultures emerging from colonialism. At the same time, these Irish case studies become the means of interrogating contemporary theories of translation. Moving authoritatively between literary theory and linguistics, philosophy and cultural studies, anthropology and systems theory, the author provides a model for a much needed integrated approach to translation theory and practice. In the process, the work of a number of important literary translators is scrutinized, including such eminent and disparate figures as Standishn O'Grady, Augusta Gregory and Thomas Kinsella. The interdependence of the Irish translation movement and the work of the great 20th century writers of Ireland - including Yeats and Joyce - becomes clear, expressed for example in the symbiotic relationship that marks their approach to Irish formalism. Translation in a Postcolonial Context is essential reading for anyone interested in translation theory and practice, postcolonial studies, and Irish literature during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Published twenty years ago, Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory was a landmark description of the field of postcolonial studies in theoretical terms that set its intellectual context alongside poststructuralism, postmodernism, Marxism, and feminism. Gandhi examined the contributions of major thinkers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and the subaltern historians. The book pointed to postcolonialism’s relationship with earlier anticolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and M. K. Gandhi and explained pertinent concepts and schools of thought—hybridity, Orientalism, humanism, Marxist dialectics, diaspora, nationalism, gendered subalternity, globalization, and postcolonial feminism. The revised edition of this classic work reaffirms its status as a useful starting point for readers new to the field and as a provocative account that opens up possibilities for debate. It includes substantial additions: A new preface and epilogue reposition postcolonial studies within evolving intellectual contexts and take stock of important critical developments. Gandhi examines recent alliances with critical race theory and Africanist postcolonialism, considers challenges from postsecular and postcritical perspectives, and takes into account the ontological, environmental, affective, and ethical turns in the changed landscape of critical theory. She describes what is enduring in postcolonial thinking—as a critical perspective within the academy and as an attitude to the world that extends beyond the discipline of postcolonial studies.

Provides an in-depth introduction to debates within post-colonial theory and criticism. The many contributors include Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Anthony Giddens, Anne McClintock, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and bell hooks.

Anomalous States is an archeology of modern Irish writing. David Lloyd commences with recent questioning of Irish identity in the wake of the northern conflict and returns to the complex terrain of nineteenth-century culture in which those questions of identity were first formed. In five linked essays, he explores modern Irish literature and its political contexts through the work of four Irish writers--Heaney, Beckett, Yeats, and Joyce. Beginning with Heaney and Beckett, Lloyd shows how in these authors the question of identity connects with the dominance of conservative cultural nationalism and argues for the need to understand Irish culture in relation to the wider experience of colonized societies. A central essay reads Yeats's later works as a profound questioning of the founding of the state. Final essays examine the gradual formation of the state and nation as one element in a cultural process that involves conflict between popular cultural forms and emerging political economies of nationalism and the colonial state. Modern Ireland is thus seen as the product of a continuing process in which, Lloyd argues, the passage to national independence that defines Ireland's post-colonial status is no more than a moment in its continuing history. Anomalous States makes an important contribution to the growing body of work that connects cultural theory with post-colonial historiography, literary analysis, and issues in contemporary politics. It will interest a wide readership in literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and history.

On the surface, James Joyce’s work is largely apolitical. Through most of the twentieth century he was the proud embodiment of the rootless intellectual. However, perspectives on the colonial history of Ireland have proliferated in recent years, yielding a subtle and complex conception of the Irish postcolonial experience that has become a major theme in current Joyce scholarship. In this volume Leonard Orr brings together a diverse collection of essays situating Joyce in the debates generated by postcolonial theory and discourse. Highly original and often provocative, these essays bring Joyce powerfully within the ambit of postcolonial studies.

In Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender, Leith Davis studies the construction of Irish national identity from the early eighteenth until the midnineteenth centuries, focusing in particular on how texts concerning Irish music, as well as the social settings within which those texts emerged, contributed to the imagining of Ireland as the Land of Song. Through her considerations of collections of Irish music by the Neals, Edward Bunting, and George Petrie, antiquarian tracts by Joseph Cooper Walker and Charlotte Brooke, lyrics and The Wild Irish Girl by Sidney Owenson, and songs by Thomas Moore and Samuel Lover, Davis suggests that music served as an ideal means through which to address the terms of the colonial relationship between Ireland and England. Davis also explores the gender issues so closely related to the discourses on both music and national identity during the time, and the influence of print culture and consumer capitalism on the representation of Irish music at home and abroad.

For hundreds of years, Ireland has been a testing ground for colonizing techniques. Postcolonial Dublin shows how perpetrators of colonialism have made use of urban planning and architecture to underscore and legitimate ideologies. From suburban development to building facades, the conflict between nationalists and colonialists has inscribed itself on Dublin's landscape. Andrew Kincaid illustrates how the architecture and urban planning of Dublin have been integral to debates about nationalism, modernism, and Ireland's relationship to the rest of the world. Looking at objects such as Londonderry's Market House, Patrick Abercrombie's Dublin of the Future, and the urban renewal project of today's Temple Bar, Kincaid highlights Ireland's colonial history and the significance of architecture in the evolution of national identity. In doing so, he demonstrates how ideology "spatializes" itself. Postcolonial Dublin engages the prevailing historical representations of Irish nationalism, arguing that the evolving city reflected a debate over who would hold the reins of power. Bringing the tools of literary criticism and postcolonial theory to bear on the field of urban studies, Kincaid places Dublin at the forefront of debates over modernism, modernity, and globalization.Andrew Kincaid is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

"James Joyce: Developing Irish Identity" follows the increasing focus on Irish identity in Joyce's major works of prose. This book traces the development of the idea of Ireland, the concept of Irishness, the formation of a national identity and the need to deconstruct a nationalistic self-conception of nation in Joyce's work. Through close reading of "Dubliners", "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", "Stephen Hero" and "Ulysses", Joyce articulates the problems that colonialism poses to a nation-state that cannot create its identity autonomously. Furthermore, this reading uncovers Joyce's conception of national identity as increasingly sophisticated and complicated after Irish independence was won. From here, Halloran argues that Joyce presents his readers with ideas and suggestions for the future of Ireland. As Irish studies become increasingly imbricated with postcolonial discourse, the need for re-examination of classic texts becomes necessary."James Joyce: Developing Irish Identity" provides a new approach for understanding the dramatic development of Joyce's oeuvre by providing a textual analysis guided by postcolonial theory.