Languages & Literatures 2011 | 1 | - Peter Lang

16 English Language and Literatures · Anglistik · Langue et littératures anglaises
T
Eamon Maher / Eugene O’Brien (eds)
Breaking the Mould
Literary Representations
of Irish Catholicism
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles,
Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2011 .
VIII, 241 pp .
Reimagining Ireland . Vol . 36
Edited by Eamon Maher
pb . ISBN 978-3-0343-0232-6
CHF 62 .– / € D 42 .80 / € A 44 .– / € 40 .– /
£ 36 .– / US-$ 61 .95
C
Heather Marcovitch
The Art of the Pose
his book revisits Oscar Wilde’s major
writings through the field of performance
studies . Wilde wrote about performance
as a cultural dialectic, as a form of serious
and critical play, and as the basis of a subversive
poetics . In his studies at Oxford University,
his famous lecture tour of the United
States and Canada, his friendships with famous
actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Lillie
Langtry, the writing of his critical essays, The
Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome, and his society
comedies, and culminating in his postprison
writings De Profundis and The Ballad
of Reading Gaol, Wilde develops a rich the-
atholicism has played a central role in
Irish society for centuries . It is sometimes
perceived in a negative light, being associated
with repression, antiquated morality
and a warped view of sexuality . However,
there are also the positive aspects that Catholicism
brought to bear on Irish culture, such
as the beauty of its rituals, education and
health care, or concern for the poor and the
underprivileged . Whatever their experience
of Catholicism, writers of a certain generation
could not escape its impact on their lives,
an impact which is pervasive in the literature
they produced .
This study, containing twelve chapters
written by a range of distinguished literary
experts and emerging scholars, explores in
a systematic manner the cross-fertilisation
between Catholicism and Irish/Irish-Ameri-
Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory
Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2010 .
222 pp ., num . ill .
pb . ISBN 978-3-0343-0439-9
CHF 61 .– / € D 42 .10 / € A 43 .20 / € 39 .30 / £ 35 .40 / US-$ 60 .95
€ D includes VAT – valid for Germany · € A includes VAT – valid for Austria
ory of performance that addresses aesthetics,
ethics, identity and individualism . This
book also traces Wilde’s often-troubled relationship
with late-Victorian society in terms
of its attempts to define his public performances
by stereotyping him as both irrelevant
and dangerous, from the early newspaper
caricatures to its later description of him as
a sexual monster .
heatheR MaRCovitCh is a professor of
English at Red Deer College in Alberta, Canada
. She has published on late-Victorian literature,
modernist literature and television
studies .
can literature written in English . The figures
addressed in the book include James Joyce,
Maud Gonne, Constance Markievicz, Kate
O’Brien, Edwin O’Connor, Brian Moore, John
McGahern, Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan,
Vincent Carroll and Brian Friel . This book will
serve to underline the complex relationship
between creative writers and the once allpowerful
religious Establishment .
ContentS: Eamon Maher/Eugene O’Brien:
Introduction • Jeanne I . Lakatos: The Semiotic
Theory of Iconic Realism and Cultural
Dissonance in de Meun’s and de Lorris’s Roman
de la Rose and James Joyce’s Ulysses •
Cathy McGlynn: ‘In the buginning is the woid’:
Creation, Paternity and the Logos in Joyce’s
Ulysses • Mary Pierse: The Donkey and the
Sabbath • Sharon Tighe-Mooney: Exploring
the Irish Catholic Mother in Kate O’Brien’s
Pray for the Wanderer • Aintzane Legarreta
Mentxaka: Catholic Agnostic – Kate O’Brien
• James Silas Rogers: Edwin O’Connor’s Language
of Grace • Eamon Maher: Issues of Faith
in Selected Fiction by Brian Moore (1921-1999)
• Peter Guy: ‘Earth’s Crammed with Heaven,
and every Common Bush Afire with God’:
Religion in the Fiction of John McGahern •
Eugene O’Brien: ‘Any Catholics among you
…?’: Seamus Heaney and the Real of Catholicism
• John McDonagh: ‘Hopping Round
Knock Shrine in the Falling Rain’: Revision
and Catholicism in the Poetry of Paul Durcan
• Victor Merriman: ‘To sleep is safe, to
dream is dangerous’: Catholicism on Stage in
Independent Ireland • Tony Corbett: Effing
the Ineffable: Brian Friel’s Wonderful Tennes-
see and the Interrogation of Transcendence .
Simone Celine Marshall
The Anonymous Text
The 500-Year History of
The Assembly of Ladies
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles,
Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2010 .
VIII, 211 pp ., 1 table
pb . ISBN 978-3-03911-953-0
CHF 56 .– / € D 38 .– / € A 39 .10 / € 35 .50 /
£ 32 .– / US-$ 55 .95
O
eaMon MaheR is Director of the National
Centre for Franco-Irish Studies at the Insti-
tute of Technology, Tallaght . He is currently
completing a monograph entitled ‘The Church
and its Spire’: John McGahern and the Cath-
olic Question .
eugene o’BRien is Senior Lecturer and
Head of the Department of English Language
and Literature at Mary Immaculate College,
University of Limerick . His previous publications
include ‘Kicking Bishop Brennan Up
the Arse’: Negotiating Texts and Contexts in
Contemporary Irish Studies (2009) .
ne of the most intriguing features of
The Assembly of Ladies, an anonymous
fifteenth-century Middle English poem, is that
it has remained in print in anthologies for over
500 years . Why would a poem about courtly
love remain so popular for so long? This book
analyses the literary and historical publishing
evidence about The Assembly of Ladies, to show
that the poem has remained in print not for
its literary merit, but because its anonymity
has allowed it to be appropriated by editors
for their own particular social and political
causes . The book draws together textual, contextual,
and intertextual evidence about all
twenty editions of The Assembly of Ladies . By
examining closely how and why a single text
is or has been included in canonical traditions
over time, this study not only reveals the material
presence of the text in various traditions
but also brings to the foreground the cat egories
scholars continue to use while defining or im-
agining those traditions .
SiMone Celine MaRShall is a Senior Lec-
turer in the Department of English at the Uni-
versity of Otago, New Zealand . Her current
research focuses on the literary anonymity
in medieval literature, showing how and why
it is used, and its relationship with anonym-
ity in other literatures .