'This brilliant book, with rich materialat its disposal, links the life and the work; and without any forcing.' Irish Times

Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland

McCormack, W.J.

Biographies & Memoirs

Oxford University Press

Fool of the Family. A Life of J.M. Synge:

Fool of the Family a Life of J.M. Synge

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

Including samples of Gaelic literature in translation, this is a collection of Irish poetry from the age of Swift to the middle of the 20th century. Major names include Aogan O Rathaille, Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Henrietta Battier, James Clarence Mangan, Lady Wilde, anonymous writers on famine and terror, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and some of his survivors. Disinterring a tradition of enlightened outrage, the editor reconstructs a distinctively Irish poetic voice down through the centuries. Devoted to humane values yet wise to the duplicity of all self-proclaimed virtue, their voice has repeatedly adopted the mask of dramatic ferocity, with Swift's savage indignation setting the tone.

Ferocious humanism: An anthology of Irish poetry from before Swift to Yeats and after

Literature & Fiction

J.M.Dent.

The subject of Yeats’s politics is one that his various biographers have failed to examine. This fascinating and original look at the complex political life of one of the world’s most renowned poets attempts to redress the balance.

Blood Kindred: The Politics of W.B. Yeats and his Death

Arts & Literature

RANDOM HOUSE UK

All revolutionary movements since 1789 have looked instinctively to the French model. The French influence in Ireland was indeed profound, especially in the years leading up to the Easter Rising. However, it was not the traditions of the Tennis Court Oath or Bastille Day that motivated the Irish rebels, but a new French Catholic nationalism which reached its apogee with the Dreyfus Affair (1895). This was a complex reactionary movement, partly religious, partly royalist, and anti-modern. In Ireland, its influence was advanced through the thought of individual visitors, through Catholic teaching orders, and through a vigorous periodical press.

Dublin 1916: The French Connection

History

Europe

Gill & Company

Irish literature in English commands world-wide respect, but it is rarely discussed in a comparative light. This study of the making and unmaking of character commences with Balzac's impact on nineteenth-century Irish fiction. Sheridan Le Fanu links Balzac and Swedenborg to Yeats, and anticipates Elizabeth Bowen's deployment of ghost story conventions in the 1940s. Through painterly imagery, biblical quotation and the distortion of proper names, Le Fanu shows character to be a self-consuming project. Yeats's Parnell emerges as a modernist gothic hero of the 1930s. Bowen's The heat of the day anatomises the problems of identity, bequeathed by Yeats. Radically revising the idea of a gothic tradition and traversing two centuries of Irish literary history, Dissolute characters gives a fluent and detailed account of the emerging relation between Irish culture, modernism and politics.

Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History Through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen

History & Criticism

Manchester Univ Pr

The Silence of Barbara Synge is a unique work of cultural enquiry, combining archival research, literary criticism, and religious and medical history to pull the strands together and relate them to the family's literary descendent J.M. Synge. Taking the alleged death of Mrs. John Hatch (née Synge) in 1767 as a focal point, this book explores the varied strands of the Synge family tree in 18th and 19th century Ireland. Key events in the family's history are carefully documented, including a suicide in 1769 which is echoed in an early Synge play, the effects of the famine which influenced "The Playboy of the Western World" in 1907, and the behavior of Francis Synge at the time of the union.

The Silence of Barbara Synge

British & Irish

Manchester University Press

A fresh new reassessment of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73), one of the bestselling Irish novelists of the mid-Victorian period, who is recognized today for his ghost stories and tales of psychological terror, including In a Glass Darkly and The Wyvern Mystery.
"This excellent study...is far more than a revelation of Le Fanu, though this is incidentally provided in a discriminating and scholarly way...Dr. McCormack illuminates the more private and tortured universe of Le Fanu himself". -- Times Literary Supplement

Sheridan Le Fanu

Sutton Pub Ltd

An extensive new edition of the highly acclaimed " Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789-1939.

From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History

Cork University Press

fine copy only very minimal sunning to cover,

The Battle of the Books: Two Decades of Irish Cultural Debate

The Lilliput Press

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Books by McCormack, W.J.