Nation and Migration provides a literary history for a nation that still considers itself a land of immigrants, exploring the significant contributions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to the development of a British Atlantic literature and culture

A unique perspective on Yeats's and Synge's contributions to the literature of revolutionary Ireland

This set reissues 6 books, originally published between 1951 and 1990, on William Butler Yeats, a foremost figure of twentieth-century literature and one of the driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival. The volumes examine Yeats’s work, his poetic development, and his social and private life, and will be of interest to students of literature.

This lively introduction to the poems of W. B. Yeats, first published in 1988, provides a series of intriguing new readings of his work in relation to his profound involvement with occultism and folklore. During Yeats’s formative years as an artist, two compelling movements were emerging: the revivals of interest in Irish folklore and in the mag

The impact of the Irish famine of 1845-1852 was unparalleled in both political and psychological terms. The effects of famine-related mortality and emigration were devastating, in the field of literature no less than in other areas. In this incisive new study, Melissa Fegan explores the famine's legacy to literature, tracing it in the work of contemporary writers and their successors, down to 1919. Dr Fegan examines both fiction and non-fiction, including journalism, travel-narratives and the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope. She argues that an examination of famine literature that simply categorizes it as 'minor' or views it only as a silence or an absence misses the very real contribution that it makes to our understanding of the period. This is an important contribution to the study of Irish history and literature, sharply illuminating contemporary Irish mentalities.

In Dance in Ireland: Steps, Stages and Stories, Sharon Phelan provides an in-depth view of dance in Ireland during the colonial and post-colonial eras. She presents dance as an integral part of Irish life and as a signifier of cultural change. Central themes are documented and analysed. They include cross-cultural influences, the dance master and pantomimic dance traditions, dance during the Gaelic Revival, dichotomies in dance, and the theatricalisation of Irish dance. The book is illustrated with photographs and it is an indispensable resource for academics and artists alike, as they continue to foster dance, on the page and on the stage.

Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.