Dublin is one of the world's great literary cities, immortalized in works by some of the most celebrated international authors. It is a city of warmth and character, which combines the richest of histories with a vibrant contemporary edge, and which welcomes millions of people to its streets each year. In addition to being Ireland's capital city, Dublin is a city with a proud European identity and with long-established, dynamic links with the rest of the world. Dublin Tales comprises an exciting selection of stories from across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries which are illustrative of this. The stories in Dublin Tales are variously vibrant, evocative, humorous, and diverse, and engage in different ways with Dublin's history, its culture, its cityscape, and its people. It includes stories by writers who are intimately associated with the city (James Joyce and Brendan Behan), as well as by some of the most acclaimed Irish authors of the twentieth century (Elizabeth Bowen, Liam O'Flaherty, William Trevor, John McGahern, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne). Less familiar authors are also included, as are specially commissioned stories from some of the most talented younger writers writing today (Caitriona Lally, Kevin Power, and Melatu Uche Okorie). Dublin Tales also includes bilingual versions of two stories which were originally written in the Irish language by Dara Ó Conaola and Caitlín Nic Íomhair, which have been specially translated into English for this startlingly original new book.

This volume explores the history of Irish writing between the Second World War (or the 'Emergency') in 1939 and the re-emergence of violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It situates modern Irish writing within the contexts of cultural transition and transnational connection, often challenging pre-existing perceptions of Irish literature in this period as stagnant and mundane. While taking into account the grip of Irish censorship and cultural nationalism during the mid-twentieth century, these essays identify an Irish literary culture stimulated by international political horizons and fully responsive to changes in publishing, readership, and education. The book combines valuable cultural surveys with focussed discussions of key literary moments, and of individual authors such as Sean O'Faolain, Samuel Beckett, Edna O'Brien, and John McGahern.

Through increased immigration, Ireland has encountered Central and Eastern Europe in a very direct manner since the mid-1990s. However, there was already a scattered history of cultural communication between these two regions, even if these dialogues have often been discrete and discontinuous. Recovering and exploring some of these diverse interrelationships, this volume charts some of the alternative, lesser-known routes that Irish cultural life has taken. By plotting various movements between these two peripheries of Europe, the book recalibrates the map of Irish literary, artistic and historical experiences. In doing so, it also looks to incorporate this movement into theoretical understandings of Irish culture.

Offering an introduction to Irish culture and society, this glossary serves as a routemap for undergraduates to further study. It contains around 400 short and accessible explanations of the key events, figures and concepts in Irish studies since the pre-modern period. From "the Abbey Theatre" and "Bloody Sunday" to "Viking Invasions" and "Oscar Wilde", this glossary gives an interdisciplinary overview of Irish culture and society and offers directions for further reading. Covering literary terms, traditions and movements as well as Irish history, politics, music and art, the entries are fully cross-referenced and assume no prior knowledge making this a useful source of information for students of Irish studies.

Olivia Manning (1908-1980) had a reputation as a difficult personality and this has threatened to obscure her reputation as a writer. The book aims to recover Manning's place as a pre-eminent novelist of British wartime experience. Manning belonged to a British literary generation which held tenaciously to its diverse Irish connections in the wartime years, but, as with Cyril Connolly or Lawrence Durrell, her claims on Irishness were intermittent and often distinctly pragmatic. The book deals in depth with a diverse range of biographical, historical and literary detail. It examines the troubled interface between public and domestic narratives" and the ways in which Manning developed, through her experiences of living in Romania, Athens, Egypt and Jerusalem, her creative methods of politicising the refugee experience. As well as looking at Manning's novels within their diverse settings the book also examines the varied literary modes Manning deploys and adapts - the gothic, autobiography and writing the self, the serial novel, the wartime and epic and more. Although interest in World War II literature has been proliferating over the past twenty years a full length study of Manning will be of great interest to scholars of modern British literature and cultural history. In the fields of postcolonial and transnational studies, Manning should be a necessary presence as she crosses geographical, political, and cultural borders in her life and writing. Her experiments with 'the serial form' also provide critical gloss to studies of modernism and realism as well as being of great import to the now burgeoning study of the Middlebrow.