Illustrated stories recall various aspects of Irish life over the past one hundred years, including tales of the fishermen of Kerry, the horsemen of Kildare, and recollections of emigration, marriage, and daily life.

Between the late 1890s and the early 1900s, the young Irish writer John Millington Synge journeyed across his home country, documenting his travels intermittently for ten years. His body of travel writing includes the travel book The Aran Islands, his literary journalism about West Kerry and Wicklow published in various periodicals, and his articles for the Manchester Guardian about rural poverty in Connemara and Mayo. Although Synge’s nonfiction is often considered of minor weight compared with his drama, Bruna argues persuasively that his travel narratives are instances of a pioneering ethnographic and journalistic imagination. J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival is the first comprehensive study of Synge’s travel writing about Ireland, compiled during the zeitgeist of the preindependence Revival movement. Bruna argues that Synge’s nonfiction subverts inherited modes of travel writing that put an emphasis on Empire and Nation. Synge’s writing challenges these grand narratives by expressing a more complex idea of Irishness grounded in his empathetic observation of the local rural communities he traveled amongst. Drawing from critically neglected revivalist travel literature, newspapers and periodicals, and visual and archival documents, Bruna sketches a new portrait of a seminal Irish Literary Renaissance figure and sheds new light on the itineraries of activism and literary engagement of the broader Revival movement.

"Irish Memories" is a compilation of excerpts and descriptions of Irish life during the early 1900s. Written by Edith Somerville and Violet Florence Martin but published under the name Martin Ross, these two women managed to create a literary text that immerses its readers in the rich and magical culture of Ireland. Recounting the life and times of citizens during the ups and downs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern readers will find themselves engrossed and unable to put the book down until it's finished.

Though the short story is often regarded as central to the Irish canon, this text was the first comprehensive study of the genre for many years. Heather Ingman traces the development of the modern short story in Ireland from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to the present day. Her study analyses the material circumstances surrounding publication, examining the role of magazines and editors in shaping the form. Ingman incorporates recent critical thinking on the short story, traces international connections, and gives a central part to Irish women's short stories. Each chapter concludes with a detailed analysis of key stories from the period discussed, featuring Joyce, Edna O'Brien and John McGahern, among others. With its comprehensive bibliography and biographies of authors, this volume will be a key work of reference for scholars and students both of Irish fiction and of the modern short story as a genre.

From the legendary poet Oisin to modernist masters like James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and Samuel Beckett, Ireland's literary tradition has made its mark on the Western canon. Despite its proud tradition, the student who searches the shelves for works on Irish women's fiction is liabel to feel much as Virginia Woolf did when she searched the British Museum for work on women by women. Critic Nuala O'Faolain, when confronted with this disparity, suggested that "modern Irish literature is dominated by men so brilliant in their misanthropy... [that] the self-respect of Irish women is radically and paradoxically checkmated by respect for an Irish national achievement." While Ann Owen Weekes does not argue with the first part of O'Faolain's assertion, she does with the second. In Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition, she suggests that it is the critics rather than the writers who have allowed themselves to be checkmated. Beginning with Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and ending with Jennifer Johnston's The Railway Station (1980), she surveys the best of the Ireland's female literature to show its artistic and historic significance and to demonstrate that it has its own themes and traditions related to, yet separate from, that of male Irish writers. Weekes examines the work of writers like E.OE. Sumerville and Martin Ross (pen names for cousins Edith Somerville and Violet Martin), Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Mary Lavin, and Molly Keane, among others. She teases out the themes that recur in these writers' works, including the link between domestic and political violence and re-visioning of traditional stories, such as Julia O'Faolain's use of the Cuchulain and Diarmuid and Grainne myths to reveal the negation of women's autonomy. In doing so, she demonstrates that the literature of Anglo- and Gaelic-Irish women presents a unified tradition of subjects and techniques, a unity that might become an optimistic model not only for Irish literature but also for Irish people.

This innovative new study examines the significance given to the country house in Ireland under the Union and how this is represented in the works of Edgeworth, Lever, Trollope, Martin and Somerville, Bowen and Lady Gregory. The Irish country house is set in a classical and European context as the centre for 'the good life' and the pinnacle of 'civilisation'. In Ireland, that inherited tradition was challenged by an alternative culture nominated as 'savage'. This book explores how the Irish country house was the focus of conflict between and symbiosis of 'civilisation' and 'savagery'.