This book represents the first collection of original critical material on Martin McDonagh, one of the most celebrated young playwrights of the last decade. Credited with reinvigorating contemporary Irish drama, his dark, despairing comedies have been performed extensively both on Broadway and in the West End, culminating in an Olivier Award for the The Pillowman and an Academy Award for his short film Six Shooter. In Martin McDonagh, Richard Rankin Russell brings together a variety of theoretical perspectives - from globalization to the gothic - to survey McDonagh's plays in unprecedented critical depth. Specially commissioned essays cover topics such as identity politics, the shadow of violence and the role of Catholicism in the work of this most precocious of contemporary dramatists. Contributors: Marion Castleberry, Brian Cliff, Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, Maria Doyle, Laura Eldred, Jose Lanters, Patrick Lonergan, Stephanie Pocock, Richard Rankin Russell, Karen Vandevelde

This book represents the first collection of original critical material on Martin McDonagh, one of the most celebrated young playwrights of the last decade. Credited with reinvigorating contemporary Irish drama, his dark, despairing comedies have been performed extensively both on Broadway and in the West End, culminating in an Olivier Award for the The Pillowman and an Academy Award for his short film Six Shooter.

In Martin McDonagh: A Casebook, Richard Rankin Russell brings together a variety of theoretical perspectives ??? from globalization to the gothic ??? to survey McDonagh??'s plays in unprecedented critical depth. Specially commissioned essays cover topics such as identity politics, the shadow of violence and the role of Catholicism in the work of this most precocious of contemporary dramatists.

Contributors: Marion Castleberry, Brian Cliff, Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, Maria Doyle, Laura Eldred, Jos?? Lanters, Patrick Lonergan, Stephanie Pocock, Richard Rankin Russell and Karen Vandevelde.

This study reads James Joyce's Dubliners and principally, Ulysses, through studies of hospitality, particularly the hospitality articulated in the Lukan parable of the Good Samaritan. It traces the origins of the novel, in part, to the physical attacks on Joyce in 1904 Dublin and 1907 Rome, and shows how those incidents, combined with his interest in this parable, which he incorporated into both his short story Grace and throughout Ulysses, especially in its last four episodes, led him to develop a rich theory of hospitality. Richard Rankin Russell demonstrates that Joyce finally sought to make us more charitable readers through his explorations and depictions of Samaritan hospitality.

Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama shows how the leading Irish playwright explores a series of dynamic physical and intellectual environments, charting the impact of modernity on rural culture and on the imagined communities he strove to create between readers, and script, actors and audience.

Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney's lives and careers have been intertwined since the 1960s, when they participated in the Belfast Group of creative writers and later edited the literary journal "Northern Review." In "Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland," Richard Rankin Russell explores Longley's and Heaney's poetic fidelity to the imagination in the midst of the war in Northern Ireland and their creation, through poetry, of a powerful cultural and sacred space. This space, Russell argues, has contributed to cultural and religious dialogue and thus helped enable reconciliation after the years of the Troubles.

The first chapter examines the influence of the Belfast Group on Longley and Heaney's shared aesthetic of poetry. Successive chapters analyze major works by both poets. Russell offers close readings of poems in the context of the poets' cultural and political concerns for the province. He concludes by showing how thoroughly their poetic language has entered the cultural, educational, and political discourse of contemporary Northern Ireland as it pursues the process of peace.

"Richard Rankin Russell shows clearly there are strands of reconciliatory feeling, desire, and attitude that bind the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley together. He demonstrates on the strength of this reconciliatory aesthetic how these poets ought to be considered together in critical intimacy. Along the way, Russell draws profitably on some interesting and occasionally little-known thinkers on religion and the sacred." --John Wilson Foster, University of British Columbia

"Although Richard Rankin Russell is wise enough to realize that poets are not 'legislators of the world, ' whether acknowledged or unacknowledged, he argues convincingly that Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley have nurtured the process of reconciliation in war-torn Northern Ireland. By concentrating on the way they have addressed the violence that has ruined so many lives in their home country, Russell makes a significant contribution to the scholarship that surrounds them and their peers. He also teaches us how the imagination that makes art can also make peace." --Henry Hart, College of William and Mary

"Russell's book takes a worthwhile and relatively unusual approach to criticism of modern poetry from Northern Ireland, by combining in-depth study of two poets, and putting these figures in the context of what he calls 'reconciliation'--that is to say, the evolving peace-process in contemporary Northern Ireland, along with the history of its long gestation through the years of the Troubles. Russell believes that art--and in this case the art is poetry--made a difference to political and cultural developments in Northern Ireland over the past thirty and more years, and that this difference was one for the better, contributing to the political developments that delivered (or at least have so far seemed to deliver) an end to violence in the Province." --Peter McDonald, Oxford University

Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney's lives and careers have been intertwined since the 1960s, when they participated in the Belfast Group of creative writers and later edited the literary journal Northern Review. In Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland, Richard Rankin Russell explores Longley's and Heaney's poetic fidelity to the imagination in the midst of the war in Northern Ireland and their creation, through poetry, of a powerful cultural and sacred space. This space, Russell argues, has contributed to cultural and religious dialogue and thus helped enable reconciliation after the years of the Troubles. The first chapter examines the influence of the Belfast Group on Longley and Heaney's shared aesthetic of poetry. Successive chapters analyze major works by both poets. Russell offers close readings of poems in the context of the poets' cultural and political concerns for the province. He concludes by showing how thoroughly their poetic language has entered the cultural, educational, and political discourse of contemporary Northern Ireland as it pursues the process of peace.

The author of such works as Lamb, Cal, and Grace Notes, Bernard MacLaverty is one of Northern Ireland's leading-and most prolific-contemporary writers. Bringing together leading scholars from a full range of critical perspectives, this is a comprehensive survey of contemporary scholarship on MacLaverty. Covering all of his novels and many of his short stories, the book explores the ways in which the author has grappled with such themes as The Troubles, the Holocaust, Catholicism, and music. Bernard MacLaverty: Critical Readings also includes coverage of the film adaptations of his work.

Regional voices from England, Ireland, and Scotland inspired Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel prize-winner, to become a poet, and his home region of Northern Ireland provided the subject matter for much of his poetry. In his work, Heaney explored, recorded, and preserved both the disappearing agrarian life of his origins and the dramatic rise of sectarianism and the subsequent outbreak of the Northern Irish "Troubles" beginning in the late 1960s. At the same time, Heaney consistently imagined a new region of Northern Ireland where the conflicts that have long beset it and, by extension, the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom might be synthesized and resolved. Finally, there is a third region Heaney committed himself to explore and map-the spirit region, that world beyond our ken. In Seamus Heaney's Regions, Richard Rankin Russell argues that Heaney's regions-the first, geographic, historical, political, cultural, linguistic; the second, a future where peace, even reconciliation, might one day flourish; the third, the life beyond this one-offer the best entrance into and a unified understanding of Heaney's body of work in poetry, prose, translations, and drama. As Russell shows, Heaney believed in the power of ideas-and the texts representing them-to begin resolving historical divisions. For Russell, Heaney's regionalist poetry contains a "Hegelian synthesis" view of history that imagines potential resolutions to the conflicts that have plagued Ireland and Northern Ireland for centuries. Drawing on extensive archival and primary material by the poet, Seamus Heaney's Regions examines Heaney's work from before his first published poetry volume, Death of a Naturalist in 1966, to his most recent volume, the elegiac Human Chain in 2010, to provide the most comprehensive treatment of the poet's work to date.

The author of such works as "Lamb, Cal, " and "Grace Notes," Bernard MacLaverty is one of Northern Ireland's leading--and most prolific--contemporary writers. Bringing together leading scholars from a full range of critical perspectives, this is a comprehensive survey of contemporary scholarship on MacLaverty. Covering all of his novels and many of his short stories, the book explores the ways in which the author has grappled with such themes as The Troubles, the Holocaust, Catholicism, and music. "Bernard MacLaverty: Critical Readings" also includes coverage of the film adaptations of his work.

The first detailed introduction to the entirety of Seamus Heaney's work This study will enable readers to gain clearer understanding of the life and major works of Seamus Heaney. It considers literary influences on Heaney, ranging from English poets such as Wordsworth, Hughes, and Auden to Irish poets such as Kavanagh and Yeats to world poets such as Virgil and Dante. It shows how Heaney was closely attuned to poetry's impact on daily life and current events even as he articulated a convincing apologia for poetry's own life and integrity. Discussing Heaney's deep immersion in Irish Catholicism, this book demonstrates how faith influenced his belief system, poetry and politics. Finally, it also considers how deeply Heaney's artistic endeavours were intertwined with politics in Northern Ireland, especially through his embrace of constitutional nationalism but rejection of physical force republicanism. Key Features Includes sections on biography, historical, cultural and political contexts, poetry and other genres, as well as a concluding section on primary works and secondary criticism Pays special attention to the marriage of form and content in the poetry and how they work together to express subtle shades of meaning Offers close readings of Heaney's canonical poems throughout his career, including the early seminal poems such as Digging, the 'bog poems', and his many elegies, such as Casualty, Station Island, and Clearances Draws on drafts of the poems and prose at the Heaney archives at Emory University and the National Library of Ireland