About the Book
Crafting Infinity is a multi-disciplinary collection of essays that investigates how aspects of traditional Irish culture have been revised, retooled, and repackaged in the interest of maintaining the integrity of Irish myth tales, artistic values, spiritual foundations, and historic icons. From perspectives on early Irish Christianity to national mythology, traditional Irish music, Irish history represented in film, literary inventiveness, and evidence of the Irish diaspora, this study examines how artists, writers, theorists, and emigrants from Ireland re-interpreted, and reshaped Irish traditions, often invoking Ireland's relationship with other nations before it acquired independence. Because with each retelling of legend, reworking of musical styles, and recreating of historic events, there has been inventiveness and alterations, inconsistencies affirm that the continuators of Irish tradition both preserve and alter their source materials and reshape iconic figures. The end product of these endeavors is tantamount to infinity, for just as Standish O'Grady, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Jennifer Johnston, and Edna O'Brien craft fiction or rewrite folklore, with Irish characters and themes, while borrowing from other cultural wellsprings (such as Orientalism or French design), so exporters of Irish art forms and dispositions towards musical style, nationalism, and spirituality necessarily reconfigure the original, as no tradition can remain pure indefinitely. Each facet of Irish culture takes on the quality of a Celtic knot, artistically infinite in its circular design, and indestructible in its universal presence and recognition. In Crafting Infinity, each contributor dismantles a quality of Irish history, culture, or the arts, revealing how a multiplicity of interpretations can be applied to Irish traditions.
About the Author: Dr Rory T. Cornish was born in London and studied at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, Davidson College in North Carolina, and University College London where he was a graduate research student under Professor Ian R. Christie, FBA. He has taught on both sides of the Atlantic and is presently Professor of History at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He has been a contributor to fifteen publications, including The International Encyclopedia of Military History (Routledge Press, 2006), The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), and was co-editor of Thomas Francis Meagher: The Making of an Irish American (Irish Academic Press, 2006). The author of an early study on the political career of George Grenville, he is presently working on a new study of Grenville, Charles Lloyd, and political patronage in eighteenth century Britain. In 2008, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London. Dr Marguerite Quintelli-Neary studied at Rowan University, New Jersey, the Sorbonne (Paris) and Universite Francois Rabelais (Tours, France) as an undergraduate, completing an MA at Villanova University and PhD at the University of Delaware. She has taught at Rowan University and Chadron State College and presently teaches Irish and British Literature at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Her publications have appeared in numerous journals, including Etudes Irlandaises, New Hibernia Review, In-Between, The Journal of Irish Literature, and The Southern Review. She was Associate Editor of the two-volume Dictionary of Irish Literature (Greenwood, 1996), author of Folklore and the Fantastic in Twelve Modern Irish Novels (Greenwood, 1997) and The Irish-American Myth of the Frontier West (Maunsel Irish Research Series, 2009). She also edited Visions of the Irish Dream (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) and served as editor of Working Papers in Irish Studies from 2003-2010.
