This book offers new close readings of contemporary Irish drama in the context of postcolonial Biblical studies. Developing Christopher Morash's historiographical metaphor of Babel, it combines appropriations of this and other selected Biblical themes of building found in plays by such authors as Malachy McKenna (Tillsonburg), Dermot Bolger (Ballymun Trilogy), Stacey Gregg (Shibboleth), Richard Dormer (Drum Belly) or Sebastian Barry (Tales of Ballycumber). The monograph explores the stances contributed by key scholars specialising in Irish drama and theatre (Christopher Morash, Shaun Richards, Helen Heusner Lojek), draws on the most recent findings within postcolonial Biblical criticism and touches upon the assumptions of subcreation studies (Mark J. P. Wolf).

This book offers a collection of essays in literary and cultural studies. The articles explore a wide range of distinct problems and texts with the aim to question the already known and to interrogate the realms of ethics, literature, history and cultural identities. The contributors not only revive the meanings and values as they were lived at the time of creating the specific works, but also point to the ways in which these meanings continue to function for contemporary readers.

The volume explores the ways in which the Great War has been remembered and imaged in various local accounts. It provides careful readings of a wide range of sources: letters exchanged by Henry James and Burgess Noakes, spoken accounts of the Old Believers of the Russian Orthodox Church, historical documents concerning Eastern Europe and the United States, travel writings by Fritz Wertheimer, Hermann Struck, and Herbert Eulenberg, literary texts by Lord Dunsany, Miroslav Krleza, and Gustav Meyrink, theater performances in Italy and Ireland and visual arts: masks for facially disfigured soldiers made by Francis Derwent Wood and Anna Coleman Ladd.

Within the past decades, Henry James has been seen going to the movies and to Paris, both far more likely destinations for him than battlefields of the modern world. Sending him off to war seems to be a preposterous idea, but the exaggeration inscribed in the title of the present volume is meant to stress the historicity of wars and battles underlying James's life and work, quite apart from conflict on which literature thrives at all times. The book consists of five parts devoted to various forms and aspects of conflict. It deals with both literal and metaphorical battles of which the author was aware or in which he was involved. Apart from addressing James's attitude to two major conflicts, the Civil War and World War One, the articles range from critical discussions of James's biography, criticism, and fiction, to studies of the intertextual connections between his oeuvre and works of both past and present authors.