Wright - A Companion to Irish Literature

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

Published Recently

This edition first published 2010

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization

2010 Julia M. Wright

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to Irish literature/edited by Julia M. Wright.

p. cm. (Blackwell companions to literature and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-8809-8 (hardcover: alk. paper)

1. English literatureIrish authorsHistory 2. Epic literature, IrishHistory and criticism. and criticism. 3. Irish literatureHistory and criticism. 4. Northern IrelandIn literature. 5. IrelandIn literature. I. Wright, Julia M.

PR8711.C66 2010

820.9'9417dc22

2010011933

VOLUME I

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank, first and foremost, my contributors for all of their work on this project, many of them completing their essays under especially challenging circumstances including a happy total of seven births across the two volumes. Their steady good humor, thoughtful responses, and patience with my queries, requests, and nudges helped to make editing these volumes a very pleasant experience as well as an intellectually rewarding one.

I am also grateful to the Canada Research Chairs Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their indispensable support, and to Gordon Miller for his very careful and thorough work as a research assistant. My thanks as well to Dalhousie University for providing me with a sabbatical essential to the timely completion of the manuscript and to the Killam Library, and especially the incredibly efficient Interlibrary Loan Department, for its invaluable assistance. My colleagues at Dalhousie have, as always, been a source of both collegial calm and intellectual excitement, creating an energizing environment for scholarship. Isobel Bainton and Emma Bennett at Wiley-Blackwell offered their usual excellent advice and they, along with others at the press, made Wiley-Blackwell once again a joy to work with. And, above all, I thank Jason Haslam, for everything and always, including steady encouragement about work and much laughter (and sci-fi) at home.

Notes on Contributors

Guinn Batten is the author of The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism (1998), a contributor to The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, the editor (and author of an Afterword for) Medbh McGuckians The Soldiers of Year II (2002), and the author of a dozen essays on contemporary Irish poetry that include contributions to two Cambridge Companions.