Cork University Press

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

The Book of Howth is now available

The Book of Howth: Elizabethan Conquest and the Old English
 
by Valerie McGowan- Doyle

This study provides the first sustained address of The Book of Howth and its compiler, Christopher St. Lawrence, 7th baron Howth (ca. 1510-1589).  The Book of Howth ultimately offers a unique and extended Old English perspective on colonial conflict, displacement and identity formation in response to the Tudor question of “failed” conquest and the measures of reform government it generated. 

ISBN 978-185918-468-4    €39  £35, Hardback     234 x 156mm   220 pages

 

 

This book addresses the evolution and impact of the Tudor re-conquest of Ireland on the Old English colonial community through a detailed study of The Book of Howth.  Its compiler, the 7th baron Howth, an influential member of the Old English colonial aristocracy, has traditionally received only passing mention for his opposition to Sir Henry Sidney as lord deputy, for which he was imprisoned in 1577 and again in 1578, and for the charges of domestic abuse brought against him in 1579 for which he was imprisoned a third time.  More careful attention to these episodes within the context of intensified measures of conquest and its attendant displacement of the Old English draws attention to the turbulence created within the Old English community prior to their more strident displays of opposition in the later Elizabethan and Stuart periods.

The Book of Howth, though long neglected as an erroneously-perceived work of uncertain authorship, dating, and worth, was in fact, as this study argues, compiled purposefully by Howth over the decade of the 1570s in response to this process.  This study therefore reassesses Howth’s text for its contribution to assessments of colonial practice, conflict and positioning in the later sixteenth century.   

Valerie McGowan-Doyle lectures in Irish and British history at Kent State University and John Carroll University in the USA.

Elizabeth Bowen's Selected Irish Writings edited by Eibhear Walshe

This anthology of the Irish writings of the Anglo-Irish novelist, Elizabeth Bowen 1899-1973 gathers together, for the first time, her Irish writings including her  lectures, essays, reviews and reports and includes an extensive introductory essay by the editor as well as annotations and a critical bibliography .

 ISBN 978-185918-449-3,     €39.00, £35, Hardback     234 x 156mm     272 pages

 

 

 

 

 

"... a welcome addittion to Bowen publications....it has a value in restoring a due emphasis to the novelist's birthplace [Cork] and to her sense of herself as an Irish, or Anglo-Irish woman. It contains, criticism, reviews, prefaces, social comment and reports for the Ministry of Information in London on the mood in Dublin vis-a-vis the war and controversial Irish neutrality........These essays remind us powerfully of how Ireland was in the past, and how it was viewed....[The editor]...provides a cogent and informative introduction.....the real virtue of the book...is to remind us how magnificently Elizabeth Bowen rose to every occasion....[and] ... through it all shines her distinctive critical manner, at once grand, colloquial and engagingly idiosyncratic."-The Irish Times

Elizabeth Bowen’s family had been settled in Farrahy in North Cork for nearly two hundred years by the time of her birth in 1899 and her fictions reflect this long and difficult history between landlord and landscape.  As she wrote in her family history Bowen’s Court (1942)  ‘The land outside Bowen’s Court’s windows left prints on my ancestors eyes that looked out: perhaps their eyes left, also, prints on the scene? If so, those prints were part of the scene to me‘.  In all of these Irish writings, Bowen looked homewards to North Cork as a place of stability and loyalty in an endangered world and her vision of Anglo-Ireland becomes her talisman, her source for imaginative power and stability in war-disordered London. This edited collection charts her illuminating relationship with the new Irish state from her perspective as an Anglo-Irish novelist and provides an account of her life-long engagement with her own country from 1929 until the late 1960s.

Eibhear Walshe is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern English at University College Cork. He is the editor of Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien (Cork University Press, 1993), Sex, Nation and Dissent, (Cork University Press, 1997)

More details http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/