The Irish Revival has inspired a richly diverse and illuminating body of scholarship that has enlarged our understanding of the movement and its influence. The general tenor of recent scholarly work has involved an emphasis on inclusion and addition, exploring previously neglected texts, authors, regional variations, and international connections. Such work, while often excellent, tends to see various revivalist figures and projects as part of a unified endeavor, such as political resistance or self-help. In contrast, The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision seeks to reimagine the field by interpreting the Revival through the concept of "complexity," a theory recently developed in the information and biological sciences. Taken as a whole, these essays show that the Revival's various components operated as parts of a network but without any overarching aim or authority. In retrospect, the Revival's elements can be seen to have come together under the heading of a single objective; for example, decolonization broadly construed. But this volume highlights how revivalist thinkers differed significantly on what such an aspiration might mean or lead to: ethnic authenticity, political autonomy, or greater collective prosperity and well-being. Contributors examine how relationships among the Revival's individual parts involved conflict and cooperation, difference and similarity, continuity and disruption. It is this combination of convergence without unifying purpose and divergence within a broad but flexible coherence that Valente and Howes capture by reinterpreting the Revival through complexity theory.

Employing previously unexamined archival material, Paige Reynolds reconstructs five large-scale public events in early twentieth-century Irish culture: the riotous premiere of J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907; the events of Dublin Suffrage Week, including the Irish premiere of Ibsen's Rosmersholm, in 1913; the funeral processions of the playwright and Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney in 1920; the sporting and arts competitions of the Tailteann Games in 1924; and the organized protests accompanying the premiere of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars in 1926. The book provides attentive readings of the literature and theatre famously produced in tandem with these events, as well as introducing surprising texts that made valuable contributions to Irish national theatre. This detailed study revises pessimistic explanations of twentieth-century mass politics and crowd dynamics by introducing a more sympathetic account of national communities and national sentiment.

Employing previously unexamined archival material, Paige Reynolds reconstructs five large-scale public events in early twentieth-century Irish culture: the riotous premiere of J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907; the events of Dublin Suffrage Week, including the Irish premiere of Ibsen's Rosmersholm, in 1913; the funeral processions of the playwright and Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney in 1920; the sporting and arts competitions of the Tailteann Games in 1924; and the organized protests accompanying the premiere of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars in 1926. The book provides attentive readings of the literature and theatre famously produced in tandem with these events, as well as introducing surprising texts that made valuable contributions to Irish national theatre. This detailed study revises pessimistic explanations of twentieth-century mass politics and crowd dynamics by introducing a more sympathetic account of national communities and national sentiment.

Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across more than a century, writers from Kate O'Brien to Sally Rooney have manipulated and remade modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of private consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world. Living amid the tenaciously conservative imperatives of church and state in Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, and the ordered narrative of the book. Such structures provide a stability that is valuable and even necessary for such characters to flourish, as well as an instrument of containment or repression that threatens to, and in some cases does, destroy them. The writers studied here, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Eimear McBride, employ the modernist mode in part to urge readers to recognize that female interiority, the prompt for many of the movement's illustrious formal experiments, continues to provide a crucial but often overlooked mechanism to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, political violence, and sexual abuse.

Irish Literature in Transition, 1980-2020 elucidates the central features of Irish literature during the twentieth century's long turn, covering its significant trends and formations, reassessing its major writers and texts, and providing path-making accounts of its emergent figures. Over the past forty years, life in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland has been transformed by new material conditions in each polity and by ideological shifts in the way people understand themselves and their relation to the world. Amid these remarkable changes, culture on both sides of the border has emerged as a global phenomenon, one that both reflects and intervenes in rapidly changing contemporary conditions. This volume accounts for broad patterns of literary and cultural production in this period and demonstrates the value of Irish contemporary literature within anglophone and European traditions and as a body of work that has kept its eye trained on the particularities of the island and its inhabitants.

The Irish Revival has inspired a richly diverse and illuminating body of scholarship that has enlarged our understanding of the movement and its influence. The general tenor of recent scholarly work has involved an emphasis on inclusion and addition, exploring previously neglected texts, authors, regional variations, and international connections. Such work, while often excellent, tends to see various revivalist figures and projects as part of a unified endeavor, such as political resistance or self-help. In contrast, The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision seeks to reimagine the field by interpreting the Revival through the concept of "complexity," a theory recently developed in the information and biological sciences. Taken as a whole, these essays show that the Revival's various components operated as parts of a network but without any overarching aim or authority. In retrospect, the Revival's elements can be seen to have come together under the heading of a single objective; for example, decolonization broadly construed. But this volume highlights how revivalist thinkers differed significantly on what such an aspiration might mean or lead to: ethnic authenticity, political autonomy, or greater collective prosperity and well-being. Contributors examine how relationships among the Revival's individual parts involved conflict and cooperation, difference and similarity, continuity and disruption. It is this combination of convergence without unifying purpose and divergence within a broad but flexible coherence that Valente and Howes capture by reinterpreting the Revival through complexity theory.

The New Irish Studies demonstrates how diverse critical approaches enable a richer understanding of contemporary Irish writing and culture. The early decades of the twenty-first century in Ireland and Northern Ireland have seen an astonishing rate of change, one that reflects the common understanding of the contemporary as a moment of acceleration and flux. This collection tracks how Irish writers have represented the peace and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland, the consequences of the Celtic Tiger economic boom in the Republic, the waning influence of Catholicism, the increased authority of diverse voices, and an altered relationship with Europe. The essays acknowledge the distinctiveness of contemporary Irish literature, reflecting a sense that the local can shed light on the global, even as they reach beyond the limited tropes that have long identified Irish literature. The collection suggests routes forward for Irish Studies, and unsettles presumptions about what constitutes an Irish classic.