• CONTENTS: Images of Spain in Irish Literature, 1922-1936 - Images of the Spanish Civil War in Irish Literature, 1936-1939 - Images of Franco's Spain in Irish Literature, 1939-1975.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This new study investigates how Spain was represented in Irish fiction, plays, poems, and travelogues written in a period covering the first five decades of Irish independence, as well as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). These two countries situated at Europe's western periphery followed a similar socio-political trajectory in the twentieth century, despite the crucial difference that democracy survived the civil war in Ireland, but not in Spain. Both De Valera's Ireland and Franco's Spain were marked by a Catholic conservative-nationalist state ideology and by economic, political, and cultural isolation throughout the 1940s and 1950s, but underwent a rapid process of modernization from the 1960s onwards. Against this historical background, and drawing on the useful theoretical concepts of imagology, the author analyses a variety of literary depictions of life in Spain and explores what the writers' "hetero-images" of Spain reveal about their "auto-images" of Ireland. The book demonstrates how Irish writers used Spain and its troubles as a foil for Ireland, in order to comment obliquely on socio-political developments in their own country since the achievement of independence.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Premising the autobiography in African literature
• The genre of the autobiography
• Towards a working definition of autobiography
• Historical autobiography
• Philosophical autobiography
• Poetic autobiography
• Conclusion
• Theoretical Considerions
• Introduction
• Theories of autobiography
• Postcolonialism and life-writing
• Authenticity, fact and truth in autobiography
• Conclusion
• Literature Review
• Introduction
• Studies on autobiography
• Memory
• Towards a working definition of memory
• Locating the self
• Nation and nationhood : context and contestation
• Memory and nation
• The memory boom
• Memory in Africa
• Conclusion
• Surveying Trends In Kenyan Autobiography
• Introduction
• Motive in autobiography
• Audience in autobiography
• Thematic concerns in Kenyan autobiographies
• Relevance of autobiography
• Limitations of autobiography
• Conclusion
• Narrating and Re-imagining national selfdetermination : the personal and the political : Jaramogi Oginga Odingas Not Yet Uhuru
• Introduction
• Context and meaning of uhuru
• Biographical background
• Personal story and communal history
• Political autobiography and Odinga the ideologue
• Deferred dream of independence
• Odinga's imagination of the nation : Economic empowerment and the Luo nation
• Culture, education and nation formation
• Nation and nationhood in Not Yet Uhuru
• The memory of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga : Kang'o ka Jaramogi
• Conclusion
• Narrating the self and Nation in adversarial contexts : Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o detained : a writer's prison diary
• Introduction : incaceration in the postcolonial context
• Biographical background and literary works
• Prison and portrayal of the self in Detained
• Nation and nationhood in Detained
• Contextualising prison literature in the postcolonial nation
• Memory and prison writing
• Background to Ngũgĩ's detention
• Prison, power and identity politics
• Connection and disconnection
• Language and writing as means of connection
• Conclusion
• Narrating the self, nation and the memory of violence in childhood memoir : Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o's dreams in a time of war
• Introduction
• Contextualising childhood in postcolonial Africa
• Contextualising Dreams in Kenyan history
• Autobiographical and fictional borderlines in Dreams
• Mediated narative and characterisation in Dreams
• Ngũgĩ the myth-maker in Dreams
• Dispossession and land conflict in Dreams
• Violence in Dreams
• Dreams and Ngũgl̃s fictional works
• Contradictions in the narration of the nation state : the example of the Lari Massacre
• Conclusion
• The personal narrative as challenge to political status Quo and patriarchal order : Wangari Maathal's Unbowed : one woman's story
• Introduction : a gendered version of the nation
• Biographical background
• Humble beginnings I : the birth and making of the self
• Humble beginnings II : the birth and making of the nation
• The woman self : confronting patriarchy
• The self and institutions : Maathai's activism and the green belt movement
• Education and travel : transformation and deterritorialization
• Challenges in Maathai's private life
• Audience and motive in Unbowed
• Challenging the political status quo
• Conclusion
• The intellectual narrative and (His)story of the nation : Bethwell Allan Ogot's my footprints on the sands of the sands of time
• Introduction : Ogotthe historian
• Humble Beginnings Communal origins and birth of the epic hero
• Footprints : historiography or autobiography?
• Ogot's private life
• The Africanist and the public figure
• The epic hero motif
• The griot as the king
• The archivist and biographer
• The growth of the hero and the Kenyan nation
• Conclusion
• Conclusion
• Bibliography.

The commercial theatre of the late sixteenth century is often credited with introducing its audiences to new modes of thought about the self, society and the nation, making them conscious that the self is performed, as an actor performs a role. Yet the earlier interlude drama, originally performed in households and other institutions of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, indicates that the late medieval period was fully aware of the theatricality of identity. This book argues that ideas of performance inform the concepts of aristocratic masculinity developed in the plays "Nature", "Fulgens and Lucres", "The Worlde and the Chylde", "The Interlude of Youth" and "Calisto and Melebea". It examines how the depiction of young male aristocrats in these texts is shaped by ideas of male youth constituted in the middle ages, and shows them as failing or succeeding to perform an adult noble masculinity in the aristocratic body and in aristocratic household. The book also suggests ways in which the plays offer discreet praise and censure of the manner in which their noble patrons performed as aristocrats. Throughout, it brings out the subtle qualities of the interludes, which, the author shows, have been unjustly neglected. Dr. Fiona S. Dunlop is Research Associate of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Examines how portrayals of families in Hardy's novels are used to comment on the socio-historical changes in Victorian England.