Ulster, Co. Antrim, 1903 Born with a limp, unsuitable for military service, Peter Greenwood knows that he is an embarrassment to his father, an officer in the British army. At seventeen the youth travels to Belfast to study journalism. New friends help Peter find a job at a conservative newspaper The Empire. His first assignment is to publish the memoirs of a retired captain Evan Pryce, a veteran of the Transvaal campaign. At the very first meeting Peter recognizes a broken, bitter man, who is not proud of his past. Molly, the captain's feral and uncouth daughter, takes a liking to Peter and shares a few family secrets that do not quite tie with the patriotic spirit of the newspaper. The Pryce family has a sworn enemy, an Irish nationalist hungry for vengeance, to which Peter becomes a witness. Even though his own life is spared, it now belongs to the rebels. He must use his literary skills to cover up their crimes. Ulster Lament, a bewitching folk melody sung by the ringleader, infects Peter's thoughts and makes him question his loyalty to the crown. He starts sympathizing with the rebels and believing that their rage is justified. Will he turn against everything he was taught to hold sacred?

Lament seems to have been universal in the ancient world. As such, it is an excellent touchstone for the comparative study of attitudes towards death and the afterlife, human relations to the divine, views of the cosmos, and the constitution of the fabric of society in different times and places. This collection of essays offers the first ever comparative approach to ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern traditions of lament. Beginning with the Sumerian and Hittite traditions, the volume moves on to examine Bronze Age iconographic representations of lamentation, Homeric lament, depictions of lament in Greek tragedy and parodic comedy, and finally lament in ancient Rome. The list of contributors includes such noted scholars as Richard Martin, Ian Rutherford, and Alison Keith. Lament comes at a time when the conclusions of the first wave of the study of lament-especially Greek lament-have received widespread acceptance, including the notions that lament is a female genre; that men risked feminization if they lamented; that there were efforts to control female lamentation; and that a lamenting woman was a powerful figure and a threat to the orderly functioning of the male public sphere. Lament revisits these issues by reexamining what kinds of functions the term lament can include, and by expanding the study of lament to other genres of literature, cultures, and periods in the ancient world. The studies included here reflect the variety of critical issues raised over the past 25 years, and as such, provide an overview of the history of critical thinking on the subject.

Focusing on several distinct genres of eighteenth-century Irish song, Henigan demonstrates in each case that the interaction between the elite and vernacular, the written and oral, is pervasive and characteristic of the Irish song tradition to the present day.

Burning dinners, stitching "scandalous" quilts, talking "hard" in the male dominated world of rap music---Feminist Messages interprets such acts as instances of coding, or covert expressions of subversive or disturbing ideas. While coding may be either deliberated or unconscious, it is a common phenomenon in women's stories, art, and daily routines. Because it is essentially ambiguous, coding protects women from potentially dangerous responses from those who might be troubled by their messages.