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Public diplomacy enables private citizens to be involved in international relations either through initiatives sponsored by governments or through direct people-to-people contacts in areas such as culture, business, education, tourism and sport. Public Diplomacy in Ireland and Japan traces the evolution of this growing branch of diplomacy and examines the role it has played in the foreign policies of Ireland and Japan, and in their bilateral relationship. It concludes that public diplomacy has contributed significantly to strengthening the links between the two countries.

\"'The old ideal of Manhood has grown obsolete,' wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1831, 'and the new is still invisible to us.' The essays in this volume explore the way Victorian novelists tried to answer the question of what it meant to 'be a man': how manhood was learned, sustained, broken, or restored, and how the idea of the manly was shaped by class, schooling, region and religion, and by scientific and medical debate. Topics covered include the playful subversion of gender roles in the early writings of Charlotte Brontèe; changing patterns of working class masculinity in London and Manchester; Dickens and the nurturing male; boyhood and girlhood in Eliot's The Mill on the Floss; the challenge to patriarchy in sensation fiction; manhood, imperialism and the adventure novel; masculinity and aestheticism; Hardy's reluctant, failed, or damaged men; and Conrad's studies of men isolated or divided against themselves\"-- Provided by publisher.

Gael Linn celebrates its sixtieth birthday in 2013. To mark the occasion, this book describes one of the most imaginative and innovative organisations in Irish social, cultural and business life. Beginning with Linnte Ghael Linn, pools based on Gaelic games, Gael-Linn later encompassed such activities as bingo, various forms of industry, publishing, the music business, education and film making to name but a few

\"Dramatic and documentary narratives about aggressive and garrulous women often cast such women as reckless and ultimately unsuccessful usurpers of cultural authority. Contending narratives, however, sometimes within the same texts, point to the effective subversion and undoing of the normative restrictions of social and gender hierarchies. Words Like Daggers explores the scolding invectives, malevolent curses, and ecstatic prophesies of early modern women as attested to in legal documents, letters, self-narratives, popular pamphlets, ballads, and dramas of the era. Examining the framing and performance of violent female speech between the 1590s and the 1660s, Kirilka Stavreva dismantles the myth of the silent and obedient women who allegedly populated early modern England. Blending gender theory with detailed historical analysis, Words Like Daggers asserts the power of women's language--the power to subvert binaries and destabilize social hierarchies, particularly those of gender, in the early modern era. In the process Stavreva reconstructs the speech acts of individual contentious women, such as the scold Janet Dalton, the witch Alice Samuel, and the Quaker Elizabeth Stirredge. Because the dramatic potential of women's powerful rhetorical performances was recognized not only by victims and witnesses of individual violent speech acts but also by theater professionals, Stavreva also focuses on how the stage, arguably the most influential cultural institution of the Renaissance era, orchestrated and aestheticized women's fighting words and, in so doing, showcased and augmented their cultural significance. \"-- Provided by publisher.

Early medieval Ireland is remembered as the \"Land of Saints and Scholars,\" due to the distinctive devotion to Christian faith and learning that permeated its culture. As early as the seventh century, however, questions were raised about Irish orthodoxy, primarily concerning Easter observances. Yet heresy trials did not occur in Ireland until significantly later, long after allegations of Irish apostasy from Christianity had sanctioned the English invasion of Ireland. InThe Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish, Maeve Brigid Callan analyzes Ireland's medieval heresy trials, which all occurred in the volatile fourteenth century. These include the celebrated case of Alice Kyteler and her associates, prosecuted by Richard de Ledrede, bishop of Ossory, in 1324. This trial marks the dawn of the \"devil-worshipping witch\" in European prosecutions, with Ireland an unexpected birthplace. Callan divides Ireland's heresy trials into three categories. In the first stand those of the Templars and Philip de Braybrook, whose trial derived from the Templars', brought by their inquisitor against an old rival. Ledrede's prosecutions, against Kyteler and other prominent Anglo-Irish colonists, constitute the second category. The trials of native Irishmen who fell victim to the sort of propaganda that justified the twelfth-century invasion and subsequent colonization of Ireland make up the third. Callan contends that Ireland's trials resulted more from feuds than doctrinal deviance and reveal the range of relations between the English, the Irish, and the Anglo-Irish, and the church's role in these relations; tensions within ecclesiastical hierarchy and between secular and spiritual authority; Ireland's position within its broader European context; and political, cultural, ethnic, and gender concerns in the colony. Early medieval Ireland is remembered as the \"Land of Saints and Scholars,\" due to the distinctive devotion to Christian faith and learning that permeated its culture. As early as the seventh century, however, questions were raised about Irish orthodoxy, primarily concerning Easter observances. Yet heresy trials did not occur in Ireland until significantly later, long after allegations of Irish apostasy from Christianity had sanctioned the English invasion of Ireland. InThe Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish, Maeve Brigid Callan analyzes Ireland's medieval heresy trials, which all occurred in the volatile fourteenth century. These include the celebrated case of Alice Kyteler and her associates, prosecuted by Richard de Ledrede, bishop of Ossory, in 1324. This trial marks the dawn of the \"devil-worshipping witch\" in European prosecutions, with Ireland an unexpected birthplace.Callan divides Ireland's heresy trials into three categories. In the first stand those of the Templars and Philip de Braybrook, whose trial derived from the Templars', brought by their inquisitor against an old rival. Ledrede's prosecutions, against Kyteler and other prominent Anglo-Irish colonists, constitute the second category. The trials of native Irishmen who fell victim to the sort of propaganda that justified the twelfth-century invasion and subsequent colonization of Ireland make up the third. Callan contends that Ireland's trials resulted more from feuds than doctrinal deviance and reveal the range of relations between the English, the Irish, and the Anglo-Irish, and the church's role in these relations; tensions within ecclesiastical hierarchy and between secular and spiritual authority; Ireland's position within its broader European context; and political, cultural, ethnic, and gender concerns in the colony.

\"Modernism, Periodicals, and Cultural Poetics addresses how late modernist poetry in Britain tended toward a culturalist expression and importantly how this occurred within the pages of literary periodicals. 'Periodical formations' describe networks of exchange within and between different literary periodicals that condition the types of poetry published and the kinds of poetic discourse that come to predominate. A re-emphasis on periodical production following the publication of Eliot's The Waste Land and culminating with the pre-Movement magazines of the 1940's illustrates a complex and diverse series of debates and negotiations about not only the tradition of English poetry and its role in contemporaneous form, but also how poetry of the period related to the avant-garde trends prominent on the European continent and in America. By focusing on periodical formations, the development of what are now accepted understandings of the period can be better addressed, and certain lasting assumptions can be demythologized\"-- Provided by publisher.

Iconic Spaces looks at Samuel Beckett's mature theatrical work as a displaced theology of the icon. Sandra Wynands rejects conventional existentialist or nihilist interpretations of Beckett's work, arguing instead that beneath the text, in the depths of language and being, Beckett creates an absolutely irreducible, transcendent space. She traces a nondual model of perception and experience through a selection of Beckett's art-critical and dramatic works, focusing in particular on four minimalist plays: Catastrophe, Not I, Quad, and Film . Iconic Spaces makes an important contribution to scholars and students of literature, philosophy, theatre studies, and religion by giving them an exciting new way of reading and experiencing Beckett's work.

After 1770, Ireland experienced the establishment of modern forms of Irish Catholicism, new engagement by the public with the political process, and the growth of the modern state, represented by new legal and educational systems. An Irish-Speaking Island investigates the role in these developments of the population who spoke Irish in their daily lives—whether as a first or second language—and links the history of language contact and bilingualism with the broader history of Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As late as 1840, Ireland had as many as four million Irish speakers—a significant proportion of the total population—who could be found in every county of the island and in all social classes and religious persuasions. Their impact on the modern history of Ireland and the United Kingdom cannot be captured by a simple conclusion that they became anglicized. Rather, Nicholas M. Wolf explores the complex ways in which the transition from Irish to English placed a premium on adaptive bilingualism and shaped beliefs and behavior in the domestic sphere, religious life, and oral culture within the community. An Irish-Speaking Island will interest not only historians but also scholars of linguistics, folklore, politics, literature, and religion. Winner, Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture, American Conference for Irish Studies Winner, Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Books, American Conference for Irish Studies