scholarly journals The Permanence of Place: Places and Their Names in Irish Literature

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 93-109
Author(s):  
Piotr Stalmaszczyk ◽  

This paper discusses the relation between places and their names as reflected in Irish literature. According to Robbie Hannan (1991: 19) attachment to place is among the strongest human emotions, explicitly revealed in literature. Celtic literature is ‘saturated’ with images of landscape and preoccupied with places and their names, landscape is constantly present in ancient sagas and bardic poetry, modern drama, short stories, novels and essays. The sense of place is explicitly manifest in medieval heroic tales (such as The Táin), and twentieth century novels (e.g. James Joyce’s Ulysses) and poetry, or contemporary drama (e.g. Brian Friel’s Translations). Patrick Sheeran (1988: 194) has observed that the idea of the Irish sense of place is: (a) a product of the native tradition; (b) it is a verbal or nominal preoccupation and has little to do with any actual cultivation of things; (c) it relates to death rather than to life. The principal aim of this paper is to further add to the above characteristics.

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
Jill Felicity Durey

This article illuminates two short stories by John Galsworthy through examining them with the help of his diaries and letters, a handful of unpublished letters by his nephew from an internment camp and secondary historical sources. It argues that the stories, when read in conjunction with these sources, are highly revealing about human nature during Second World War and also about Galsworthy’s prescient fears concerning a second twentieth-century world war, which he did not live to see.


2021 ◽  

The book is devoted to the works of James Baldwin, one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. The authors examine his most important contributions – including novels, essays, short stories, poetry, and media appearances – in the wider context of American history. They demonstrate the lasting importance of his oeuvre, which was central to the Civil Rights Movement and continues to be relevant at the dawn of the twenty-first century and the Black Lives Matter era.


2002 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 330-339
Author(s):  
Keith Soothill

Somerset Maugham's writings had huge audiences in the first half of the twentieth century. In much of his work the focus is on people behaving badly. What effect did his work have on his readers? This article examines his short stories, of which approximately one-fifth of the major ones have murder as their theme. Focusing on the murders that Maugham ‘creates’, the claim is that Maugham is subversive, challenging some readily made assumptions. In Maugham's scheme of things, the criminal justice system is usually inappropriate, irrelevant or produces injustice, with ‘rough justice’ usually the best that is on offer. The resourceful can get away with murder. Murder is not the most serious crime for many. Instinct rather than rationality is the best judge. Maugham also emphasises the importance of fate, thus implying we are not in control of our destinies. The article argues that popular authors, such as Maugham, may have contributed much more than is generally recognised to the developing unease about the ‘status quo’ that ultimately led to the landslide victory of the Labour government in 1945.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 254-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nwamaka Okeke-Ogbuafor ◽  
Tim Gray ◽  
Selina Stead

Purpose This paper aims to understand what two apparently contrasting concepts of communality and place attachment say about the quality of community life in the Niger Delta. Design/methodology/approach The research for this paper relied on extensive qualitative and quantitative data: qualitative data were collected from five oil-rich and three oil-poor communities across Ogoniland, while quantitative data were collected from four of these communities. Thematic content analysis was used to interpret the qualitative data, while the quantitative data were analysed through Excel. Findings Most participants from both oil-rich and oil-poor communities strongly reject a social sense of communality and strongly endorse a geographical sense of place. Practical implications The wider implication of this finding is that proponents of community development (CD) have a choice between either the cynical option of noting that Ogoni’s strong sense of place means that they will tolerate limited CD, or the noble option of noting that Ogoni’s strong sense of place is a solid foundation on which to build sustainable CD by empowering citizens to create their own future. Originality/value The originality of this study is twofold. First, it shows the complexity of people’s sense of community encompassing widely different and possibly contradictory elements. Second, it reveals the strength and persistence of people’s attachment to place despite its physical shortcomings.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67
Author(s):  
Sayed Mohammad Anoosheh ◽  
Muhammad Hussein Oroskhan

The first traces of modernism in Iranian society can be found in the second decade of twentieth century which was deeply embedded with religious concepts. With regard to Persian literature, short story was developed as a new genre and a sign of modernism of that period by prominent Iranian writers such as Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951), Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh (1892-1997) and Sadegh Chubak (1916-1998). In this way a cultural clash was broken out between the traditional religious concepts and the new modern ideas. Among these writers, Chubak was more influenced by the doctrine of modernism. He expressed his message colloquially through his short stories to instigate the lower part of society. His naturalistic style of writing delved into the most gruesome details of people's life with the aim of shocking his reader in experiencing a new perspective previously ignored. To highlight Chubak's style of writing attempt is made to explore one of the highly praised short stories entitled "An Afternoon in Late Autumn" on the ground of the Bakhtin's theory of grotesque realism cited in Rabelais and His World. Grotesque realism is a site upon which religious and social hierarchies can be subverted and renewed. This study tries to reveal that Chubak followed the Bakhtin's grotesque realism to evoke a new outlook particularly in the lower section of society.


Author(s):  
T. Hajder

Polish literature is one of the leading positions not only in the Slavic world, but also well-presented at the global level. The article is devoted to the Polish writer of the middle of the twentieth century, whose name is unknown to the Ukrainian narratee, but his works are extremely interesting. The reasons why some writers do not fall into the field of wide-ranging research are different. In the case of the Kazimierz Trukhanovsky’s works, this is an insufficient research of the Polish literary criticism, the researchers are writing about it only now. Returning the names of interesting writers and attracting attention to their works is an actual and interesting task.The creative legacy of K. Trukhanovsky is quite extensive – it’s a romance cycle, story and short stories, individual novels. Philosophy, reflection and utopia are the most extensive characteristics of the writer’s works. The imagery and aesthetic background of the novels become clearer if we attract the work of artists, whose leading motive of creativity was the hell and the wandering of human souls in the search of divine light. The writer applied to mythologization and the magic properties of time-space measurements in the novel. Mythological and literary traditions are superimposed, as a result of which the author creates a complicated model of a labyrinthine novel.


Last Acts ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter

The introduction outlines a theoretical framework for the book. Through a brief survey of critical approaches to Hamlet, it considers the common alignment of early modern drama with mourning and argues that new critical perspectives emerge if we focus on the experience of the dying subject instead. William Perkins’s 1595 tract, A Salve for a Sick Man, illustrates how death was understood around Shakespeare’s time. By situating Perkins’s text in relation to ancient Stoicism and twentieth-century phenomenology, the introduction explicates what is distinctive about the understanding of dying found in the ars moriendi tradition and argues for the theoretical sophistication and continuing influence of the genre.


Author(s):  
Victoria Margree ◽  
Daniel Orrells ◽  
Minna Vuohelainen

The introduction to the volume sets Richard Marsh in his historical context and argues that our understanding of late-Victorian and Edwardian professional authorship remains incomplete without a consideration of Marsh’s oeuvre. The introduction discusses Marsh as an exemplary professional writer producing topical popular fiction for an expanding middlebrow market. The seeming ephemerality of his literary production meant that its value was not appreciated by twentieth-century critics who were constructing the English literary canon. Marsh’s writing, however, deserves to be reread, as its negotiation of mainstream and counter-hegemonic discourses challenges our assumptions about fin-de-siècle literary culture. His novels and short stories engaged with and contributed to contemporary debates about aesthetic and economic value and interrogated the politics of gender, sexuality, empire and criminality.


Author(s):  
Navaneetha Mokkil

Kamala Das, one of the best-known bilingual writers from India in the twentieth century, consistently pushed the boundaries of what could be represented in literature through her poetry in English, autobiographical writings and novellas in English and Malayalam, and a large body of short stories in Malayalam. Through the conscious deployment of the confessional voice in her poetry and life writings and the intricate entanglement of the public and the private in her fictional worlds, Das carved a space for the explorations of the affective realm and physicality in modern Indian literature. Kamala Das’s exposure to books and literary production came at an early age through her mother, Nalappat Balamaniyamma, a prolific poet, and her maternal uncle, Nalappat Narayana Menon, a prominent writer and translator.


2019 ◽  
pp. 228-243
Author(s):  
Peter McDonald

This chapter focuses on Louis MacNeice’s translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936), which is often cited by classicists as well as by admirers of MacNeice’s own poetry as one of the most important twentieth-century versions of Greek tragedy that exists. The enthusiasm of classicists for MacNeice’s achievement seems to point to a fusion of Greek fidelity with poetic originality. The chapter then argues that the meaning of MacNeice’s Agamemnon is bound up closely with certain creative tensions that energized both his own writing in the 1930s and after and, more generally, informed the direction of Irish literature of the mid-century. In trying to identify and define these tensions, it helps to bring MacNeice alongside two figures of central importance: the classical scholar and poet E.R. Dodds, and the poet and classical enthusiast W.B. Yeats.


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