With the economic rise of the "Celtic Tiger" in the 1990s, Irish culture was deeply impacted by a concurrent rise in immigration. A nation tending to see itself as a land of emigrants now saw waves of newcomers. Moynihan takes as her central question a formulation by sociologist Steve Garner: "What happens when other people's diasporas converge on the homeland of a diasporic people?" Moynihan's approach to Ireland's changing demographics is, however,...

Many of the socially marginalized Irish immigrant women of this era made their living in domestic service. In contrast to immigrant men, who might have lived in a community with their fellow Irish, these women lived and worked in close contact with American families. Lynch-Brennan reveals the essential role this unique relationship played in shaping the place of the Irish in America today. Such women were instrumental in making the Irish presence...

Ireland is a country which has come to be defined in part by an ideology which conflates nationalism with the land. From the Irish Revival's celebration of the Irish peasant farmer as the ideal Irishman to the fierce history of land claim battles between the Irish and their colonizers, notions of the land have become particularly bound up with conceptions of what Ireland is and what it is to be Irish. In this book, Wright considers this fraught relationship...

Maureen Waters began writing about the Bronx in the spirit of dinnseachas, Irish place lore, as a means of recuperating from the accidental death of her son, whose story frames her own. Finding her way through the disorienting 1960s, after a girlhood tutored by nuns and inspired by the Holy Ghost, she set out on a kind of spiritual journey to recover what was valuable and life-sustaining in the Irish Catholic experience left behind. Writing her memoir...

Shakespeare's presence in Joyce's work is tentacular, extending throughout his career on many different levels: cultural, structural, lexical, and psychological; yet a surprisingly long time has passed since the last monograph on this literary nexus was published. Joyce/Shakespeare brings together fresh work by internationally recognized Joyce scholars on these two icons, reinvigorating our understanding of Joyce at play with the Bard. One way these...

In 1890, The Snake's Pass was published in serialized form in the periodical The People. It is the story of Arthur Severn, an Englishman who has inherited wealth and a title through an aunt who took him under her wing to the exclusion of closer relations. His inheritance includes land in Ireland, and now that he is a man of leisure, he decides to tour the west of Ireland. As Bram Stoker's first full-length novel, The Snake's Pass is a heady blend...

Seamus Heaney's unexpected death in August 2013 brought to completion his body of work, and scholars are only now coming to understand the full scale and importance of this extraordinary career. The Nobel Prize-winning poet, translator, and playwright from the North of Ireland is considered the most important Irish poet after Yeats and, at the time of his death, arguably the most famous living poet. For this reason, much of the scholarship to date...

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...

The Irish and the Jews are two of the classic outliers of modern Europe. Both struggled with their lack of formal political sovereignty in the nineteenth-century. Simultaneously European and not European, both endured a bifurcated status, perceived as racially inferior and yet also seen as a natural part of the European landscape. Both sought to deal with their subaltern status through nationalism; both had a tangled, ambiguous, and sometimes...