Our Publications

Edited by: Dr Katherine Calvert

Reveals how socialist discourses and psychoanalytic ideas shaped the modern models of motherhood envisioned by left-wing and socially critical women writers working in the Weimar press and literary spheres. More ->

Edited by: Associate Professor Síofra Pierse and Dr Emma Dunne

What is turmoil? This bilingual and interdisciplinary book proposes a distinctive new ontology of turmoil through study of its incidence and impact within the eighteenth-century francophone context. With focus on Enlightenment, revolutionary and post-revolutionary texts, these essays identify three key generative indicators of turmoil: phenomenon; paradigm shift; adaptation. More ->

Author: Dr Manu Braganca

This book analyses the successive appearances of Adolf Hitler in French fiction between 1945 and 2017. It discusses why, unlike what has been observed in the US and in the UK, it has proven problematic for French novelists to write about Hitler in their numerous fictional explorations of the Second World War. It examines the literary and ethical challenges of including historical characters such as Hitler in fiction, and demonstrates how these challenges evolved over time as memories of the Second World War also evolved in France. More ->

Author: Dr Joseph Twist

At a time when the place of Muslims in German society is being disputed, this book explores how four contemporary German writers of Muslim backgrounds - Zafer Senocak, SAID, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Navid Kermani - point beyond identity politics and suggest new ways of thinking about religion and community. Twist highlights both the spirituality and the cosmopolitanism of these authors, bringing their thought into dialogue with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. More...

Author: Professor Ursula Fanning

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women’s writing through the twentieth century—a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women’s writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Italian context. More ->

Author: Associate Professor Derval Conroy

Ruling Women is a two-volume study devoted to an analysis of the conflicting discourses concerning government by women in seventeenth-century France. In this second volume, Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama, Conroy analyzes over 30 plays published between 1637 and 1691, examining the range of constructions of queenship that are thrown into relief. The analysis focuses on the ways in which certain texts strive to manage the cultural anxiety produced by female rule and facilitate the diminution of the uneasy cultural reality it represents, while others dramatize the exercise of political virtue by women, explode the myth of gender-differentiated sexual ethics, and suggest alternative constructions of gender relations to those upheld by the normative discourses of sexual difference. The approach is underpinned by an understanding of theatre as fundamentally political, a cultural institution implicated in the maintenance of, and challenge to, societal power relations. Innovative and stimulating, Conroy's work will appeal to scholars of seventeenth-century drama and history of ideas, in addition to those interested in the history of women in political thought and the history of feminism. More ->

Author: Associate Professor Derval Conroy

Ruling Women is the first study of its kind devoted to an analysis of the debate concerning government by women in seventeenth-century France. Drawing on a wide range of political, feminist and dramatic texts, Conroy sets out to demonstrate that the dominant discourse which upholds patriarchy at the time is frequently in conflict with alternative discourses which frame gynæcocracy as a feasible, and laudable reality, and which reconfigure (wittingly or unwittingly) the normative paradigm of male authority. Central to the argument is an analysis of how the discourse which constructs government as a male prerogative quite simply implodes when juxtaposed with the traditional political discourse of virtue ethics. In Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France, the first volume of the two-volume study, the author examines the dominant discourse which excludes women from political authority before turning to the configuration of women and rulership in the pro-woman and egalitarian discourses of the period. Highly readable and engaging, Conroy's work will appeal to those interested in the history of women in political thought and the history of feminism, in addition to scholars of seventeenth-century literature and history of ideas. More ->

Author: Dr Marco Bellardi

Il libro traccia un profilo del percorso letterario di Giuseppe Pontiggia a partire dalla sua formazione nel periodo di fermento culturale legato alla rivista «il verri» di Luciano Anceschi, passando per il successivo distanziamento dalle posizioni del Gruppo 63, con la definizione di uno stile personale di classica misura, fino agli originali esiti dell’ultima produzione.
Il saggio entra nell’analisi dettagliata dei testi per sintetizzare gli elementi principali della narrativa e dello stile pontiggiani con un linguaggio chiaro e accessibile, mostrando il valore umano e letterario di un’esperienza artistica ancora non pienamente accolta nel canone letterario contemporaneo.
Ne emerge così l’immagine di uno scrittore tra i più significativi del secondo Novecento, un vero maestro per chi l’ha conosciuto, un ispiratore per chi lo affronterà domani. More ->

Author: Dr Jeanne Riou

Examining perception in the discourses of 1900, this study aims to uncover some of the less apparent emotional undercurrents of scientific theories of understanding. "Connections" may be either theories of society and social action, (ambivalent ties as described by Simmel and Plessner, repressive ones, as we see in Freud), or they may be a manner of narrating the self and its links, emotional and intellectual, to the world. They can be energetic in the sense of Schopenhauer's will, motivational in the sense of Nietzsche's will-to-power, empathic in the sense of early phenomenology, or object-driven and therefore ethical, in the sense of Husserl. They can be suggestive - adapting the Heraclitean notion of flow, as we can see at different points in writers as diverse as Husserl, William James and Henri Bergson, or declarative, in the sense of Arnold Gehlen, for whom connections are institutional - human beings, with a reduced instinct in comparison to other creatures, forge links to the world by means of the culture they produce. Connections can be many things at once - physiological effects of perception - or psychological responses to perception. In this study, they are seen as implicit, but nonetheless important discursive forces. 

Author: Associate Professor Paolo Acquaviva

Che cos'è un nome? Ha un senso approfondire una nozione apparentemente così intuitiva? Come può contribuire a una maggiore consapevolezza linguistica esaminare i modi in cui il linguaggio identifica le entità a cui pensiamo? Il libro risponde a queste e altre domande, stimolando il lettore a riflettere sul significato dei nomi, sulle loro categorie grammaticali, sulla loro forma e struttura, presentando un quadro ricco e articolato in cui confluiscono i risultati delle ricerche contemporanee in semantica, filosofia del linguaggio, tipologia linguistica, morfologia e sintassi.

What is a noun or a name? Does it even make sense to make precise a notion that looks so intuitive? How can a better understanding of the way language identifies entities contribute to a better linguistic awareness? This book addresses these and similar questions. It proposes a reflection on the meaning of nouns and names, their grammar, and their form and structure. A rich and articulated picture emerges from this description, which joins together the results of current research in semantics, philosophy of language, linguistic typology, morphology, and syntax. More ->

Author: Professor Bettina Migge and Isabelle Léglise

Proposing a new methodological approach to documenting languages spoken in multilingual societies, this book retraces the investigation of one unique linguistic space, the Creole varieties referred to as Takitaki in multilingual French Guiana. It illustrates how interactional sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistic, discourse analytical and quantitative sociolinguistic approaches can be integrated with structural approaches to language in order to resolve rarely discussed questions systematically (what are the outlines of the community, who is a rightful speaker, what speech should be documented) that frequently crop up in projects of language documentation in multilingual contexts. The authors argue that comprehensively documenting complex linguistic phenomena requires taking into account the views of all local social actors (native and non native speakers, institutions, linguists, non-speakers etc.), applying a range of complementary data collection and analysis methods and putting issues of ideology, variation, language contact and interaction centre stage. This book will be welcomed by researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, fieldwork studies, language documentation and language variation and change. More ->

Author: Associate Professor Emer O'Beirne

Spanning seven decades, Nathalie Sarraute's literary career has established her as one of the most prominent and highly respected French writers of the twentieth century. From the outset she has sought, through consistent formal innovation, to develop a mode of literary expression adequate to an endlessly mobile and mutable self stifled as much in public discourse as in traditional fictional characterization. More ->

Author: Dr Manu Braganca & Dr Peter Tame

This edited volume is a sequel to, and a development of, The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016 (2016). It focuses on the six major European countries and states that remained officially neutral throughout the Second World War, namely Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Vatican. More ->

Edited by: Rey Conquer and Joseph Twist

The articles gathered here problematise and bring complexity to ideas of interreligious – and intrareligious, and religious–secular – dialogue a toleration. They each examine the way writers have drawn on the imagination – or have made demands on their readers’ imaginations – in presenting and exploring religious difference. The imagination plays a crucial, but often underdiscussed, role in both conceptualisations of religious dialogue and encounter, and in the relation between literature and religion. To imagine the beliefs of others is also to risk an act of cultural arrogance, or pure projection. If imagination is invention, it therefore has ethical implications – as well as theological ones. The texts under discussion here are very much rooted in the German context, including the Reformation, the German-speaking Enlightenment, the GDR and National Socialist Germany, but they also have a much broader relevance. Religion offers a framework which allows for a critical view of prevailing structures of power, and which can serve as a model of an encounter with the other. An imaginative engagement with the beliefs of others intensifies this encounter, allowing for an unsettling departure from the familiar and for new ways of thinking, seeing and believing. More ->

Author: Professor Bettina Migge and Shelome Gooden

This book brings together papers that discuss social and structural aspects of language contact and language change. Several papers look at the relevance of historical documents to determine the linguistic nature of early contact varieties, while others investigate the specific processes of contact-induced change that were involved in the emergence and development of these languages. A third set of papers look at how new datasets and greater sensitivity to social issues can help to (re)assess persistent theoretical and empirical questions as well as help to open up new avenues of research. In particular they highlight the heterogeneity of contemporary language practices and attitudes often obscured in sociolinguistic research. The contributions all focus on language variation and change but investigate it from a variety of disciplinary and empirical perspectives and cover a range of linguistic contexts. More ->

Edited by: Associate Professor Paolo Acquaviva and Michael Daniel

The strong development in research on grammatical number in recent years has created a need for a unified perspective. The different frameworks, the ramifications of the theoretical questions, and the diversity of phenomena across typological systems, make this a significant challenge.

This book addresses the challenge with a series of in-depth analyses of number across a typologically diverse sample, unified by a common set of descriptive and analytic questions from a semantic, morphological, syntactic, and discourse perspective. Each case study is devoted to a single language, or in a few cases to a language group. They are written by specialists who can rely on first-hand data or on material of difficult access, and can place the phenomena in the context of the respective system. The studies are preceded and concluded by critical overviews which frame the discussion and identify the main results and open questions. More ->

Edited by: Prof Ursula Fanning

Matilde Serao is still today too often remembered as a minor author in a large cohort of nineteenth-century Italian writers. In fact, the contributions show that Serao was anything but a minor figure: she enjoyed international renown and was translated into all major European languages. More ->

Edited by: Dr Stephen Lucek and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno

This collection brings together work from scholars across sociolinguistics, World Englishes and linguistic landscapes to reflect on developments and future directions in Irish English, building on the ground-breaking contributions of Jeffrey Kallen to the discipline. More ->

Edited by: Assoc Prof Derval Conroy

This volume sets out to examine the ways in which an equality between the sexes is constructed, conceptualised, imagined or realised in early modern France, a period and a country which produced some of the earliest theorisations on equality. In so doing, it aims to contribute towards the development of the history of equality as an intellectual category within the history of political thought, and to situate "the woman question" within that history. The eleven chapters in the volume span the fields of political theory, philosophy, literature, history and history of ideas, bringing together literary scholars, historians, philosophers and scholars of political thought, and examining an extensive range of primary sources. More ->

Edited by: Professor Bettina Migge and Gisela Holfter

A comprehensive survey of Ireland's place in Europe, providing a detailed narrative of a cultural relationship that began with Irish missionaries bringing Christianity and learning to the continent. How have Ireland and her people and culture been perceived and represented in Europe? Twenty-two internationally renowned experts address this question through contributions on film, music, art, architecture, media, literature and European Studies.

With contributions from: David Clark, Fiorenzo Fantaccini, Anna Fattori, Joachim Fischer, Paul Gillespie, Anne Karhio, Linda King, Joanna Kosmalska, Marieke Krajenbrink, Brigid Laffan, Fergal Lenehan, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Edward Moxon-Browne, Lynda Mulvin, Anna Ní Ghallachair, Éamon Ó Ciosáin, Thomas O’Connor, Mervyn O’Driscoll, Finola O’Kane, Harry White. More ->

Edited by: Professor Michael Brophy

The Irish Journal of French Studies is an annual international refereed journal published by the Association des Études Françaises et Francophones d'Irlande. Articles in English, French or Irish are welcomed on any aspect of research in the area of French and Francophone culture, society, literature and thought. Articles published within the last two years are available free online to members and may be purchased by non-members. All other articles are available on an open access basis. More ->

Edited by: Dr Manu Braganca and Fransiska Louwagie

This volume presents the intellectual autobiographies of fourteen leading scholars in the fields of history, literature, film and cultural studies who have dedicated a considerable part of their career to researching the history and memories of France during the Second World War. Based in five different countries, Margaret Atack, Marc Dambre, Laurent Douzou, Hilary Footitt, Robert Gildea, Richard J. Golsan, Bertram M. Gordon, Christopher Lloyd, Colin Nettelbeck, Denis Peschanski, Renée Poznanski, Henry Rousso, Peter Tame, and Susan Rubin Suleiman have played a crucial role in shaping and reshaping what has become a thought-provoking field of research. This volume, which also includes an interview with historian Robert O. Paxton, clarifies the rationales and driving forces behind their work and thus behind our current understanding of one of the darkest and most vividly remembered pages of history in contemporary France. More ->

Edited by: Dr Gillian Pye and Christiane Schönfeld

Germanistik in Ireland: Jahrbuch der / Yearbook of the Association of Third-Level Teachers of German in Ireland (the Yearbook) is the official publication of the Association of Third-Level Teachers of German in Ireland. It appears once a year. Each member of the Association of Third-Level Teachers of German in Ireland receives one copy of the Yearbook as part of their membership. The aim of the Yearbook is to provide a forum for the publication of research in German Studies in the broadest and most inclusive sense, comprising literary and cultural studies, history and Landeskundeof the German-speaking countries, applied and theoretical linguistics, German as a Foreign Language and Fachdidaktikincluding German for special purposes, and other related areas. More ->

Edited by: Associate Professor Derval Conroy & Prof. Jean-Paul Pittion (TCD)

This collective volume of nine essays, bringing together researchers from France and Ireland and edited by Derval Conroy and Jean-Paul Pittion, is part of an ongoing project led by the editors which aims to contribute to scholarship concerning the early modern French book. As the editors point out in the Foreword, the volume is informed by the belief that ‘the role the printed works of the period played as cultural instruments which reflect, shape or support the ideas, prejudices or tastes of the milieus which created and received them, cannot be properly evaluated if the material and commercial conditions in which they were produced are not taken into account’. More ->

Edited by: Associate Professor Siofra Pierse and James Hanrahan

This collection of essays investigates the darker aspects of Diderot, writer, art critic, philosopher and encyclopédiste. The chapters focus on the schism between positive images of the Enlightenment and an undercurrent of disorder, transgression and clandestine intellectual and social practices. Diderot’s role in this fissure is critically scrutinised through an analysis of the interface between Enlightenment and its dark side. In his reticence before authority and censorship, in the richness and complexity of his literary and philosophical works, in the emotional conflict of his theatre, or in his innovative aesthetic vision, Diderot consistently evokes the darker side of the Enlightenment. More ->

Edited by: Professor Mary Gallagher and Dr Jeanne Riou

Our era seems beset by the peddling of ‘post truth’ politics, by the derision of critical voices as purveyors of ‘fake news’ and by the convulsive hold of chauvinistic nationalisms and populist agendas. Against that backdrop, ‘Ressentiment’ is a notion that
deserves renewed attention and analysis. This book’s reappraisal focuses on the past/present predicament of critical discourse, pointing up some of the many ways and contexts in which ‘dissensus’ is limited or disabled either by ‘Ressentiment’ or by accusations of ‘Ressentiment’.

Edited by: Professor Bettina Migge, Eithne B. Carlin, Isabelle Léglise and Paul B. Tjon Sie Fat

In and Out of Suriname: Language, Mobility and Identity offers a unique multidisciplinary perspective on a multilingual society in the Caribbean and Guianan sphere. Breaking away from the view of bounded ethnicity, the authors address central theoretical issues of multilingual and multicultural societies including ethnicity as a social distinction, identity as the shifting construction of the self and others, and the role of language therein. They discuss the impact of contact and mobilities on language maintenance, expansion and change. Language, mobility and identity in Suriname are observed through the lens of the actors themselves, from the ever-mobile Amerindians and Maroons on the periphery of land and society through expanding urban societies enhanced by recent migration from Haiti, Brazil and China. More ->

Edited by: Professor Bettina Migge & Associate Professor Máire Ní Chiosáin

Proposing a new methodological approach to documenting languages spoken in multilingual societies, this book retraces the investigation of one unique linguistic space, the Creole varieties referred to as Takitaki in multilingual French Guiana. It illustrates how interactional sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistic, discourse analytical and quantitative sociolinguistic approaches can be integrated with structural approaches to language in order to resolve rarely discussed questions systematically (what are the outlines of the community, who is a rightful speaker, what speech should be documented) that frequently crop up in projects of language documentation in multilingual contexts. The authors argue that comprehensively documenting complex linguistic phenomena requires taking into account the views of all local social actors (native and non native speakers, institutions, linguists, non-speakers etc.), applying a range of complementary data collection and analysis methods and putting issues of ideology, variation, language contact and interaction centre stage. This book will be welcomed by researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, fieldwork studies, language documentation and language variation and change. More ->

Chapter by: Dr Diana Battaglia 

Written from a multicultural and interdisciplinary perspective, this collection of new essays explores the semiotics of food in the 20th- and 21st-century crime fiction of authors such as Anthony Bourdain, Arthur Upfield, Sara Paretsky, Andrea Camilleri, Fred Vargas, Ruth Rendell, Stieg Larsson, Leonardo Padura, Georges Simenon, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and Donna Leon. The collection covers a range of issues, such as the provision of intra-, peri- or paratextual recipes, the aesthetics and ethics of food, eating rituals as indications of cultural belonging, and regional, national and supranational identities. It also tackles eating disorders and other seemingly abnormal habits as signs of “Otherness.”

Translated by: Associate Professor Stephen Schwartz

Vincent Descombes brings together an astonishingly large body of philosophical and anthropological thought to present a thoroughgoing critique of contemporary cognitivism and to develop a powerful new philosophy of the mind. More ->

Translation and Introduction by: Professor Mary Gallagher

In 1927, Paul Morand -- a French diplomat and noted European author -- made two extended trips to the Caribbean, Latin America and the American South. Published in 1929, his travel account begins as a diary about his experience of Venezuela, Curaçao, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Trinidad, Jamaica and Cuba and ends with a lengthy essay on Mexico. Morand was already a prolific, cosmopolitan writer but he had not yet acquired his controversial post-war reputation. The stylish writing of 'Caribbean Winter' fizzes with an acute intelligence and a rich -- though sometimes elliptical -- allusiveness (which is why this translation includes explanatory notes). It maps not just Morand's vivid impressions but also his main preoccupations, particularly with the shifting place of Europe in the new world order. More ->

Translated by: Associate Professor Stephen Schwartz

As a logical concept, identity refers to one and the same thing. So why, Vincent Descombes asks, do we routinely use “identity” to describe the feelings associated with membership in a number of different communities, as when we speak of our ethnic identity and religious identity? And how can we ascribe the same “identity” to more than one individual in a group? In Puzzling Identities, one of the leading figures in French philosophy seeks to bridge the abyss between the logical meaning of identity and the psychological sense of “being oneself.” More ->

Translation by: Associate Professor Philip Johnston

Philip G Johnston's new translation of Un rio, un amor (One River, One Love) by Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) is faithful to the author's quasi-Surrealist intentions. Written in France and Spain in 1928-1929, this collection reflects the influences, conflicts and impulses that governed the poet's life then. It speaks of the alienation of a marginalised, disaffected individual in a Spain which he described as "decrepit and decomposing", of a shy homosexual gradually and painfully coming to terms with his orientation in a rigid, hostile society, of a passion for American popular culture (Jazz, Blues and cinema), filtered through a Hispanic sensitivity, and eventually somewhat tempered by the disappointments of daily life.