The island of Ireland is home to one of the world's great literary and artistic traditions. This book reads Irish literature and art in context of the island's coastal and maritime cultures, beginning with the late imperial experiences of Jack and William Butler Yeats and ending with the contemporary work of Anne Enright and Sinead Morrissey. It includes chapters on key historical texts such as Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands, and on contemporary writers including Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Kevin Barry. It sets a diverse range of writing and visual art in a fluid panorama of liquid associations that connect Irish literature to an archipelago of other times and places. Situated within contemporary conversations about the blue and the environmental humanities, this book builds on the upsurge of interest in seas and coasts in literary studies, presenting James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, John Banville, and many others in new coastal and maritime contexts. In doing so, it creates a literary and visual narrative of Irish coastal cultures across a seaboard that extends to a planetary configuration of imagined islands.

Public perceptions of political ethics are at the heart of current political debate. Drawing on original data, this book is the first general account of popular understandings of political ethics in contemporary British politics. It offers new insights into how citizens understand political ethics and integrity and how they form judgments of their leaders. By locating these insights against the backdrop of contemporary British political ethics, the book shows how current institutional preoccupations with standards of conduct all too often miss the mark. While the use of official resources is the primary focus of much regulation, politicians' consistency, frankness and sincerity, which citizens tend to see in terms of right and wrong, are treated as 'normal politics'. The authors suggest that new approaches may need to be adopted if public confidence in politicians' integrity is to be restored.

The first two decades of Irish independence were fraught and the formation of the post-imperial state was a continual controversy. The conditional perception of what Ireland was, should, or might be coincided with a revolution in the arts. Now forgotten cultures flared and disappeared, little magazines, cabaret clubs, riots and theatres erupting in a fluctuating public sphere. Nicholas Allen reads the crisis of Irish independence as formative of newly experimental relations between novels, poems, paintings, artists and audiences. The conditional, unfinished spaces of the modernist artwork were an unfinished civil war. In connecting these texts and times, Allen locates Joyce, Beckett, Jack and W. B. Yeats in the controversies surrounding the Irish state after 1922. With its interdisciplinary perspective on artists and contexts, this book is a major contribution to the study of Irish culture of the 1920s and 30s and of modernism's histories.

In all the complex cultural history of the islands of Britain and Ireland the idea of the coast as a significant representative space is critical. For many important artists coastal space has figured as a site from which to braid ideas of empire, nation, region, and archipelago. They have been drawn to the coast as a zone of geographical uncertainty in which the self-definitions of the nation founder; they have been drawn to it as a peripheral space of vestigial wildness, of island retreats and experimental living; as a network of diverse localities richly endowed with distinctive forms of cultural heritage; and as a dynamically interconnected ecosystem, which is at the same time the historic site of significant developments in fieldwork and natural science. This collection situates these cultures of the Atlantic edge in a series of essays that create new contexts for coastal study in literary history and criticism. The contributors frame their research in response to emerging conversations in archipelagic criticism, the blue humanities, and island studies, the essays challenging the reader to reconsider ideas of margin, periphery and exchange. These twelve case studies establish the coast as a crucial location in the imaginative history of Britain, Ireland and the north Atlantic edge. Coastal Works will appeal to readers of literature and history with an interest in the sea, the environment, and the archipelago from the 18th century to the present. Accessible, innovative and provocative, Coastal Works establishes the important role that the coast plays in our cultural imaginary and suggests a range of methodologies to represent relationships between land, sea, and cultural work.

Ernie O'Malley was a revolutionary republican and writer. One of the leading figures in the Irish independence and civil wars, he survived wounds, imprisonment and hunger strike, before going to the USA in 1928 to fundraise on de Valera's behalf. Broken Landscapes tells of his subsequent journeys, through Europe and the Americas, where O'Malley moved in wide social circles that included Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Hart Crane and Jack B. Yeats. Back in Mayo he took up farming. In 1935 he married Helen Hooker, an American heiress, with whom he had three children, Cathal, Etain and Cormac, before a bitter separation. His literary reputation was established with a magnificent memoir, On Another Man's Wound (1936). In later years he was close to John Ford, and worked on The Quiet Man (1952). This vibrant new collection of letters, diaries and fragments opens up the broad panorama of his life to readers. It enriches the history of Ireland's troubled independence with reflections on loss and reconciliation. It links the old world to the new - O'Malley perched on the edge of the Atlantic, a folklore collector, art critic and radio broadcaster; autodidact, modernist and intellectual. It conducts a unique conversation with the past. In Broken Landscapes, we travel with O'Malley through Italy, the American Southwest, Mexico and points inbetween. In Taos, he mingled wiht the artistic set around D. H. Lawrence. In Ireland, he drank with Patrick Kavanagh, Liam O'Flaherty and Louis MacNiece. The young painter Louis le Brocquy was his guest on his farm in Burrishoole, Co. Mayo. These places and people remained with O'Malley in his private writing, assembled for the first time from family and institutional archives. Reading these letters, dairies and fragments is to see Ireland in the tumultuous world of the twentieth century, as if for the first time, allowing us to view the intellectual foundations of the State through the eyes of its leading chronicler.

Public perceptions of political ethics are at the heart of current political debate. Drawing on original data, this book is the first general account of popular understandings of political ethics in contemporary British politics. It offers new insights into how citizens understand political ethics and integrity and how they form judgments of their leaders. By locating these insights against the backdrop of contemporary British political ethics, the book shows how current institutional preoccupations with standards of conduct all too often miss the mark. While the use of official resources is the primary focus of much regulation, politicians' consistency, frankness and sincerity, which citizens tend to see in terms of right and wrong, are treated as 'normal politics'. The authors suggest that new approaches may need to be adopted if public confidence in politicians' integrity is to be restored.

'The Britain at the Polls series always asks-and answers, often with new insights-the key questions about British general elections. And few elections in living memory pose as many big questions as that of May 2010.' - Martin Kettle, The Guardian 'For decades Britain at the Polls has given us high quality insights into British elections. This latest edition is the most significant and intriguing of all: an excellent cast of contributors provide a vivid and accessible presentation of evidence with an engaging clarity of writing and depth of analysis. It should prove invaluable not only for academics, but students, journalists and anyone who wants to understand a unique, game-changing election.' - Geoffrey Evans, Nuffield College, Oxford 'Britain at the Polls 2010 is an essential guide to a highly unusual election. The authors provide detailed coverage of the major developments within and between the parties, the issues that shaped the election and-perhaps most importantly-some long-term trends in public opinion that might explain New Labour's slow but steady decline since the late 1990s. Detailed, yet highly accessible, this book should be read by anyone interested in the what, when and why of this remarkable event in British politics.' - Kai Arzheimer, Professor of Empirical Political Science, University of Mainz 'This is an outstanding collection of papers by an outstanding cast of authors. It tells the story of the remarkable election of 2010 to be sure, but it also makes general patterns in British politics much more understandable. I heartily endorse it.' - Christopher Wlezien, Professor of Political Science, Temple University, Philadelphia 'This volume is a worthy contribution to a long-running and valuable series of post-election analyses. It provides insights which are of immediate interest, and in coming years it will be a useful reference for those who want to recall 'what really happened' in the important election of 2010. - Susan Scarrow, University of Houston The latest book in the long-running Britain at the Polls series provides an indispensible and incisive review of the extraordinary 2010 UK general election. Leading experts chart the path from Tony Blair's reelection in 2005 to the collapse of the Labour vote and the formation of the first coalition government since 1945. Topics covered include Gordon Brown's premiership, David Cameron's leadership of a resurgent Conservative party, the effects of the financial crisis and the parliamentary expenses scandal, and the drama of the UK's first ever televised leaders' debates. The book analyses the impact of these factors and others on the election and looks ahead to assess how the coalition government-and British politics-will adapt in the new political and economic environment.