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This is a story of a scarcely credible abundance, of flocks of
birds so vast they made the sky invisible. It is also a story,
almost as difficult to credit, of a collapse into extinction so
startling to the inhabitants of the New World as to provoke a
mystery. In the fate of the North American passenger pigeon we can
read much of the story of wild America - the astonishment that
accompanied its discovery, the allure of its natural 'productions',
the ruthless exploitation of its 'commodities' and the ultimate
betrayal of its peculiar genius. And in the bird's fate can be
read, too, the essential vulnerability of species, the
unpredictable passage of life itself.
In three contributions to the little-researched subject of the
history of science in Ireland, John Wilson Foster looks at
neglected episodes in Irish cultural history from mid-Victorian to
Edwardian times. He discusses Darwinism in late 19th-century
Ireland and its impact on Irish churchmen, with special reference
to Darwin's champion John Tyndall, whose famous declaration of
materialism in his Presidential Address to the British Association
for the Advancement of Science in Belfast 1874 provoked a vehement
response from the leaders of the Protestant as well as Catholic
churches. Foster then moves to the Belfast of 1911 and the building
and launching of the Titanic, which he sees as the culmination of
the engineering genius of Belfast from the mid-19th to early 20th
century. In his third essay, Foster looks at the growing interest
in Belfast towards the end of the 19th century in amateur
scientific fieldwork (for example, botany), encouraged by the
values and preoccupations on Victorian culture. The book is based
on lectures delivered at NUI Maynooth in the National University of
Ireland's Visiting Lectureship series.
The Irish novel has had a distinguished history. It spans such
diverse authors as James Joyce, George Moore, Maria Edgeworth, Bram
Stoker, Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Lady Morgan, John Banville,
and others. Yet it has until now received less critical attention
than Irish poetry and drama. This volume covers three hundred years
of Irish achievement in fiction, with essays on key genres, themes,
and authors. It provides critiques of individual works, accounts of
important novelists, and histories of sub-genres and allied
narrative forms, establishing significant social and political
contexts for dozens of novels. The varied perspectives and emphases
by more than a dozen critics and literary historians ensure that
the Irish novel receives due tribute for its colour, variety and
linguistic verve. Each chapter features recommended further
reading. This is the perfect overview for students of the Irish
novel from the romances of the seventeenth century to the present
day.
The Irish novel has had a distinguished history. It spans such
diverse authors as James Joyce, George Moore, Maria Edgeworth, Bram
Stoker, Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Lady Morgan, John Banville,
and others. Yet it has until now received less critical attention
than Irish poetry and drama. This volume covers three hundred years
of Irish achievement in fiction, with essays on key genres, themes,
and authors. It provides critiques of individual works, accounts of
important novelists, and histories of sub-genres and allied
narrative forms, establishing significant social and political
contexts for dozens of novels. The varied perspectives and emphases
by more than a dozen critics and literary historians ensure that
the Irish novel receives due tribute for its colour, variety and
linguistic verve. Each chapter features recommended further
reading. This is the perfect overview for students of the Irish
novel from the romances of the seventeenth century to the present
day.
This is a critical survey of the fiction and non-fiction written in
Ireland during the key years between 1880 and 1920, or what has
become known as the Irish Literary Renaissance. The book considers
both the prose and the social and cultural forces working through
it.
Colonial Consequences contains sixteen essays in Irish literature
and culture by Belfast-born, Vancouver-based critic John Wilson
Foster. The essays survey texts, genres and cultural backgrounds,
from eighteenth-century landscape verse, the origins of Irish
modernism, Yeats's great poem 'Easter 1916', to the literature and
life-styles of Northern Ireland. They give eloquent, close readings
of specific writers - Kavanagh, Hewitt, Rodgers, Montague, Murphy,
Donoghue - and at the heart of the book Foster expands on his 1974
study of Seamus Heaney with a new and challenging analysis of the
poet as a deeply political writer, working through cultural
traditions that are questioned, while respected. The volume
concludes with recent essays which have made Foster an important
figure in the current debate over political meanings and cultural
trends in a riven, unsettled society. An unusual, personal
introduction by the author retraces the steps that led him to these
combative and penetrating inquiries. Scholarly, engaged and
readably written, locally rooted yet globally perceived, they
provide a rich matrix of interpretation which frames the past while
clarifying the future.
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