John B. Keane's popular play "The Field" (1965), based on a boundary dispute and murder in County Kerry, inspired the 1990 film scripted and directed by Jim Sheridan. Both works address the impact of dislocating social change on agricultural communities while insisting on darker power struggles within traditional life. To Keane's acute portrayal of the mid-century dismantling of rural society, Sheridan adds not only his characteristic attention to the varieties of social injustice spawned by modernization, but also liberal allusions to Irish myth, literature, and cinema. Drawing on fresh interviews, archival research, and new directions in the philosophy of film studies, Cheryl Herr grounds this reading of "The Field" in the conflict between embodied communal practices and the eternal threat of the outsider.

Our Heavenly Father longs to speak to us. He desires for His children to sit down, rest from their busyness, and listen to what He has to say. My Father's Voice is just that - one of God's children sitting and listening and permitting God to interrupt life on earth. It is an account of taking time to wait on God to speak and communing with Him.

Fueled by the Enlightenment's model of revolutionary cultural change, the hopeful Irish rose against British rule in the famous rebellion of 1798. The British responded quickly and violently to suppress it, and for generations after, Irish school children knew intimately the stories of patriotism, terror, and betrayal that came out of the '98 Rising. The enactment of these stories, through a series of extremely popular political melodramas, reinforced that learning and was fundamental to the evolving sense of Irish nationhood. For the Land They Loved makes available in print for the first time the complete texts of four of the most ideologically complex and theatrically effective of the many "lost" Irish melodramas produced at the popular Queen's Theatre in Dublin during the late nineteenth and earl twentieth centuries. This edition, complete with period illustrations of playbills, pictorial ads, and portraits, includes a detailed critical and historical essay that weaves the separate narratives of the plays into a sustained story of Irish sociopolitical life in the revolutionary 1790s. All four plays focus on the '98 Rising. J. W. Whitbread's Lord Edward, Or '98 (1894) and Wolfe Tone (1898) dramatize the consequences of heroism from the aristocratic and United Irish point of view, while P. J. Bourke's When Wexford Rose (1910) and For the Land She Loved (1915) engage resistance from working-class and feminist-nationalist perspectives. Such plays, shown constantly in Irish cities and small towns as well as overseas, were to become part of the social dialogue that produced another rising in 1916 and beyond. For scholars and students of Irish history and culture, and for anyone interested in understanding the consciousness behind modern Irish resistance, For the Land They Loved will prove to be essential reading.