Luke Gibbons

A provocative history of Ulysses and the Easter Rising as harbingers of decolonization. When revolutionaries seized Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising, they looked back to unrequited pasts to point the way toward radical futures—transforming the Celtic Twilight into the electric light of modern Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. For Luke Gibbons, the short-lived rebellion converted the Irish renaissance into the beginning of a global decolonial movement. James Joyce and the Irish Revolution maps connections between modernists and radicals, tracing not only Joyce’s projection of Ireland onto the world stage, but also how revolutionary leaders like Ernie O’Malley turned to Ulysses to make sense of their shattered worlds. Coinciding with the centenary of both Ulysses and Irish independence, this book challenges received narratives about the rebellion and the novel that left Ireland changed, changed utterly.

For decades, James Joyce's modernism has overshadowed his Irishness, as his self-imposed exile and association with the high modernism of Europe's urban centers has led critics to see him almost exclusively as a cosmopolitan figure. In Joyce's Ghosts, Luke Gibbons mounts a powerful argument that this view is mistaken: Joyce's Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism, informing his most distinctive literary experiments. Ireland, Gibbons shows, is not just a source of subject matter or content for Joyce, but of form itself. Joyce's stylistic innovations can be traced at least as much to the tragedies of Irish history as to the shock of European modernity, as he explores the incomplete project of inner life under colonialism. Joyce's language, Gibbons reveals, is haunted by ghosts, less concerned with the stream of consciousness than with a vernacular interior dialogue, the "shout in the street," that gives room to outside voices and shadowy presences, the disruptions of a late colonial culture in crisis. Showing us how memory under modernism breaks free of the nightmare of history, and how in doing so it gives birth to new forms, Gibbons forces us to think anew about Joyce's achievement and its foundations.

This was the first comprehensive study of film production in Ireland from the silent period to the present day, and of representations of Ireland and ‘Irishness’ in native, British, and American films. It remains an authority on the topic. The book focuses on Irish history and politics to examine the context and significance of such films as Irish Destiny, The Quiet Man, Ryan’s Daughter, Man of Aran, Cal, The Courier, and The Dead.

For decades, James Joyce's modernism has overshadowed his Irishness, as his self-imposed exile and association with the high modernism of Europe's urban centers has led critics to see him almost exclusively as a cosmopolitan figure. In Joyce's Ghosts, Luke Gibbons mounts a powerful argument that this view is mistaken: Joyce's Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism, informing his most distinctive literary experiments. Ireland, Gibbons shows, is not just a source of subject matter or content for Joyce, but of form itself. Joyce's stylistic innovations can be traced at least as much to the tragedies of Irish history as to the shock of European modernity, as he explores the incomplete project of the inner life under colonialism. Joyce's language, Gibbons reveals, is haunted by ghosts, less concerned with the stream of consciousness than with a vernacular interior dialogue, the "shout in the street," that gives room to outside voices and shadowy presences, the disruptions of a late colonial culture in crisis. Showing us how memory under modernism breaks free of the nightmare of history, and how in doing so it gives birth to new forms, Gibbons forces us to think anew about Joyce's achievement and its foundations.

A provocative history of Ulysses and the Easter Rising as harbingers of decolonization. When revolutionaries seized Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising, they looked back to unrequited pasts to point the way toward radical futures—transforming the Celtic Twilight into the electric light of modern Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. For Luke Gibbons, the short-lived rebellion converted the Irish renaissance into the beginning of a global decolonial movement. James Joyce and the Irish Revolution maps connections between modernists and radicals, tracing not only Joyce’s projection of Ireland onto the world stage, but also how revolutionary leaders like Ernie O’Malley turned to Ulysses to make sense of their shattered worlds. Coinciding with the centenary of both Ulysses and Irish independence, this book challenges received narratives about the rebellion and the novel that left Ireland changed, changed utterly.

‘Nobody’s Business’: The Aran Diaries of Ernie O’Malley presents new insights into the contradictions and complexities of the mind of Ernie O’Malley, one of mid-twentieth century Ireland’s foremost cultural critics. In 1941, 1955 and 1956, the former revolutionary leader and author of the acclaimed memoir of the War of Independence, On Another Man’s Wound, visited the Aran Islands. While on the islands, O’Malley kept diaries recounting his daily conversations and interactions with other visitors and islanders including Elizabeth Rivers, with whom he stayed on one occasion, Charles Lamb and Seán Keating. The diaries, devoid of sentiment and often highly critical, reveal his views on art, literature, history and contemporary Irish life and international affairs as well as his thoughts on the economic, religious and daily life of the Aran islanders. His unvarnished observations on the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of life in post-Independence Ireland make his diaries absorbing and provocative. Edited with introductory essays by Cormac O’Malley and Róisín Kennedy and an afterword by Luke Gibbons, ‘Nobody’s Business’: The Aran Diaries of Ernie O’Malley offers fascinating insights into the mind and opinions of a key figure in Irish cultural nationalism.

Ireland's Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University publishes Famine Folios, a unique resource for students, scholars and researchers, as well as general readers, covering many aspects of the Famine in Ireland from 1845 - 1852 - the worst demographic catastrophe of nineteenth-century Europe. The essays are interdisciplinary in nature, and make available new research in Famine studies by internationally established scholars in history, art history, cultural theory, philosophy, media history, political economy, literature and music. This publications initiative is devised to augment the Museum experience, and is part of the Museum's commitment to making its collection accessible to audiences of all ages and levels of educational interest. The booklets are produced to the highest level, beautifully illustrated with works from the Museum and related collections. It ensures that audiences have access to the latest scholarship as it pertains to both the historical and contemporary dimensions of the collection.The absence of photographs of the Irish Famine has been attributed to the shortcomings of a medium then it its infancy, but it may also be due to certain limitations in the visible itself. Susan Sontag argued that images can evoke sentimental responses but cannot address wider political questions of obligation and justice. Luke Gibbons revisits representations of the Famine, particularly those in Ireland's Great Hunger Museum to argue that images can not only give visual pleasure but demand ethical interventions on the part of spectators. This fusing of sympathy and affective response with the right of redress is conveyed by a 'judicious obscurity,' a determination not to show all, which places an obligation on the spectator to complete what is beyond representation, or what is left to the imagination.

This was the first comprehensive study of film production in Ireland from the silent period to the present day, and of representations of Ireland and ‘Irishness’ in native, British, and American films. It remains an authority on the topic. The book focuses on Irish history and politics to examine the context and significance of such films as Irish Destiny, The Quiet Man, Ryan’s Daughter, Man of Aran, Cal, The Courier, and The Dead.

This pioneering study of Burke's engagement with Irish politics and culture argues that Burke's influential early writings on aesthetics are intimately connected to his lifelong political concerns. The concept of the sublime, which lay at the heart of his aesthetics, addressed itself primarily to the experience of terror, and it is this spectre that haunts Burke's political imagination throughout his career. Luke Gibbons argues that this found expression in his preoccupation with political terror, whether in colonial Ireland and India, or revolutionary America and France. Burke's preoccupation with violence, sympathy and pain allowed him to explore the dark side of the Enlightenment, but from a position no less committed to the plight of the oppressed, and to political emancipation. This major reassessment of a key political and cultural figure will appeal to Irish studies and Post-Colonial specialists, political theorists and Romanticists.

Explores the complexities of the gothic genre, maintaining that, though originally a literary genre known for its popular or sensational appeal, the gothic grew to become part of everyday life. This is a thought-provoking study that recognises the relationship between racial theory and literary genre.

This pioneering study of Burke's engagement with Irish politics and culture argues that Burke's influential early writings on aesthetics are intimately connected to his lifelong political concerns. The concept of the sublime, which lay at the heart of his aesthetics, addressed itself primarily to the experience of terror, and it is this spectre that haunts Burke's political imagination throughout his career. Luke Gibbons argues that this found expression in his preoccupation with political terror, whether in colonial Ireland and India, or revolutionary America and France. Burke's preoccupation with violence, sympathy and pain allowed him to explore the dark side of the Enlightenment, but from a position no less committed to the plight of the oppressed, and to political emancipation. This major reassessment of a key political and cultural figure will appeal to Irish studies and Post-Colonial specialists, political theorists and Romanticists.