Circe's Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Writing about Ireland

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Cork University Press, 2001 - History - 206 pages
Circe's Cup is a collection of eight essays that investigate the role writing played in transforming early modern Irish culture. This radical new assessment of culture and conflict in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland covers a wide range of topics, including ethnography, translation practices, and political philosophy. Taking its title from the metaphor of "Circe's Cup," which was used by Old and New English writers to describe the corrupting influence they attributed to Irish culture, this collection presents a new perspective on colonial theory. Clare Carroll's essays cross disciplines, cultures, and languages to examine various modes of discourse, such as those of gender, religion, and ethnicity. History, poetry, philology, and political science are read side by side to ferret out examples of cultural change. Carroll's account considers both English and Irish language sources, and contrasts them to French, Spanish, and Italian texts. Circe's Cup argues for the need to see similarities between Irish and English texts, while at the same time focusing on the sharp, and often irreconcilable, difference between the two.

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Contents

Introduction
1
Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals
11
The Construction of Gender and the Cultural and Political
28
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

Clare Carroll is associate professor of literature at the City University of New York. She is the author of Circe's Cup, also published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

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