There was a time when the two most notorious red-light districts not only in Ireland but in all of Europe could be found on the streets of Dublin. Though the name of Monto has endured long in folk memory, the area known as Hell was equally notorious, feared and renowned in its day. In this new work Maurice Curtis explores the histories of these dark remnants of Dublin's past, complete with their gambling, duelling and vice, their rowdy taverns and houses of ill repute.

There was a time when the two most notorious red-light districts not only in Ireland but in all of Europe could be found on the streets of Dublin. Though the name of Monto has endured long in folk memory, the area known as Hell was equally notorious, feared and renowned in its day. In this new work by Maurice Curtis explores the histories of these dark remnants of Dublin’s past, complete with their gambling, dueling and vice, their rowdy taverns and houses of ill repute.

For as long as we have records, Temple Bar has been at the heart of Dublin's cultural life. Its history is one of design, craft, publishing, the performing arts, coffee houses, political debate and great colour and energy. The world's favourite oratorio and chorus – 'Hallelujah' from Handel's Messiah – had its world premiere in Temple Bar in 1742 in Neals' Musick Hall, and a tradition of great musical vibrancy has continued there over time. Today, it is one of the central tourist areas of Dublin, and one of the most visited sets of streets on the island of Ireland. This is its history.

Irish Theatre in the Twenty-First Century is the first in-depth study of the subject. It analyses the ways in which theatre in Ireland has developed since the 1990s when emerging playwrights Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, and Enda Walsh turned against the tradition of lyrical eloquence with a harsh and broken dramatic language. Companies such as Blue Raincoat, the Corn Exchange, and Pan Pan pioneered an avant-garde dramaturgy that no longer privileged the playwright. This led to new styles of production of classic Irish works, including the plays of Synge, mounted in their entirety by Druid. The changed environment led to a re-imagining of past Irish history in the work of Rough Magic and ANU, plays by Owen McCafferty, Stacey Gregg, and David Ireland, dramatizing the legacy of the Troubles, and adaptations of Greek tragedy by Marina Carr and others reflecting the conditions of modern Ireland. From 2015, the movement #WakingTheFeminists led to a sharpened awareness of gender. While male playwrights showed a toxic masculinity on the stage, a generation of female dramatists including Carr, Gregg, and Nancy Harris gave voice to the experiences of women long suppressed in conservative Ireland. For three separate periods, 2006, 2016, 2020-2, the author served as one of the judges for the Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards, attending all new productions across the island of Ireland. This allowed him to provide the detailed overview of the 'state of play' of Irish theatre in each of those times which punctuate the book as one of its most innovative features. Drawing also on interviews with Ireland's leading theatre makers, Grene provides readers with a close-up understanding of Irish theatre in a period when Ireland became for the first time a fully modernized, secular, and multi-ethnic society.

This collection of essays is a critical reexamination of Joyce’s famed book of short stories, Dubliners. Despite the multifaceted critical attention Dubliners has received since its publication more than a century ago, many readers and teachers of the stories still rely on and embrace old, outdated readings that invoke metaphors of paralysis and stagnation to understand the book. Challenging these canonical notions about mobility, paralysis, identity, and gender in Joyce’s work, the ten essays here suggest that Dubliners is full of incredible movement. By embracing this paradigm shift, current and future scholars can open themselves up to the possibility of seeing that movement, maybe even noticing it for the first time, can yield surprisingly fresh twenty-first-century readings.

Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce: Joyces Noyces offers a fresh perspective on the Irish writer James Joyce’s much-noted obsession with music. This book provides an overview of a century-old critical tradition focused on Joyce and music, as well as six in-depth case studies which revisit material from the writer’s career in the light of new and emerging theories. Considering both Irish cultural history and the European art music tradition, the book combines approaches from cultural musicology, critical theory, sound studies and Irish studies. Chapters explore Joyce’s use of repetition, his response to literary Wagnerism, the role and status of music in the aesthetic and political debates of the fin de siècle, music and cultural nationalism, ubiquitous urban sound and ‘shanty aesthetics’. Gerry Smyth revitalizes Joyce’s work in relation to the ‘noisy’ world in which the author wrote (and his audience read) his work.

Originally dating from the 1860s, Rathgar is one of the most well-known areas of Dublin, a salubrious suburb, filled with history.In this book, author Maurice Curtis explores the area that was once home to DeValera, JM Synge and the many other people who have shaped the nation.