Irelands in the Asia-Pacific

Since Mary McAleese embraced the expatriate and emigrant Irish in her inaugural Presidential address, much has been made of the global Irish family.

This exciting collection of essays by a group of eminent scholars explores the teaching and research of Irish literature in a region of the world that has scouted the attractions of western culture since the sixteenth century.

Three or four centuries later those attractions, as far as the Irish are concerned, have become specific.

It is reasonably well-known that in his own life-time W.B.

Yeats was invited to take up a Professorship in Japan; that Ulysses has been translated at least three times into Chinese; that the plays of George Bernard Shaw apparently strike a chord with students in Hong Kong; that the fairy-tales of Wilde are reverenced in China; and that the Irish influence on Australian literature has been pervasive if not profound.

But what is not well-known are the contexts for these and other interrelations.

Irelands in the Asia-Pacific explores these in a sequence of articles grouped under the headings of: Writing an Irish Self; Joyce at large; Post-Colonial readings of Irish Literature; Antipodean Connections; Teaching Irish Literature in the Asia-Pacific; and Irish Literature Down-Under.