This co-edited collection breaks new ground by bringing together several leading scholars to explore the substantial body of work produced by Padraic Colum (1881–1972) who was a poet, a novelist, a dramatist, a biographer, a writer of fiction for adults and children, and a collector of folklore. The awards, honours, and distinction conferred upon him and his work throughout his life and career, as well as retrospectively, give an indication of the significant and wide-ranging appeal and influence of Colum not only as an Irish writer and storyteller but also as a literary figure entrusted with the myths and legends of other cultures and nations. Despite such achievements, he has received comparatively little critical or scholarly attention to date. This volume showcases the richness of Colum’s work by subjecting it to a rigorous literary and theoretical examination and is the first combined and detailed analysis of both his children’s and adult texts.

Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is the first study to offer complete and comprehensive explanations of the most significant philosophical references in James Joyce's avant-garde masterpiece. Philosophy is important in all of Joyce's works, but it is his final novel which most fully engages with that field. Robert Baines shows the broad range of philosophers Joyce wove into his last work, from Aristotle to Confucius, Bergson to Kant. For each major philosophical allusion in Finnegans Wake, this book explains the original idea and reveals how Joyce first encountered it. Drawing upon extensive research into Joyce's notebooks and drafts, Baines then shows how Joyce developed and adapted that idea through repeated revisions. From here, the final form of the idea as it appears in the Wake is explored. In carefully examining the Wake's key philosophical allusions, essential themes within the novel come into focus, including history, time, language, being, and perception. We see also how those allusions combine to create a network of ideas, thinkers, and texts which has a logic and an integrity. Ultimately, Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake shows that the more one knows of the Wake's philosophical allusions, the more one can find meaning and reason in this famously perplexing book of the night.

This work is a portrait of the life of the elder Yeats and his family, showing that J.B. Yeats was as worthy of his sons as they were of their father.

Joyce said, "My imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn't when I read Freud or Jung." This volume is the first extended examination of the connections between Vico and Joyce. Joyce employed Vico's New Science as the basis of Finnegans Wake, as he employed Homer's Odyssey as the basis of Ulysses. In what ways are Vico and Joyce similar? To what extent is Vico an influence on Joyce? And in what ways can Vico's philosophy be newly understood when seen in relation to Joyce's use of it? This book suggests ways to see both thinkers anew. Vico and Joyce is divided into three major parts: "Cycles and History," in which Vico's famous conception of the course and recourse of historical events is examined in relation to Joyce's use of this idea in Finnegans Wake; "Joyce and Vico," in which the relationship between the two thinkers is approached more from the side of Joyce than Vico; "Language and Myth," in which the similarities of Vico's and Joyce's grasp of language and imaginative forms of thought are considered. This book opens up a relationship and set of ideas whose time has come. In the last decade there has been an exciting renaissance in the study of Vico that originated in the English-speaking world and spread back to Italy. Joyce has been the one major twentieth-century figure through which most English readers have come to know something of Vico. To consider them together opens up new avenues for our understanding of the imagination, memory, and the cyclic course of human history.

This book looks at James Joyce's relationship with his friends in Paris: the hard-drinking Robert McAlmon, the gentle James Stephens, the artist Arthur Power, Padraic and Mary Colum, Thomas MacGreevy and Samuel Beckett.

A masterful history of Ireland’s Easter Rising told through the lives of ordinary people who forged a revolutionary generation. On Easter Monday, 1916, Irish rebels poured into Dublin’s streets to proclaim an independent republic. Ireland’s long struggle for self-government had suddenly become a radical and bloody fight for independence from Great Britain. Irish nationalists mounted a week-long insurrection, occupying public buildings and creating mayhem before the British army regained control. The Easter Rising provided the spark for the Irish revolution, a turning point in the violent history of Irish independence. In this highly original history, acclaimed scholar R. F. Foster explores the human dimension of this pivotal event. He focuses on the ordinary men and women, Yeats’s “vivid faces,” who rose “from counter or desk among grey / Eighteenth-century houses” and took to the streets. A generation made, not born, they rejected the inherited ways of the Church, their bourgeois families, and British rule. They found inspiration in the ideals of socialism and feminism, in new approaches to love, art, and belief. Drawing on fresh sources, including personal letters and diaries, Foster summons his characters to life. We meet Rosamond Jacob, who escaped provincial Waterford for bustling Dublin. On a jaunt through the city she might visit a modern art gallery, buy cigarettes, or read a radical feminist newspaper. She could practice the Irish language, attend a lecture on Freud, or flirt with a man who would later be executed for his radical activity. These became the roots of a rich life of activism in Irish and women’s causes. Vivid Faces shows how Rosamond and her peers were galvanized to action by a vertiginous sense of transformation: as one confided to his diary, “I am changing and things around me change.” Politics had fused with the intimacies of love and belief, making the Rising an event not only of the streets but also of the hearts and minds of a generation.