Navigations: Collected Irish Essays 1976-2006 by Richard Kearney

This new selected edition of Kearney’s writings on Ireland supplants his seminal text, The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions (a revised Introduction appears here), and extends Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture to which eight pieces are added comprising 50 per cent new material, and giving unique access to the state and status of Irish culture in the twenty-first century. Twentieth-century Ireland witnessed a crisis of culture. Experienced largely as a conflict between traditional aspiration and modern realism; transitions, however resisted, are inevitable. Navigations encompasses the notion of the intellectual circumnavigation of early medieval and ancient Irish scholars and exchanges, and the shallows and deeps of competing arguments that make up these texts.

Contents In five parts: Political, Literary, Dramatic & Visual Narratives, and Dialogues.

The studies include:

• The Triumph of Failure: Long Kesh & the Prison Tradition;
• Yeats & the Conflict of Imaginations;
• A Crisis of Fiction: Flann O’Brien, Francis Stuart, John Banville;
• The Language Plays of Brian Friel;
• Modern Irish Cinema: Re-viewing Traditions;
• An Art of Other-ness: Louis le Brocquy;
• Dialogue with Borges; Heaney: Fictional Worlds;
• Migrant Minds: Bono, Jordan, Durcan, Ballagh;
• Myth & the Critique of Ideology.

PRAISE FOR RICHARD KEARNEY

‘His books are among the sharpest and most intensely argued works on contemporary Irish culture.’ – Irish Times

‘The name Richard Kearney is synonymous with intellectual excellence.’ – Irish University Review

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RICHARD KEARNEY, Professor of Philosophy and chair of Film Studies at Boston College and the University of Paris, is a leading international voice in European and Irish cultural and political studies. His books include The Wake of Imagination: Ideas of Creativity in Western Culture (1987), Poetics of Modernity (1995), The God Who May Be: A Hermenutics of Religion (2001) and On Stories (2001).