Prophecy, Fate and Memory in the Early and Medieval Celtic World brings together a collection of studies that closely explore aspects of culture and history of Celtic-speaking nations. Non-narrative sources and cross-disciplinary approaches shed new light on traditional questions concerning commemoration,sources of political authority, and the nature of religious identity. Leading scholars and early-career researchers bring to bear hermeneutics from studies of religion and literary criticism alongside more traditional philological and historical methodologies. All the studies in this book bring to their particular tasks an acknowledgement of the importance of religion in the worldview of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Their approaches reflect a critical turn in Celtic studies that has proved immensely productive across the last two decades.

All across Ireland, thousands of people are living in apartments and houses with serious fire safety and structural defects. Some of these have made the news, many more have not. Defects: Living with the Legacy of the Celtic Tiger tells the horrifying story of these people and how they came to be trapped in dangerous homes. In this follow-up to Home, his hugely popular and acclaimed manifesto for public housing reform, Eoin Ó Broin reveals how decisions made by successive governments from the 1960s to the 1990s led to an alarmingly light touch building control regime. This regime, when combined with the hubris and greed of Celtic Tiger-era property development, allowed defective and unsafe properties to be built and sold in huge numbers to unsuspecting victims. Who was responsible? Why were they allowed to get away with it? And who will foot the bill to fix these potentially fatal defects? All these questions and more are answered in this hard-hitting and shocking investigative work.

Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World delves deep into the experience of Celtic communities and individuals in the late medieval period through to the modern age. Its thirteen essays range widely, from Scottish soldiers in France in the fifteenth century to Gaelic-speaking communities in rural New South Wales in the twentieth, and expatriate Irish dancers in the twenty-first. Connecting them are the recurring themes of memory and foresight: how have Celtic communities maintained connections to the past while keeping an eye on the future? Chapters explore language loss and preservation in Celtic countries and among Celtic migrant communities, and the influence of Celtic culture on writers such as Dylan Thomas and James Joyce. In Australia, how have Irish, Welsh and Scottish migrants engaged with the politics and culture of their home countries, and how has the idea of a Celtic identity changed over time? Drawing on anthropology, architecture, history, linguistics, literature and philosophy, Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World offers diverse, thought-provoking insights into Celtic culture and identity.

Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.

English Romanticism and the Celtic World explores the way in which British Romantic writers responded to the national and cultural identities of the 'four nations' England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The essays collected here, by specialists in the field, interrogate the cultural centres as well as the peripheries of Romanticism, and the interactions between these. They underline 'Celticism' as an emergent strand of cultural ethnicity during the eighteenth century, examining the constructions of Celticness and Britishness in the Romantic period, including the ways in which the 'Celtic' countries viewed themselves in the light of Romanticism. Other topics include the development of Welsh antiquarianism, the Ossian controversy, Irish nationalism, Celtic landscapes, Romantic form and Orientalism. The collection covers writing by Blake, Wordsworth, Scott, Byron and Shelley, and will be of interest to scholars of Romanticism and Celtic studies.

An anthology of Celtic stories and blessings.

Includes section "Book reviews".

Irish culture is obsessed with the past, and this book asks why and how. In an innovative reading of Irish culture since 1980, Emilie Pine provides a new analysis of theatre, film, television, memoir and art, and interrogates the anti-nostalgia that characterizes so much of contemporary Irish culture.