New Crops, Old Fields

Reimagining Irish Folklore

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• Publisher: Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781787072480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

From our homes to our houses of government, from our schoolyards to our stadia, from our galleries to our gable walls, folklore is not only preserved but continues to be reimagined in all aspects of everyday life in Ireland. In the twenty-first century, the traditions of Irish folklore are engaged in a constant process of regeneration, where the old and the new, the oral, the textual and the visual intermingle. However, while the «first life» of Irish folklore has amassed a vast literature, what has attracted less attention is its «second life»: the variety of ways in which traditions have been reused and recycled in other contexts by politicians, poets, visual artists, sportsmen, tourism officers, museum curators, writers and musicians.

This volume is concerned with those moments of cultural creation that occupy the space between the «first life» and «second life» of folklore and, in particular, the ways in which folk traditions are reinvented. Featuring essays from both authorities in the field and emerging voices, this interdisciplinary collection demonstrates the rich diversity of folk culture, as a practice and as an area of study, in contemporary Ireland.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction (Eamon Byers / Conor Caldwell)
• 1 Folklore: A Zombie Category? (Diarmuid Ó Giolláin)
• 2 Legends and Oral History in Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass (Manuel Cadeddu)
• 3 Humanizing History: Storytelling and Subjectivity in the Works of Frank Delaney (Anjili Babbar)
• 4 Who Knows Where the Time Goes: Songs of the Past and Stories of the Present in Kate Thompson’s The New Policeman (Rebecca Long)
• 5 Valse Shilly Shally: An Irish Expression of the Viennese Waltz (Maria Byrne)
• 6 Musical Interpretations of Fenian Literature by Contemporary Irish Composers (Angela Horgan Goff)
• 7 Revisiting Samhain: Two Directions on a Theme (Daithí Kearney)
• 8 From Page to Stage and Beyond: (Re)imagining Cré na Cille (Eilís Ní Dhúill)
• 9 Mother Ireland: Folklore and the Fractured Family in Irish-Themed Cinema (Jack Casey)
• 10 Discovering and Celebrating Ireland’s Tree Folklore (Ben Simon)
• Notes on Contributors
• Index