Modern Irish-American Fiction

Modern Irish-American Fiction PDF Author: Daniel J. Casey
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815602347
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Reflected in these writings from twenty-one Irish Americans are the themes common to all immigrant literature, but from the authors’ own ethnic point of view. The struggle for success forms the underlying structure in the stories by O’Hara, Curran, and McCarthy; and the changing values the New World imposes on the individual are seen in Edwin O’Connor’s Grand Day for Mr. Garvey. Irish wit and black humor pepper all the stories, as represented by Dunn’s bartender-philosopher, Dooley, and Donleavy’s Fairy Tale of New York. Catholicism is omnipresent and is often characterized by the priest, as in Fitzgerald’s Benediction, Power’s Bill, and Flaherty’s Fogarty. Themes that have an immense effect on the characters’ relationships are their difficulties in communicating with one another, which Gill captures succinctly in The Cemetery, and the repositioning of gender roles, so evident in Cullinan’s Life After Death and in Costello’s Murphy’s Xmas. Finally, there are the intense, often contradictory, feelings the characters have toward their “homeland:” Hamill’s Gift illustrates the desire to rid Ireland of British rule; Gordon’s “neighborhood” shows the immigrants’ embarrassment over their origins. Editors Casey and Rhodes have organized these pieces chronologically, beginning at the turn of the century. Thus, the selections illustrate the progression of Irish-American literature and also fulfill the word of William Kennedy, who said of his own writing: “those who came before helped to show me how to turn experience into literature.”

Modern Irish-American Fiction

Modern Irish-American Fiction PDF Author: Daniel J. Casey
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815602347
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reflected in these writings from twenty-one Irish Americans are the themes common to all immigrant literature, but from the authors’ own ethnic point of view. The struggle for success forms the underlying structure in the stories by O’Hara, Curran, and McCarthy; and the changing values the New World imposes on the individual are seen in Edwin O’Connor’s Grand Day for Mr. Garvey. Irish wit and black humor pepper all the stories, as represented by Dunn’s bartender-philosopher, Dooley, and Donleavy’s Fairy Tale of New York. Catholicism is omnipresent and is often characterized by the priest, as in Fitzgerald’s Benediction, Power’s Bill, and Flaherty’s Fogarty. Themes that have an immense effect on the characters’ relationships are their difficulties in communicating with one another, which Gill captures succinctly in The Cemetery, and the repositioning of gender roles, so evident in Cullinan’s Life After Death and in Costello’s Murphy’s Xmas. Finally, there are the intense, often contradictory, feelings the characters have toward their “homeland:” Hamill’s Gift illustrates the desire to rid Ireland of British rule; Gordon’s “neighborhood” shows the immigrants’ embarrassment over their origins. Editors Casey and Rhodes have organized these pieces chronologically, beginning at the turn of the century. Thus, the selections illustrate the progression of Irish-American literature and also fulfill the word of William Kennedy, who said of his own writing: “those who came before helped to show me how to turn experience into literature.”

Irish Immigrants in America

Irish Immigrants in America PDF Author: Elizabeth Raum
Publisher: Capstone
ISBN: 1429611804
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
"3 story paths, 43 choices, 15 endings"--Cover.

Cabbage and Bones

Cabbage and Bones PDF Author: Caledonia Kearns
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
ISBN: 0805052003
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
In this affecting anthology of fiction by Irish-American women, the voices of some of our most important writers are finally celebrated. These 25 pieces, more than half of which have never before been published in book form, include selections by such established, award-winning authors as Anna Quindlen, Alice McDermott, Mary McCarthy, and Mary McGarry Morris, as well as promising newcomers.

The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature

The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature PDF Author: Christopher Dowd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136902406
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
This book examines the development of literary constructions of Irish-American identity from the mid-nineteenth century arrival of the Famine generation through the Great Depression. It goes beyond an analysis of negative Irish stereotypes and shows how Irish characters became the site of intense cultural debate regarding American identity, with some writers imagining Irishness to be the antithesis of Americanness, but others suggesting Irishness to be a path to Americanization. This study emphasizes the importance of considering how a sense of Irishness was imagined by both Irish-American writers conscious of the process of self-definition as well as non-Irish writers responsive to shifting cultural concerns regarding ethnic others. It analyzes specific iconic Irish-American characters including Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlet O’Hara, as well as lesser-known Irish monsters who lurked in the American imagination such as T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney and Frank Norris’ McTeague. As Dowd argues, in contemporary American society, Irishness has been largely absorbed into a homogenous white culture, and as a result, it has become a largely invisible ethnicity to many modern literary critics. Too often, they simply do not see Irishness or do not think it relevant, and as a result, many Irish-American characters have been de-ethnicized in the critical literature of the past century. This volume reestablishes the importance of Irish ethnicity to many characters that have come to be misread as generically white and shows how Irishness is integral to their stories.

Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK

Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK PDF Author: Beth O’Leary Anish
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030831949
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK addresses the concerns of Irish America in the post-war era by studying its fiction and the authors who brought the communities of their youth to life on the page. With few exceptions, the novels studied here are lesser-known works, with little written about them to date. Mining these tremendous resources for the details of Irish American life, this book looks back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the authors' immigrant grandparents were central to their communities. It also points forward to the twenty-first century, as the concerns these authors had for the future of Irish America have become a legacy we must grapple with in the present.

Reading Irish-American Fiction

Reading Irish-American Fiction PDF Author: M. Hallissy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403983275
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This book analyzes five novels, all published between 1989 and 1999, in which the main characters are 'hyphenated people': Americans who are ancestrally joined to, yet realistically separated from, the Irish. Hallissy explores why these characters think of themselves as Irish, though they have know little of Ireland or its people.

Awake in America

Awake in America PDF Author: Daniel Tobin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780268042370
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Awake in America seeks to establish a conversation between Irish and Irish American literature that challenges many of the long-accepted boundaries between the two.

There You are

There You are PDF Author: Thomas Flanagan
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
Thomas Flanagan became famous as the author of a trilogy of novels, starting withThe Year of the French,about Ireland from the rebellion of 1798 to the civil war of the 1920s. But the novelist who began by reimagining the mental and physical world of eighteenth-century County Mayo had long been immersing himself, as a scholar, essayist, and reviewer, in the literature and history of his ancestral land. In the nonfiction writings collected here, many of them unpublished in his lifetime, Flanagan brings what Christopher Cahill calls his "keen eye and strong gaze and sharp tongue" to reassessments of key figures of Irish culture. They range from Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, through W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Collins, to contemporaries and friends like Brian Moore and Frank O'Connor, and American Irish like the Molly Maguires and the director John Ford. Flanagan probes the tragically intertwined origins of celebrity and literary modernism in the careers of Irish-American writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill, and John O'Hara. He reflects on what his own novels have taught him about the possibilities of historical fiction. And his thoughts on Irish-American identity sum up the long-pondered mixture of experience and scrutiny he brought to his heritage. Witty, lively, and learned, this collection reveals that Thomas Flanagan was not only as a master of the historical novel but a writer who meditated broadly and deeply on the Ireland he once described as "a complex, profound, historical society, woven of many strands, some bright and some dark."

Too Smart to be Sentimental

Too Smart to be Sentimental PDF Author: Sally Barr Ebest
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Through a series of critical and biographical essays, this work offers a feminist literary history of twentieth-century Irish America.

Thicker Than Water

Thicker Than Water PDF Author: Gordon Snell
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780385325714
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Twelve remarkable coming of age stories capture both the "old", beguiling Ireland and its new energy today. Stories tell of a love so strong it makes the stars shine in daylight; how Catholic and Protestant hostilities burn away a new romance; the hidden longing of a past summer; a waitressing job in Texas that offers a glimpse of the harsh "dream" of immigrant life. In Emma Donoghue's title story, Mammy's second wedding brings out the bloody truth between sisters. Maeve Binchy and Ita Daly tell of old secrets cast off at last, and Chris Lynch shows how a young couple's journey to an abortion clinic in Liverpool leads to a painful awakening of deepest feelings.