What happens when cultural memory becomes a commodity? Who owns the memory? In The Memory Marketplace, Emilie Pine explores how memory is performed both in Ireland and abroad by considering the significant body of contemporary Irish theatre that contends with its own culture and history. Analyzing examples from this realm of theatre, Pine focuses on the idea of witnesses, both as performers on stage and as members of the audience. Whose memories are observed in these transactions, and how and why do performances prioritize some memories over others? What does it mean to create, rehearse, perform, and purchase the theatricalization of memory? The Memory Marketplace shows this transaction to be particularly fraught in the theatricalization of traumatic moments of cultural upheaval, such as the child sexual abuse scandal in Ireland. In these performances, the role of empathy becomes key within the marketplace dynamic, and Pine argues that this empathy shapes the kinds of witnesses created. The complexities and nuances of this exchange—subject and witness, spectator and performer, consumer and commodified—provide a deeper understanding of the crucial role theatre plays in shaping public understanding of trauma, memory, and history.

Twenty-five years in the making, a first novel that has already been compared to The Sun Also Rises and The Last Tycoon, Cheat and Charmer is certain to be one of the most admired literary debuts of the season. Written by Pulitzer Prize—winning biographer Elizabeth Frank, Cheat and Charmer is a masterful and richly detailed work of fiction–a Tolstoyan novel of marriage, sisterhood, art, politics, compromise, and betrayal set in Hollywood, New York, Paris, and London of the 1950s. Dinah Lasker grew up in the shadow of her sister, Veevi, a stunning beauty and emerging star who enchanted both the Hollywood set and its imported New York literati. But Veevi’s home was also a hotbed of political activity, owing to her marriage to Stefan Ventura, a Bulgarian filmmaker and high-profile Communist. At the end of the 1930s, when things go badly for him in Hollywood, Ventura and Veevi flee to Paris and into the lengthening shadows of Hitler and fascism. Cut to 1951, when Dinah is subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which threatens to ruin her husband, Jake, and derail his successful career as a Hollywood writer, producer, and director unless she cooperates. Can Dinah live with herself if she names Veevi–whom she both loves and loathes–in order to save her husband and preserve her idyllic married life? The choices Dinah makes set in motion an unforgettable chain of events. Like Anna Karenina, Dinah must face the consequences of her choices and her needs. Written with elegance and style, Cheat and Charmer grippingly dramatizes the interior lives of Dinah, Veevi, Jake, and their social circle. Spanning decades and following complex characters on their impassioned pursuits through America and Europe, this is a novel of grand scope, about love and deception, idealism and accommodation, the lies we live, and the truths we cannot avoid.

Regarded by scholars and fans alike as an important female author of the nineteenth century, Constance Fenimore Woolson -- a relative of the great chronicler of early American life, James Fenimore Cooper -- was known for her uniquely compelling characterizations, particularly of the women in her stories. This collection of sketches and tales highlights Woolson's strengths as a literary artist.

From a boy’s first acquaintance with nature and the meaning of time to witnessing climate change and desolating wars, Theodore Haddin’s poems in The Pendulum Moves Off celebrate the lives of humans and Earth’s other animal inhabitants with longing, exuberance, and awakening. Time is in the clock as well as in nature, and our extraction of the natural world diminishes us as well. In truth, “tock and tick” are not forever, but the call of art and music and Haddin’s love of rivers in this beautiful and thought-provoking collection remind us of a better way of life we have yet to discover.

This anthology contains nine stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) that dramatize the dilemmas and strategies of the first generation of American women writers to see themselves as artists. As the great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and the intimate friend of Henry James, Woolson was acutely conscious of her situation as a woman writer. Her stories offer answers to her own urgent questions: "Why do literary women break down so?" At the same time, they demonstrate that women's struggles with patriarchal culture and with their own womanhood could be a source of distunctive female art. Woolson's early stories are witty and incisive critiques of those conventions of literary Romanticism that encode women's marginality. Set in the wilderness that surrounded the Great Lakes, these stories revise male literary texts to clear a space where women's voices can be heard. In a group of stories set in the post-Civil War south, women artists are shown as exiles both away from their homes and from themselves. One superb tale, "Felipa," pairs a repressed woman artist with a wild child who rejects both patriarchal religion and approved heterosexual behavior. Woolson here explores the possibility of a collaboration between female wildness and female form of control. Stories written during Woolson's years in Europe confront woman artists with successful male writers and critics who resemble Henry James. These carefully crafted stories reflect James's mixed impact on women artists: as a model literary realist and as a subtle denigrator of women's talent. Joan Weimar's introduction uses unpublished letters to reconstruct and interpret Wool's life and her probable suicide. It places Woolson in the male and female literary traditions of her time and offers extended analysis of the stories.

This book examines the phenomenon of modern memory as a reaction to total war, an aspiration to truth-seeking provoked by the independent forces of modern war and collective violence which is transnational, or postnational, in character. Using examples from prose and poetry, film and theatre, painting and photography, and music and the popular arts, the author traces a narrative path through the events of the twentieth century, defining the tradition of modern memory in terms of its essentially anti-militaristic, anti-war character, as expressed in the manner in which it represents recalled violence and atrocity. Through a series of thematic discussions of two world wars, the Shoah, urbicide and nuclear weapons, Postnational Memory explores the formation of transnational memory, drawing on examples from industrialized societies, with a focus on memory of real events and their reproduction in literature and the arts, often including personal recollections that link the self to the represented past. As such, by asking how the concept of modern memory is constructed through the victims of war and genocide, the book constitutes an alternative to national memories and hegemonic, militarist or ethnocentric histories. Surveying the emergence of new, transnational forms of remembering the past, it will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, memory studies and peace studies, as well as those working in disciplines such as modern and international history, cultural studies and military studies.

When we engage with the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, we encounter a culture radically unfamiliar to us at the start of the twenty-first century. The past is a foreign country, and so too are many of its texts. This readable and provocative book seeks to enhance our understanding of early modern literature by recovering the contexts in which it was originally produced and consumed. Taking us back to the courts, theatres and marketplaces of early modern England, Jason Scott-Warren reveals the varied ways in which literary texts dovetailed with everyday experience, unlocking the distinctive social practices, economic structures and modes of behaviour that gave them meaning. He shows how the periods most beguiling writings were conditioned by long-forgotten notions of knowledge, nationhood, sexuality and personal identity. Bringing an anthropologists eye to his materials, he offers richly detailed new readings of works from within and beyond the canon, covering a span that stretches from Erasmus and More to Milton and Behn. Resisting any notion of the period as merely transitional a staging post on the road leading from the medieval to the modern world Scott-Warren reveals the distinctiveness of its literary culture, and equips the reader for fresh encounters with its extraordinary textual legacy. Any undergraduate student of the period will find it an essential guide, while scholars will find its fresh approach invigorating.