In Ireland, few figures have generated more hatred than Oliver Cromwell, whose seventeenth-century conquest, massacres, and dispossessions would endure in the social memory for ages to come. The Devil from over the Sea explores the many ways in which Cromwell was remembered and sometimes conveniently 'forgotten' in historical, religious, political, and literary texts, according to the interests of different communities across time. Cromwell's powerful afterlife in Ireland, however, cannot be understood without also investigating his presence in folklore and the landscape, in ruins and curses. Nor can he be separated from the idea of the 'Cromwellian': a term which came to elicit an entire chain of contemptuous associations that would begin after his invasion and assume a wholly new force in the nineteenth century. What emerges from all these memorializing traces is a multitudinous Cromwell who could be represented as brutal, comic, sympathetic, or satanic. He could be discarded also, tellingly, from the accounts of the past, and especially by those which viewed him as an embarrassment or worse. In addition to exploring the many reasons why Cromwell was so vehemently remembered or forgotten in Ireland, Sarah Covington finally uncovers the larger truths conveyed by sometimes fanciful or invented accounts. Contrary to being damaging examples of myth-making, the memorializations contained in martyrologies, folk tales, or newspaper polemics were often productive in cohering communities, or in displaying agency in the form of 'counter-memories' that claimed Cromwell for their own and reshaped Irish history in the process.

Contains the first printing of Sartor resartus, as well as other works by Thomas Carlyle.

Journey Westward suggests that James Joyce was attracted to the west of Ireland as a place of authenticity and freedom. It examines how this acute sensibility is reflected in Dubliners via a series of coded nods and winks, posing new and revealing questions about one of the most enduring and resonant collections of short stories ever written. The answers are a fusion of history and literary criticism, utilizing close readings that balance the techniques of realism and symbolism. The result is a startlingly original study that opens up fresh ways of thinking about Joyce's masterpieces.

Located on a prominent site overlooking Galway Bay in the west of Ireland, Tyrone House was once one of the country’s finest Georgian mansions. Dating from the 1770s, the building was home to generations of the French and St George families, a powerful symbol of their wealth and power. The interior of the house was lavishly decorated and furnished, beginning with the entrance hall, dominated by a life-size marble statue of Lord St George. But despite their advantages, over the course of the nineteenth century, the family went into irreversible decline and eventually forsook their great residence, which was destroyed by fire in 1920. This book tells the story of the rise and fall of the St Georges and their fate, embodied in what became of Tyrone House, which is today a little more than a gaunt ruin.