Kiberd - one of Ireland's leading critics and a central figure in the FIELD DAY group with Brian Friel, Seamus Deane and the actor Stephen Rea - argues that the Irish Literary Revival of the 1890-1922 period embodied a spirit and a revolutionary, generous vision of Irishness that is still relevant to post-colonial Ireland. This is the perspective from which he views Irish culture. His history of Irish writing covers Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Elizab...

Ireland is suffering a crisis of authority. Catholic Church scandals, political corruption, and economic collapse have shaken the Irish people's faith in their institutions. The nation's struggle for independence is thrown into doubt. But, as Declan Kiberd argues in this engaging survey of post-war Irish literature, the country's creative writers have been alert to this reality from the start.He describes the young...

Brought to you by Penguin.This Penguin Classic is performed by Patrick Gibson, known for his roles in The OA, The Tudors and The Passing Bells. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Declan Kiberd'Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century' Anthony Burgess, ObserverFollowing the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th June 1904, and what happens to th...

To celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses, the most important literary work of the twentieth century, eighteen artists, writers and thinkers respond to an episode each of the great modernist text.Each essayist is an expert in one of the subjects treated in the novel, but what brings them together is a common love of Ulysses.Joseph O'Connor considers the music-saturated Sirens episode and David McWill...

In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's Ulysses offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. As much a guide to contemporary life as it is virtuoso work of literary criticism, Ulysses and Us offers revolutionary insights to the scholar and the first-time reader alike.Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the hero of James Joyce's Ulysses, teaches the young ...

A teasing but affectionate celebration of cricket through the ages, written by one of Ireland's greatest living critics.Cricket is the strangest game. It features idealism, brutality, low comedy, high intelligence, luck and sheer bravery in equal measure – and often achieves the condition of art.Declan Kiberd's remarkable book is a celebration of cricket through the ages, and of the peculiarities of the people who love and play it. He evokes brilliantly wha...

At the funeral, several priests remarked how appropriate it was that Father Conroy should have returned on his last day to Rosnagree, the parish in which he was born.Father Tom Conroy – a spiky, difficult man – dies at a reunion of his seminary colleagues. As this masterly novel unfolds, we are taken through the years that formed this troublesome priest, who knew his life had been a failure. The Hungry Grass is a sharply witty and moving novel of a world on the cu...

A freshly annotated and reset edition of Joyce's great epic, in a hardback Penguin Classics editionUlysses, written between 1914 and 1921, has survived censorship, legal action and bitter controversy. Following the events of a single day in Dublin and the experiences of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, it stands as an undisputed modernist classic: a profoundly Irish book that also reaches out to the whole world.Reset from the 1922...

This book is a collection of essays and a short story written to honor Christopher Fox of Notre Dame, arguably the most influential figure in Irish Studies for the past quarter century. The essays address topics in which Professor Fox has made his own enduring scholarly contributions, and subjects to which he has made enduring contributions through his academic leadership, from the development of library collections and important fellowships at his university to the institution of a global...

These lectures were delivered by Seamus Heaney while he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. In the first of them, Heaney discusses and celebrates poetry's special ability to redress spiritual balance and to function as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world. He proceeds to explore how this 'redress' manifests itself in a diverse range of poems and poets, including Christopher Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander', 'The Midnight Court' by the eighteenth-century Irish...

This volume brings together specially commissioned essays by some of the world's leading experts on the life and work of W. H. Auden, one of the major English-speaking poets of the twentieth century. The volume's contributors include a prize-winning poet, Auden's literary executor and editor, and his most recent, widely acclaimed biographer. It offers fresh perspectives on his work from Auden critics, alongside specialists from such diverse fields as drama, ecological and travel studies. I...

With an introduction by Declan KiberdIn this new work, Andrew Gibson sets out to reverse the traditional view of Joyce and his work as the paradigm of international modernism in literature. Where criticism has usually consigned Ireland to secondary status in Joyce’s work, Gibson firmly relocates the writer and his work in Ireland, showing them at all points to be intricately bound up in Irish history, politics and culture. Crucially, he views Joyce’s departure for Europe as allegia...