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It is often said that all history writing is political. This book, the first major study of Irish antiquarian and historical writing during the turbulent second half of the eighteenth century, demonstrates the truth of this maxim. It charts the ways in which contemporary politics, notably the Catholic question, legislative independence and the gathering agrarian and political crises from the late 1780s, shaped articulations of the remote and recent past. Historical and antiquarian disputes mirrored political debate, so that Catholic and liberal Protestant interpretations of the past were pitted against conservative Protestant reiterations of earlier colonialist analyses. This study sets Irish writing in a broad European focus, examining the influence of key cultural developments, such as orientalism, primitivism and the vogue for Ossian. The intention is to show the complex ways in which Irish cultural politics in this period was open to, and interacted with, British imperial and wider European Enlightenment trends. Throughout the book, Scotland forms a particular point of comparison, since antiquaries there drew on the same Gaelic heritage in much of their work.Leaman criticizes the influence of Sufism on Islamic aesthetics and contends that it is generally misleading regarding both the nature of Islam and artistic expression. He discusses issues arising in painting, calligraphy, architecture, gardens, literature, films, and music and pays close attention to the teachings of the Qur'an. In particular he asks what it would mean for the Qur'an to be a miraculous literary creation, and he analyzes two passages in the Qur'an-those of Yusuf and Zulaykha (Joseph and Zuleika) and King Sullayman (Solomon) and the Queen of Sheba. His arguments draw on examples from history, art, philosophy, theology, and the artefacts of the Islamic world, and raise a large number of difficulties in the accepted paradigms for analyzing Islamic art.

P. J. Mathews argues against the received opinion that the Irish Revival was a purely mystical affair of high culture characterized by a preoccupation with a backward-looking Celtic spirituality, nostalgia for Gaelic Ireland, and anti-modern traditionalism. Instead, he claims, the time of the Irish Revival was a progressive period that witnessed the cooperation of various self-help movements-the Abbey Theatre, the Gaelic League, and the Irish Agricultural Organization Society-which encouraged local modes of material and cultural development.These different groups were bound together by their willingness to use traditional cultural forms as the basis for an alternative modernization project. Mathews points out that these self-help initiatives were so successful that they very quickly opened up a sphere of influence rivaling that of parliamentary politics. Much of this activity laid the groundwork for the emergence of the Sinn Fein in 1905. Making use of important theater productions of the period, Mathews skillfully traces the connections and overlaps among these radical movements and demonstrates that the self-help idea was crucial to the decolonization and modernization of Irish society during the early years of the twentieth century.

This is the first study to survey the development of musical thought in modern Irish cultural history. It registers the function of music as a dynamic agent in the history of Irish ideas in the period 1770 - 1970. Ireland's verbally dominated culture has depended on music throughout its evolution, but the presence of music - to say nothing of its impact on the formation of Irish cultural thought - has been hitherto scarcely recognised. The Keeper's Recital attempts to redress this neglect by examining the role of music in Ireland's notably polarised cultural matrix by means of three prevailing themes: the integrity of sectarian culture, the political expression of cultural autonomy and the symbolic force of celticism. The book traces the development and cultural dislocation of music in Ireland from the late eighteenth century to the death of Sean Ó Riada and it thereby identifies the function and status of music in those cultural and political ideologies of nationalism, colonialism and revival which it helped to foster. Although The Keeper's Recital is primarily concerned with such figures as Turlough Carolan, Edward Bunting, Thomas Moore, Thomas Davis, George Petrie, Douglas Hyde, Heinrich Bewerunge, Charles Villiers Stanford, Arnold Bax and Sean Ó Riada, its scrutiny of the condition of music in Irish cultural history notably embraces Irish political and literary thought throughout the period 1770-1970. While not offered as a history of music in Ireland, it engages with the principal themes of that history in order to identify and distinguish between the symbolic power of Irish music (particularly in terms of its preservation) and its failure to generate a durable aesthetic of comparable significance to that which infused the Literary Revival.

These essays analyze Edmund Burke in comparison with other political philosophers and writers, including Montesquieu, Diderot, Tocqueville, Swift, and Acton.