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Cassandra S. Tully de Lope, "Masculinity and Identity in Irish Literature: Heroes, Lads, and Fathers" (Routledge, 2024)
Masculinity and Identity in Irish Literature: Heroes, Lads, and Fathers (Routledge, 2024) addresses Irish identity in Irish literature, especially masculinity in some of its forms through an interdisciplinary methodology. The study of language performance through literary analysis and corpus studies will enable readers to approach literary texts from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives, to take advantage of the texts’ full potential as well as examining these same texts through the perspective of gender identity. This will be carried out through a specialised corpus composed of 18 novels written by twentieth- and twenty-first-century male Irish authors. Thus, the language and behaviour patterns of contemporary Irish masculinity can be found as part of these male characters’ performance of identity. This book is primarily aimed at undergraduate and graduate students who wish to introduce themselves in the study of gender and identity in an Irish context as well as researchers looking for interdisciplinary methodologies of study. What is more, it can present researchers with varied options of analysis that corpus studies have not yet touched upon so thoroughly such as masculinity and Irish literature. As a monograph meant to show analysts new fields of study in Irish literature, this book will sell to academic libraries and can be used in MA courses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Eibhear Walshe and Eleanor Fitzsimons, "Speranza: Poems by Jane Wilde" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
Speranza: Poems by Jane Wilde (Liverpool UP, 2025) by Dr. Eibhear Walshe and Dr. Eleanor Fitzsimons is the first contemporary edition of the poetry of Jane Wilde, née Elgee, who also wrote as Speranza. Speranza was, in her time, renowned worldwide, with essays, poetry and translated work published in Ireland, England, America and beyond. She was a key figure in the nationalist Young Ireland movement of the 1840s, and her poetry records the hardship experienced by the Irish people - famine and migration in particular. She was also an early advocate for women’s rights, who campaigned for the admission of women to higher education. This edition, which contains several previously unpublished poems, will make the poetry of this emblematic figure in nineteenth-century Irish writing accessible to a contemporary audience for the first time. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Deirdre F. Brady, "Literary Coteries and the Irish Women Writers' Club (1933-1958)" (Liverpool UP, 2021)
In this interview, Dr. Deirdre Brady discusses her recent book, Literary Coteries and the Irish Women Writers’ Club (1933-1958) (Liverpool UP, 2021). Literary Coteries, which was released in paperback in 2024 is centered around the activities of the Irish Women Writers’ Club, a twentieth-century women’s only coterie that helped to establish a network of professional women writers. As publishers in private printing presses, as writers of dissident texts and as political campaigners against censorship and for intellectual freedom, a radical group of twentieth-century Irish women formed a female-only coterie to foster women’s writing and maintain a public space for professional writers. This book documents the activities of the Women Writers’ Club (1933–1958), exploring its ethos, social and political struggles, and the body of works created and celebrated by its members. Examining the period through a history of the book approach, it covers social events, reading committees, literary prizes, publishing histories, modernist printing presses, book fairs, reading practices, and the various political philosophies shared by members of the Club. It reveals how professional women writers deployed their networks and influence to carve out a space for their writing in the cultural marketplace, collaborating with other artistic groups to fight for creative freedoms and the right to earn a living by the pen. The book paints a vivid portrait of the Women Writers’ Club, showcasing their achievements and challenging existing orthodoxy on the role of women in Irish literary life. Dr. Deirdre Brady is Assistant Professor at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. She is author of Literary Coteries and the Irish Women Writers' Club (1933-1958), published by the Liverpool University Press. She has published widely on Irish writers’ groups of the mid-twentieth century, including the Women Writers Club and Irish PEN, and her work has featured in peer reviewed international journals, cultural magazines, and in The Irish Times. She writes creatively, and her poetry is published by Arlen Press. Her most research publications explore the interconnections between art and commerce and the global reach of influence of Irish women writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Averill Earls, "Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972" (Temple UP, 2025)
Averill Earls is an associate professor in history at St. Olaf’s College and her research focuses on sexuality and modern Ireland. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Historical Reflections (in the top-visited issue of the journal to date), Perspectives Magazine, Nursing Clio, and Notches Blog. In 2021 she was awarded the Judith R. Walkowitz Article Prize for her 2020 article, "Solicitor Brown and His Boy." Prof. Earls is also one of the four feminist historians and award-winning podcasters who founded Dig: A History Podcast in 2017. Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972 (Temple UP, 2025) tells the unexpected, sometimes heartbreaking, stories of Dublin’s men who desired men and the Gardaí who policed them. The book uncovers Ireland’s queer lives of the past. Averill Earls investigates how same-sex-desiring men lived and loved in a country where their sexuality was illegal and seen as unnatural. Across seven social biographical chapters, each highlighting individuals at the nexus of these histories, Earls constructs a narrative of experiences through the larger contexts in which they are embedded. She uses courtroom testimonies, police records, and family history archives as well as “educated speculation” to show how structures governing male same-sex desire in Ireland played out on the bodies of the men who desired men, the teen boys who sold sex to men, and the way the Catholic-nationalist ethos shaped the Gardaí who policed them. Love in the Lav examines the experiences of people such as cabbie James Hand, who was put on trial for gross indecency, to provide a window into the queer working-class subculture of 1930s Dublin. Earls also focuses on issues of consent, especially with teens, and the unregulated queer Irish world of public figures, including Micheál Mac Liammóir, Hilton Edwards, Ronald Brown, and John Broderick. By examining twentieth-century Ireland through the lived experiences of ordinary same-sex-desiring Irish men who were relegated to obscurity by Irish society, Earls reveals the contradictions, possibilities, and magnitude of postcolonial Irish Catholic nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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José Vergara, "All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature" (Cornell UP, 2021)
All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature (Cornell UP, 2021) explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and responded to Joyce's work. Through contextually rich close readings, José Vergara uncovers the many roles Joyce has occupied in Russia over the last century, demonstrating how the writers Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin draw from Joyce's texts, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to address the volatile questions of lineages in their respective Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet contexts. Interviews with contemporary Russian writers, critics, and readers of Joyce extend the conversation to the present day, showing how the debates regarding the Irish writer's place in the Russian pantheon are no less settled one hundred years after Ulysses. The creative reworkings, or translations, of Joycean themes, ideas, characters, plots, and styles made by the five writers Vergara examines speak to shifting cultural norms, understandings of intertextuality, and the polarity between Russia and the West. Vergara illuminates how Russian writers have used Joyce's ideas as a critical lens to shape, prod, and constantly redefine their own place in literary history. All Future Plunges to the Past offers one overarching approach to the general narrative of Joyce's reception in Russian literature. While each of the writers examined responded to Joyce in an individual manner, the sum of their methods reveals common concerns. This subject raises the issue of cultural values and, more importantly, how they changed throughout the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, Russian emigration, and the post-Soviet Russian environment. José Vergara is Assistant Professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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