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In the space of a few short decades, Ireland has become one of the most globalised societies in the Western world. The full ramifications of this transformation for traditional Irish communities, religious practice, economic activity, as well as literature and the arts, are as yet unknown. What is known is that Ireland's largely unthinking embrace of globalisation has at times had negative consequences. Unlike some other European countries, Ireland has eagerly and sometimes recklessly grasped the opportunities for material advancement afforded by the global project.
This collection of essays, largely the fruit of two workshops organised under the auspices of the Humanities Institute of Ireland at University College Dublin and the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in the Institute of Technology, Tallaght, explores how globalisation has taken such a firm hold on Irish society and provides a cultural perspective on the phenomenon. The book is divided into two sections. The first examines various manifestations of globalisation in Irish society whereas the second focuses on literary representations of globalisation. The contributors, acknowledged experts in the areas of cultural theory, religion, sociology and literature, offer a panoply of viewpoints of Ireland's interaction with globalisation.
List of contents
Contents: Fintan O'Toole: Foreword - Eamon Maher: Introduction - Michael Cronin: Inside Out: Time and Place in Global Ireland - Catherine Maignant: The Global Irish Spirit - Grace Neville: In at the Death: The French Press and the Celtic Tiger - Eugene O'Brien: Negotiating the Self: The Spectral Mobile Subject - Peadar Kirby: Globalisation, Vulnerability and the Return to Religion: Reflections from the Irish Experience - Tom Inglis: The Global is Personal - Anne Fogarty: Contemporary Irish Fiction and the Transnational Imaginary - Alison O'Malley-Younger/Tom Herron: 'Root and Routes': Home and Away in Friel and Heaney - Patrick Lonergan: Irish Theatre and Globalisation: A Faustian Pact? - Willy Maley: 'Coming of Age' (and other Fictions of Globalisation) in Three Novels by Seamus Deane, Roddy Doyle and Patrick McCabe - Eamon Maher: 'The Universal is the Local without Walls': John McGahern and the Global Project.
About the author
The Editor: Eamon Maher is Director of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies at the Institute of Technology, Tallaght. He is currently working on a monograph on John McGahern entitled `The Church and its Spire¿: John McGahern and the Catholic Question.
Report
«'Cultural Perspectives on Globalisation and Ireland' is a pioneering volume (...) that should become a contemporary reference work for any critic of modern Irish culture; this book deserves the widest possible readership.» (Eóin Flannery, Irish Studies Review)
