Books to bring out the Irish in you

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! In honor of the Irish today we bring you books that celebrate the achievements of the Irish and Irish-Americans.

We begin with acclaimed The Columbia Guide to Irish American History by Timothy J. Meagher. Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2006, Library Journal said, “If you want a heroic effort at encapsulating Irish American history, this is your book” and America noted, “Anyone interested in the history of Irish America will welcome this book.”

Timothy J. Meagher fuses an overview of Irish American history with an analysis of historians’ debates, an annotated bibliography, a chronology of critical events, and a glossary discussing crucial individuals, organizations, and dates. He addresses a range of key issues in Irish American history from the first Irish settlements in the seventeenth century through the famine years in the nineteenth century to the volatility of 1960s America and beyond. The result is a definitive guide to understanding the complexities and paradoxes that have defined the Irish American experience.

Also discussing the experience of the Irish in America, Ellen Crowell’s The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag offers a rich comparative examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish and American Southern plantation literatures and their respective representations of race and nation, gender and sexuality, region and landscape, and the gothic imagination. Pairing major writers from both traditions, including Maria Edgeworth, William Faulkner, Oscar Wilde, Katherine Anne Porter and Elizabeth Bowen, the book shows how this transatlantic dialogue coalesced around questions of power, supremacy, and gentility: writers in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern literary traditions recognized and spoke to each other through the discourse of aristocracy.

And lastly, we head to the Emerald Isle for The Wallflower Critical Guide to Contemporary British and Irish Directors edited by Yoram Allon, Del Cullen, and Hannah Patterson. Encompassing the careers of over 350 directors who have worked within the British and Irish film industries over the last twenty years, this volume covers notable Irish directors such as Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan.

May the luck of the Irish be with you!