{"title":"Books by Declan Kiberd","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780571242559","title":"Ulysses and Us","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eUlysses and Us\u003c\/i\u003e, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's \u003ci\u003eUlysses \u003c\/i\u003eoffers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. As much a guide to contemporary life as it is virtuoso work of literary criticism, \u003ci\u003eUlysses and Us \u003c\/i\u003eoffers revolutionary insights to the scholar and the first-time reader alike.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLeopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the hero of James Joyce's \u003ci\u003eUlysses\u003c\/i\u003e, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the city streets, and in his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of the literature upon which Joyce drew in writing \u003ci\u003eUlysses\u003c\/i\u003e, such as Homer, Dante and the Bible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  'Declan Kiberd's brilliantly informed and highly entertaining advocacy liberates Joyce's greatest book from the dungeon of unreadable masterpieces.' Joseph O'Connor\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56291555344757,"sku":"9780571242559","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780571242559_5ff313ae-3803-42f6-887d-51a5e7943448.jpg?v=1786013942"},{"product_id":"9780674976566","title":"After Ireland – Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present","description":"Ireland is suffering from a crisis of authority. Catholic Church scandals, political corruption, and economic collapse have shaken the Irish people's faith in their institutions and thrown the nation's struggle for independence into question. While Declan Kiberd explores how political failures and economic globalization have eroded Irish sovereignty, he also sees a way out of this crisis. After Ireland surveys thirty works by modern writers that speak to worrisome trends in Irish life and yet also imagine a renewed, more plural and open nation.   After Dublin burned in 1916, Samuel Beckett feared \"the birth of a nation might also seal its doom.\" In Waiting for Godot and a range of powerful works by other writers, Kiberd traces the development of an early warning system in Irish literature that portended social, cultural, and political decline. Edna O'Brien, Frank O'Connor, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Hartnett lamented the loss of the Irish language, Gaelic tradition, and rural life. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Eavan Boland grappled with institutional corruption and the end of traditional Catholicism. These themes, though bleak, led to audacious experimentation, exemplified in the plays of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy and the novels of John Banville. Their achievements embody the defiance and resourcefulness of Ireland's founding spirit-and a strange kind of hope.   After Ireland places these writers and others at the center of Ireland's ongoing fight for independence. In their diagnoses of Ireland's troubles, Irish artists preserve and extend a humane culture, planting the seeds of a sound moral economy.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56419588571509,"sku":"9780674976566","price":35.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674976566_a0cf4fcb-5db5-44a9-b06f-9b59d81261cf.jpg?v=1786032881"},{"product_id":"inventing-ireland","title":"Inventing Ireland","description":"Kiberd - one of Ireland's leading critics and a central figure in the FIELD DAY group with Brian Friel, Seamus Deane and the actor Stephen Rea - argues that the Irish Literary Revival of the 1890-1922 period embodied a spirit and a revolutionary, generous vision of Irishness that is still relevant to post-colonial Ireland. This is the perspective from which he views Irish culture. His history of Irish writing covers Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Heaney, Friel and younger writers down to Roddy Doyle.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57466548355445,"sku":"9780099582212","price":20.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780099582212.jpg?v=1785654606"},{"product_id":"england-and-eternity","title":"England and Eternity","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA teasing but affectionate celebration of cricket through the ages, written by one of Ireland's greatest living critics. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCricket is the strangest game. It features idealism, brutality, low comedy, high intelligence, luck and sheer bravery in equal measure – and often achieves the condition of art. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDeclan Kiberd's remarkable book is a celebration of cricket through the ages, and of the peculiarities of the people who love and play it. He evokes brilliantly what it is like to be 'out there' on the field of play. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlthough the modern game is rooted in the gentle rural England described by LP Hartley and George Orwell, it has in its more modern versions come to reflect the industrial power and intermittent violence of modern life. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eEngland and Eternity\u003c\/i\u003e is a teasing but affectionate study of the genius of the English people as seen from a postcolonial perspective – and of the game which was one of their richest, oddest and most lasting gifts to the wider world.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57507898098037,"sku":"9781788548182","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781788548182.jpg?v=1787043041"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-declan-kiberd.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}