Traces development of Irish literary modernism from the 1920s to the 1990s through the writings of James Joyce, John Millington Synge, Samuel Beckett, Sean O'Faolain, Frank McCourt, and the Blasket Island autobiographers, Tomas O'Crohan and Maurice O'Sullivan. Considers Irish literature in relation to Irish nationalism and aftermath of British empire.

"A work that is as disturbing as it is empathetic, as beautiful as it is riveting." —Eimear McBride, New Statesman In the aftermath of the Norman Invasion of 1066, William the Conqueror was uncompromising and brutal. English society was broken apart, its systems turned on their head. What is little known is that a fractured network of guerrilla fighters took up arms against the French occupiers. In The Wake, a postapocalyptic novel set a thousand years in the past, Paul Kingsnorth brings this dire scenario back to us through the eyes of the unforgettable Buccmaster, a proud landowner bearing witness to the end of his world. Accompanied by a band of like-minded men, Buccmaster is determined to seek revenge on the invaders. But as the men travel across the scorched English landscape, Buccmaster becomes increasingly unhinged by the immensity of his loss, and their path forward becomes increasingly unclear. Written in what the author describes as "a shadow tongue"—a version of Old English updated so as to be understandable to the modern reader—The Wake renders the inner life of an Anglo-Saxon man with an accuracy and immediacy rare in historical fiction. To enter Buccmaster's world is to feel powerfully the sheer strangeness of the past. A tale of lost gods and haunted visions, The Wake is both a sensational, gripping story and a major literary achievement.

Even as a country ceases to be a great power, the concept of it as a great power can continue to influence decision making and policy formulation. This book explores how such a process took place in Russia from 1917 through 1920, when the Bolshevik coup of November 1917 led to the creation of two regimes: the Bolshevik "Reds" and the anti-Bolshevik "Whites." As Reds consolidated their one-party dictatorship and nursed global ambitions, Whites struggled to achieve a different vision for the future of Russia. Anatol Shmelev illuminates the White campaign with fresh purpose and through information from the Hoover Institution Archives, exploring how diverse White factions overcame internal tensions to lobby for recognition on the world stage, only to fail—in part because of the West's desire to leave "the Russian question" to Russians alone. In the Wake of Empire examines the personalities, institutions, political culture, and geostrategic concerns that shaped the foreign policy of the anti-Bolshevik governments and attempts to define the White movement through them. Additionally, Shmelev provides a fascinating psychological study of the factors that ultimately doomed the White effort: an irrational and ill-placed faith in the desire of the Allies to help them, and wishful thinking with regard to their own prospects that obscured the reality around them.

Recasting the birth of fascism, nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I, Dominique Kirchner Reill recounts how the people of Fiume tried to recreate empire in the guise of the nation. The Fiume Crisis recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) generated an international crisis. In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio, who aimed to annex the territory to Italy and became an inspiration to Mussolini. Many local Italians supported the effort, nurturing a standard tale of nationalist fanaticism. However, Dominique Kirchner Reill shows that practical realities, not nationalist ideals, were in the driver’s seat. Support for annexation was largely a result of the daily frustrations of life in a “ghost state” set adrift by the fall of the empire. D’Annunzio’s ideology and proto-fascist charisma notwithstanding, what the people of Fiume wanted was prosperity, which they associated with the autonomy they had enjoyed under Habsburg sovereignty. In these twilight years between the world that was and the world that would be, many across the former empire sought to restore the familiar forms of governance that once supported them. To the extent that they turned to nation-states, it was not out of zeal for nationalist self-determination but in the hope that these states would restore the benefits of cosmopolitan empire. Against the too-smooth narrative of postwar nationalism, The Fiume Crisis demonstrates the endurance of the imperial imagination and carves out an essential place for history from below.

Britain yesterday; America today. The reality of being top dog is that everybody hates you. In this provocative book, noted historian and commentator Jeremy Black shows how criticisms of the legacy of the British Empire are, in part, criticisms of the reality of American power today. He emphasizes the prominence of imperial rule in history and in the world today, and the selective way in which certain countries are castigated. Imperial Legacies is a wide-ranging and vigorous assault on political correctness, its language, misuse of the past, and grasping of both present and future.

In this first full-length study of race and colonialism in the works of James Joyce, Vincent J. Cheng argues that Joyce wrote insistently from the perspective of a colonial subject of an oppressive empire, and that Joyce's representations of 'race' in its relationship to imperialism constitute a trenchant and significant political commentary, not only on British imperialism in Ireland, but on colonial discourses and imperial ideologies in general. Exploring the interdisciplinary space afforded by postcolonial theory, minority discourse, and cultural studies, and articulating his own cross-cultural perspective on racial and cultural liminality, Professor Cheng offers a ground-breaking study of the century's most internationally influential fiction writer, and of his suggestive and powerful representations of the cultural dynamics of race, power, and empire.

The rise of the Mongol empire transformed world history. Its collapse in the mid-fourteenth century had equally profound consequences. Four themes dominate this study of the late Mongol empire in Northeast Asia during this chaotic era: the need for a regional perspective encompassing all states and ethnic groups in the area; the process and consequences of pan-Asian integration under the Mongols; the tendency for individual and family interests to trump those of dynasty, country, or linguistic affiliation; and finally, the need to see Koryo Korea as part of the wider Mongol empire. Northeast Asia was an important part of the Mongol empire, and developments there are fundamental to understanding both the nature of the Mongol empire and the new post-empire world emerging in the 1350s and 1360s. In Northeast Asia, Jurchen, Mongol, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese interests intersected, and the collapse of the Great Yuan reshaped Northeast Asia dramatically. To understand this transition, or series of transitions, the author argues, one cannot examine states in isolation. The period witnessed intensified interactions among neighboring polities and new regional levels of economic, political, military, and social integration that explain the importance of personal and family interests and of Korea in the Mongol state.