Cork University Press

Oscar’s Shadow: Wilde, Homosexuality and Modern Ireland

Oscar Wilde was the most famous gay Irishman and Oscar’s Shadow deals with Wilde and his homosexuality within the context of Ireland and of Irish cultural perceptions of his sexuality. The book investigates the questions: What was ‘Oscar’s shadow’, his influence on twentieth and twenty-first century Irish culture and literature? What has Oscar Wilde meant to Ireland from his disgrace in May 1895 up to the present?

Eibhear Walshe presents Oscar’s shadow in Ireland from 1895 to the present, using contemporary Irish newspaper reports of the Wilde trials of 1895, previously unpublished archival material, and a significant body of Irish critical studies, biographies and dramatisations of Wilde’s life and sexuality. If perceptions of sexual identity evolve partly through public events, how then did Irish media and literary sources configure Wilde’s homosexuality during the Wilde trials and after? Wilde’s homosexuality was a contested discourse within twentieth-century Ireland, a discourse that became interconnected with Irish cultural nationalism. Thus Wilde became a weathervane for the rare but contentious discussions of homosexuality in Ireland, and his life and his writings usefully intertwine within these debates. Oscar’s Shadow sets the historical context for cultural and legal perceptions of homosexuality in Ireland.

This book is the first study of the formation of the idea of homosexuality in Ireland into the twentieth century and centres on an account of Wilde’s visible presence as sexual ‘other’, analysing the strategies of normalisation used to police his unnameable sin within Irish media and literary accounts. Walshe argues that Wilde in Irish culture was perceived not so much as Oscar Wilde the unspeakable but much more as Oscar Wilde the dissident Irishman. Wilde, famous for his writings and notorious for his sexuality, is central for perceptions of homosexuality in modern Ireland.

Further details: http://corkuniversitypress.com/Oscar’s_Shadow:_Wilde,_Homosexuality_and_Modern_Ireland_/351/

Leadership With Consciousness

In Leadership With Consciousness Tony Humphreys posits that economic factors alone are not sufficient to explain the worldwide recession that started in 2008; indeed, he graphically points out that those economic processes are always enmeshed with powerful, often unconscious defensive emotional processes.

It is not a system – a work organisation – a bank, a multinational organisation, a financial institution – that perpetrates unethical, unfair, arrogant, superior and aggressive strategies – it is individuals. It has been a very cleverly designed unconscious strategy to blame the system – be it government, health services, church, work organisations, schools and colleges – for society’s ills. But if truth be told –if truth comes to consciousness – it was individual politicians, bankers, leaders, pope, cardinals, bishops, priests that have brought our country to its knees spiritually, socially and economically.

The book sets out to facilitate leaders in this mature process by showing why and how unconscious defences are created, how they can be identified and how conscious resolutions can be found. When leaders lead with consciousness – when they are mature – everybody in society benefits.

Further details http://corkuniversitypress.com/Leadership_With_Consciousness/352/

Companion to Irish Traditional Music on RTE's Arena

The Companion to Irish Traditional Music was reviewed on RTE 1's ARENA

Listen here

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/arena/archive1/2011/1219/arena_av.html?3147146,null,209

Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape Irish Times Non-fiction book of the year

The Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape 2nd edition was the only Irish published book to be listed in the top 15 non-fiction Irish Times books of the year.
Citation reads: Revised, expanded and now with an index, this major book is as important as ever in the ongoing battle to protect Ireland’s besieged environment as it faces huge dangers from the waste-processing industry.

 

 

 

 

 

The trouble with chardonnay conservationists, and other books
ANOTHER LIFE WHEN ITS first, majestic edition appeared, 14 years ago, I described it as an atlas with attitude – this from its weighty protest against the vandalising of the Irish countryside, already well in progress. Digesting the subsequent horrors of the Tiger years, the second edition of the Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (Cork University Press, €59) verges at times on apoplexy. It rails against “sclerotic engineer-run” local authorities, the failures of “chardonnay conservationists” and planners who “presided over an appalling collapse of landscape quality”. But Prof Kevin Whelan, Ireland’s most acute and passionate rural historian, does more than let off steam.
His essay at the heart of the new edition urges a long-overdue reorganisation of public life, swelling upwards from parish and townland. He also offers a vision for rural landscape and society, led by rediscovering “Deep Ireland”. Philosophically, this “represents seasonal, ritual, communal time rather than biographical individual time”.

More simply it exhorts “renewed respect for the local, the vernacular, the traditional and the distinctive”, not least the spirit that moves within the GAA and the local Tidy Towns committee. As a geographer with a strong economic awareness, Whelan delves into options that make much timely sense, among them more powerful marketing of artisan food to Europe from a “clean, green” Ireland embodied in the image of the traditional family farm.

Our landscape, he says, has been surprisingly forgiving of recent excesses, and as we now have enough new buildings for the next generation the challenge is to “restore and reuse”. But the drive towards a living, characterful landscape, with room for both nature and a human right to roam, will have to find its spark locally – “dragooning, compulsion and adversarial relations with local communities simply do not work.”

All of which eminently fits this great book for the bedside table (plus supportive beanbag) of our new President, whose aspirations to the ideal and those of Whelan are clearly in close accord.
With renewal of at least a third of its content, fresh regional case studies from new young geographers, and even more abundant and revelatory maps and photographs, it is also a definitive synthesis of the countryside, its habitats and its history that belongs in every Irish home and school. The first edition, also edited by Whelan, with the geographer Prof Fred Aalen and the cartographer Dr Mathew Stour, sold more than 21,000 copies. The second edition deserves to do quite as well.

http://corkuniversitypress.com/Atlas_of_the_Irish_Rural_Landscape_/342/

Music Book of the Year

"Irish Blood, English Heart" ISBN 9781859184905 has just won the Hot Press Annual (out today) Music Book of the Year. Last week it won the Sunday Times Music Book of the Year.

Cambridge lecturer Sean Campbell previously co-wrote Beautiful Day,
an analysis of Irish rock over the past 40 years. In Irish Blood English
Heart, he examines the impact made on English music by Kevin
Rowland, Shane MacGowan and Morrissey. All have credited their
Irish backgrounds with influencing their music. Along with exploring
the mordant wit and powerfully expressive lyrics that characterise
the work of these artists, Campbell also reveals some truly
gobsmacking stories, including that Morrissey’s anti-Thatcherite
politics compelled An Phoblacht to publish a mid-’80s editorial
praising The Smiths, thus forging a highly improbable link between
republicanism and early alt-rock-Hot Press Magazine.

http://corkuniversitypress.com/'Irish_Blood,_English_Heart':_Second_Generation_Irish_Musicians_in_England_/355/

Rugby in Munster: A Social and Cultural History

John A Murphy Emeritus Professor of Irish History UCC will launch Rugby in Munster: A Social and Cultural History on Wednesday December 7^th at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century rugby football in Munster has seen extraordinary growth in terms of popularity and cultural significance. The Munster rugby team in particular has become a hugely important provincial institution through which regional identity has been expressed on the international stage. This book will detail and analyse the game’s evolution in Munster from its origins in the 1870s through to the dawn of the professional era in the 2000s.-Rugby in Munster: A Social and Cultural History by Liam O’Callaghan (Cork University Press, ISBN 978 185918 480 6, hbk, 286pp, 234 x 156mm, €39/£35).

 

 

 

 

This study is the first book-length academic treatment of rugby football in Ireland. Covering the period from the game’s origins in Ireland in the 1870s through to the onset of professional rugby in the twenty-first century, this book seeks to examine Munster rugby within the context of broader social, cultural and political trends in Irish society. As well as providing a thorough chronological survey of the game’s development, key themes such as violence, masculinity, class and politics are subject to more detailed treatment

Focusing mainly on the game’s two centres of popularity in Limerick and Cork cities, this book will display how contrary to popular myth, rugby football rarely expressed any kind of unitary, coherent identity throughout the province. The game was centred on clubs and was highly adaptable to local conditions throughout its history.  In addition, the often fractious internal politics of the game within the province, reflecting the game’s contrasting social development in Limerick and Cork, will also be discussed. Drawing on the unpublished records of the game’s provincial and national administrative bodies and a comprehensive survey of the provincial press, this book will show how one sport served multifarious roles in terms of class, culture and politics in Munster.

Further details: http://corkuniversitypress.com/Rugby_in_Munster:_A_Social_and_Cultural_History_/350/

 

Liam O’Callaghan is in the Health Sciences Department, Liverpool Hope University, UK

End-of-Life Care: Ethics and Law

This book offers an Ethical Framework for end-of-life decision making in healthcare settings. The Framework, consisting of eight Modules of Learning, is a set of educational resources for health professionals, allied professionals, healthcare ethics and law lecturers and students.  It aims to foster and support ethically and legally sound clinical practice in end-of-life treatment and care in Ireland.

The Framework is the outcome of a unique collaboration between University College Cork, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the Irish Hospice Foundation and has benefitted from consultation with ethicists, legal experts, theologians, sociologists and clinicians. It draws on a range of values and principles that have been identified as important considerations in end-of-life decision making by international experts in bioethics and by professional codes of conduct, policy documents and laws. It is also informed by extensive national and international research on patients’ and families’ experiences of death and dying and the contribution of health professionals and organizations to quality end-of-life care.

 

 

 The educational aim of the Framework is not to tell people what to do, but to offer tools for thinking about difficult ethical and legal issues that arise in relation to death and dying. The objective is to foster a range of ethical skills and competencies to ensure that decisions are arrived at in the most reasonable, sensitive and collaborative way possible. Readers are introduced to the process of ethical reasoning and resolution through interactive learning and reflection on case studies drawn from practice in clinical settings in Ireland and elsewhere. These bring into sharper focus the need for sensitivity to the unique stories and circumstances of individual patients and their families.

 Further details: http://corkuniversitypress.com/End_of_Life_Care:_Ethics_and_Law_/348/

Joan McCarthy & Mary Donnelly (University College Cork), Dolores Dooley & David Smith (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland), Louise Campbell (ClinicalEthics Ireland)

Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape

The Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape 2nd edition is now published. The first edition was published in 1997 and went on to sell over 22 000 copies. This new edition contains at least one-third of new content including 500 new maps and photographs. The contemporary section has been completely rewritten to take account of the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger.

 The Atlas of Irish Rural Landscape is a highly illustrated large format book and has a pioneering introduction to the hidden riches of the Irish landscape. Topics include archaeology, field and settlement patterns, houses, demesnes, villages and small towns, monuments, woodland, bogs, roads, canals, railways, mills, mines, farmsteads, handball alleys, and a host of other features. The Atlas combines superbly chosen illustrations and cartography with a text amenable to a general reader. Hundreds of maps, diagrams, photographs, paintings allow the Atlas to present a mass of scholarly information in an accessible way, suitable for any school, college or home. The Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape also has a significant practical dimension. It increases the visibility of the landscape within national heritage and establishes a proper basis for conservation and planning. It explores contemporary changes resulting from the Celtic Tiger, and proposes how to implement necessary change in sympathy with inherited landscape character.

Further details: http://corkuniversitypress.com/Atlas_of_the_Irish_Rural_Landscape_/342/

 

F.H.A. Aalen is Emeritus Professor of Geography at Trinity College Dublin, Kevin Whelan is Director of the Keough Naughton Notre Dame Centre in Dublin and Matthew Stout is a lecturer in the Department of History, St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra.

Companion to Irish Traditional Music

The second edition of the Companion to Irish Traditional Music will be published on November 24. This second edition is not only revised but also greatly expanded, and has much new information, including material never before printed and unavailable elsewhere. In 1,750 individual articles and as many more sub-sections The Companion gives A-Z coverage of song, dance, instruments, bands, storytelling, technology, tunes and style, composition, organisations and promotion, education and transmission, collectors and archives, revival, broadcasting and recording, English, Scottish and Welsh music and song, and music in all Irish counties, Europe and the USA-Companion to Irish Traditional Music is edited Fintan (Cork University Press, ISBN 978 185918 450 9, sbk, 856pp, 245 x 175mm, €59/£50).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Among the existing publications on Irish traditional music there are works of monumental initiative and deservedly enduring status. But the radical development in this music scene since the 1960s mark it now as an established part of Irish cultural life and demand new kinds of information. The commercial side of the music has evolved and consolidated, generating a new set of standards, popular music dynamics and significant music tourism. The music’s expanding profile within the academic system too has created fresh approaches to playing and study, with a growth of academic research interest, and many major studies published or presently under way. In relevant and accessible ways The Companion uniquely draws together the oldness and newness in all of this: the practice and the study, the aesthetics and the analysis, the competing interests and diverse ideals.

 The editor Fintan Vallely is himself an accomplished musician and music writer. He has harnessed the expertise of some  200 specialists from all aspects of traditional music, who in more than half a million words and 300 images present the most comprehensive image of Irish traditional music ever assembled.  This detailed mosaic is coloured by history, ideology, scholarship, virtuosity, romance, satisfaction, pride and internationalism, all appropriately flagged by the cover’s use of Maclise’s fabulously energetic Snap Apple Night.

 The Companion to Irish Traditional Music is a key reference for the interested enthusiast, session player and professional performer.  It is also a profoundly comprehensive, one-stop resource for every library, school and home with an interest in the distinctive rituals, qualities and history of Irish culture. And it is a vital resource for all levels in education, particularly valuable at third level as both textbook and research resource. The book is uniquely backed by the provision of a parallel website – www.companion.ie - which guides structured exploration of the text and fully integrates it with the existing vast and magnificent range of traditional music internet resources.

Further details:

http://corkuniversitypress.com/Companion_to_Irish_Traditional_Music_/321/

 

Gold, Silver and Green wins International Book Award

Gold, Silver and Green: The Irish Olympic Journey, 1896-1924 by Kevin McCarthy and published by Cork University Press has won the best book on the Olympic Movement and Olympic history for 2010.  The award was made by the International Society of Olympic Historians.

The book focuses on the Irish and Irish diasporal involvement in the Olympic Games. It discusses in detail the sporting involvement but, even more so, the political and national battles which accompanied the Irish Olympic journey prior to independence. It challenges our traditional perceptions of sporting nationalism and places the Irish story in a quite unique international context, showing how decisions made in London, Lausanne and New York had a profound impact on the Irish sporting, and national, destiny.

 

 

‘This is a remarkable book  . . it engrosses the reader. -’ Bill Mallon, Journal of Olympic History

‘The research that underpins this work is impressive in its use of a wide range of source material much of it being used in a work of Irish history for the first time.’- International Journal of the History of Sport

 

ISBN 978-185918-458-5, €39, £35, Hbk, 234 x 156mm, 2010, 428pp