Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian is an innovative contribution to the scholarship on Belfast poet, Medbh McGuckian. This book considers the entire oeuvre of this globally respected Irish woman writer, a member of the contemporary avant-garde with now fifteen (U.S. published) volumes and numerous individual publications. The author positions McGuckian’s oeuvre as political and historical poetry and offers a provocative new assessment of its crafted silences. This work argues that it is the muted character of McGuckian’s poems—a consequence of a defamiliarized language, the overwhelming sway of the image, and a profusion of intertextual quoting—that constitutes their agency and force. The silences are read as a response to the precarious positionality of poet and speaker at the site of “disaster” and the limits of articulacy. In line with Rukeyser’s notion of the life of poetry, the life of McGuckian's silences is located, Fadem argues, in the poems’ production, as revealed self-reflexively, and in their prolonged consumption. This oeuvre operates as a formidable counter-discourse by converting poetry's reception into a much protracted task that redistributes the temporal economy of poem and reader and disrupts the given structures of time, place, and the order of things.

This book comprehensively looks at the oeuvre of a major Irish woman poet, Medbh McGuckian. It positions her oeuvre as political, historical poetry crafted through the poetics of silence: a defamiliarized English, a reliance on the image, and the deployment of multiple forms of intertextuality.

Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: The Case for Reparations is an inspired contribution to the scholarship on one of the most influential American novels and novelists. The author positions this contemporary classic as a meditation on historical justice and re-comprehends it as both a formal tragedy— a generic translation of fiction and tragedy or a “novel-tragedy” (Kliger)—and a novel of objects. Its many things—literary, conceptual, linguistic— are viewed as vessels carrying the (hi)story and the political concerns. From this, a third conclusion is drawn: Fadem argues for a view of Beloved as a case for reparations. That status is founded on two outstanding object lessons: the character of Beloved as embodiment of the subject-object relations defining the slave state and the grammatical object “weather” in the sentence “The rest is...” on the novel’s final page. This intertextual reference places Beloved in a comparative link with Hamlet and Oresteia. Fadem’s research is meticulous in engaging the full spectrum of tragedy theory, much critical theory, and a full swathe of scholarship on the novel. Few critics take up the matter of reparations, still fewer the politics of genre, craft, and form. This scholar posits Morrison’s tragedy as constituting a searing critique of modernity, as composed through meaningful intertextualities and as crafted by profound “thingly” objects (Brown). Altogether, Fadem has divined a fascinating singular treatment of Beloved exploring the connections between form and craft together with critical historical and political implications. The book argues, finally, that this novel’s first concern is justice, and its chief aim to serve as a clarion call for material— and not merely symbolic—reparations. This book is freely available to read at https://taylorandfrancis.com/socialjustice/?c=language-literature-arts#

American Revenge Narratives critically examines the nation’s vengeful storytelling tradition. With essays on late twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, film, and television, it maps the coordinates of the revenge genre’s contemporary reinvention across American culture. By surveying American revenge narratives, this book measures how contemporary payback plots appraise the nation’s political, social, and economic inequities. The volume’s essays collectively make the case that retribution is a defining theme of post-war American culture and an artistic vehicle for critique. In another sense, this book presents a scholarly coming to terms with the nation’s love for vengeance. By investigating recent iterations of an ancient genre, contributors explore how the revenge narrative evolves and thrives within American literary and filmic imagination. Taken together, the book’s diverse chapters attempt to understand American culture’s seemingly inexhaustible production of vengeful tales.

Intro -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction -- Setting the Scene: Women in the Irish film industry -- Susan Liddy -- Revisiting the Past -- Ellen O'Mara Sullivan and Her Role in Early Irish Cinema -- Díóg O'connell -- Feminist Reclamation Politics: Reclaiming Maeve (1981) and Mother Ireland (1988) -- Sarah Edge -- Practitioners and Production Culture -- 'Where Are the Women?' Exploring perceptions of a gender order in the Irish film industry -- Susan Liddy -- Irish Production Cultures and Women Filmmakers: Nicky Gogan -- Laura Canning -- Women Cinematographers and Changing Irish Production Cultures -- Maeve Connolly -- A Cut Above: In conversation with Emer Reynolds -- Susan Liddy -- Documenting Documentary: Liberated enclave or pink ghetto? -- Anne O'brien -- Changing the Conversation: Education, celebration and collaboration -- Educating Gráinne: The role of education in promoting gender equality in the Irish film industry -- Annie Doona -- Activism through Celebration: The role of the Dublin Feminist Film Festival in supporting women in Irish film, 2014-17 -- Karla Healion, Aileen O'driscoll, Jennifer O'meara, Katie Stone -- What If We Had Been the Heroes of the Maze and Long Kesh? Collaborative filmmaking in Northern Ireland -- Laura Aguiar -- Text and Context: Documentary, fiction and animation -- Dearbhla Glynn: Documenting war and sexual violence -- Eileen Culloty -- Pat Murphy: Portrait of an artist as a filmmaker -- Lance Pettitt -- Juanita Wilson: A crusading Irish filmmaker -- Isabelle Le Corff -- Irish Cinema and the Gendering of Space: Motherhood, domesticity and the homeplace -- Ruth Barton -- Authority to Speak: Assessing the progress of gender parity and representation in Irish animation -- Ciara Barrett -- Conclusion.

In a 1984 interview with longtime friend Edna O’Brien, Philip Roth describes her writing as “a piece of fine meshwork, a net of perfectly observed sensuous details that enables you to contain all the longing and pain and remorse that surge through the fiction.” The phrase “fine meshwork” can apply not only to O’Brien’s writing but also to the connective threads that bind her work to others’, including, most illuminatingly, Roth’s. Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Roth and O’Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In Fine Meshwork, Dan O’Brien investigates the shared concerns of these two authors, now regarded as literary icons in their home countries. He traces their fifty-year literary friendship and the striking parallels in their books and reception, bringing together what, at first glance, seem to be quite disparate milieus: the largely feminist and Irish scholarship on O’Brien with Jewish and American perspectives on Roth. In doing so, and in considering them in a transnational context, he argues that the intertwined nature of their writing symbolizes the far-ranging symbiosis between Irish literature and its American—particularly Jewish American—counterpart.

In the late eighteenth century, an influx of Protestant settlers to the mainly Catholic parish of Forkhill on the Ulster borderlands provoked clashes between natives and newcomers. None was more horrific than the brutal attack on a Protestant schoolmaster and his family in the winter of 1791. The conflict was immediately cast in sectarian terms, leading to more than 200 years of ill-will. But was it a misdiagnosis? Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics explores the social history of the parish between 1787 and 1858. In a wide-ranging analysis, Kyla Madden demonstrates that there was a greater degree of cooperation and exchange between Catholics and Protestants than the historical record has acknowledged. Madden contends that since some of our widely held assumptions about the patterns of Irish history dissolve under scrutiny at the local level, they should be more cautiously applied on a larger scale.