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.