Bøger af Brenda Josephine Liddy

This book is about the Good Friday Agreement and indeed the very nature of what an agreement is and how it is arrived at or hammered out. It is a blend of fact and fiction and could be deemed as experimental writing or faction. The Sunningdale Agreement and The Good Friday Agreement are also analysed. The narrator of the book, Patrick Sweeney, was born on the same day as the Good Friday Agreement and like Saleem in Rushdie's Midnight's Children, he feels he is handcuffed to history and that his destiny is bound up with that of his province. The Good Friday Agreement was premised on the auxiliary verb 'may', and to paraphrase Humpty Dumpty, the negotiators owed it a fortune. An auxiliary verb is a verb used in forming the tenses, moods and voices of other verbs. The primary auxiliary verbs in English are be, do and have, and the modal auxiliaries are can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will and would. So to get rid of the artillery they had to use auxiliaries! After Strand One had been hammered out, the thorn in the side of the Nationalists became the thorn in the crown of the Unionists, so in went the modal auxiliary cavalry.

Common Things That are Suddenly Special is an inspirational memoir which will motivate readers to see the ordinary things and events in their lives as special and extraordinary. It is what Thomas Larson defines as sudden memoir, which helps the writer to cope, get through, get past. Freud claimed that our memories are stored in our brains as static entities, but recent neurological discoveries show that our memories are in a state of flux and are continually being updated or refashioned. In this inspirational memoir, Brenda Liddy, takes the reader on a journey from the interfaces of north Belfast to the cherry blossoms of Kyoto. The memoir was inspired by Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book. She was a Japanese author who served as a court lady to the Empress Teishi in the mid-Heian period around the year 1,000 during which time she composed her pillow book which was in effect a collection of observations, impressions, opinions on everyday life in the court, including the highs and lows of aristocratic life. You might say Sei with her witty and sometimes pithy, sometimes unflattering remarks was a kind of early modern tweeter! The author uses Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book as a framework to reflect on her own life and some of the events that have shaped it. It starts with a reflection on the four seasons. Basho's spring haiku where he celebrates the cherry blossoms is reflected on and we learn that the poet felt as if he was in a Noh play. Liddy adheres to the 'sudden memory' style throughout the book as one moment you are in the Empress Teishi's Japanese court where the full-moon gruel festival is in full swing, and women are chasing each other with gruel sticks and the next moment you are reading about a St. Patrick's Day celebration in Belfast where young men are wearing green glitter newsboy hats and are sporting red curly beards, and women are wearing green tinsel wigs, long 80s style neon fishnet gloves and trailing green and white turkey feather boas round their necks. Or one moment Sei Shonagon recalls going to the palace to see a procession of blue horses and the next moment, Liddy recalls a TV programme where the horses were parading around before the start of the Qatar Prix de L'Arc de Triomphe. The reader will be taken a walk down memory lane, which could sometimes be the Waterworks in north Belfast where the mute swans glide along elegantly to the snow capped Slemish mountain where St. Patrick herded sheep. Sei conjures up an enchanting landscape of rippling rivers and mountain peaks with Shinto shrines, and you will find her insights illuminating. But you will also be fascinated by Liddy's viewpoints on Irish mountains and their incredible myths and legends from the Cave Hill in north Belfast in County Antrim to the Mourne Mountains which sweep down to the sea, in County Down. You could be savouring Sei's Japanese aesthetic in one entry when she describes a misadventure involving palm-leaf carriages and in the next breath you could be reading about the gates in the interface peace walls in north and west Belfast or finding out about The Gateless Gate, a Buddhist text. Or do not be surprised if you are admiring a photograph of a bridge at Toome and then further on in the memoir, you are dancing on the bridge of Avignon. You could be reading about W.B. Yeats' nine bean-rows or Muslihuddin Sadi's hyacinth or awakened by a priory peacock or amused by an observation about Not the Nine O'Clock News. The memoir, like Shakespeare's Cleopatra is full of infinite variety and moves from an early modern Japanese world of sliding screens and reed blinds where women lived in the shadows, to the hustle and bustle of a 21st century post-conflict Belfast where women are equal partners in public life and have for the most part have obtained their independence. Like her role model, Sei Shonagon, Liddy's lists are not mere inventory, but a powerful memoir, peppered with insightful comments and witty observations.

Chapter One will cover the period from Petrarch to Milton. Petrarch's greatest gift to posterity was the cycle of poems popularly known as his Canzoniere. The poems are full of humour, and are written in a tightly composed yet complex form, which record their speaker's unrequited obsession with the woman named Laura. In the centuries after it was designed, the "Petrarchan sonnet," inspired the greatest love poets of the English language-from the times of Spenser and Shakespeare to our own. Petrarch's love for Laura de Noves, was the inspiration behind Il Canzoniere. Chapter Two will be based on the metaphysical poets. The most famous metaphysical poets were John Donne (1572-1631), George Herbert, (1593-1633), Andrew Marvell (1621-1678). John Donne is considered the leading exponent of the metaphysical form. The word metaphysical means anything abstract, occult or transcendental and Samuel Johnson wrote that the 'The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour'. The difference between the Elizabethan and Petrarchan sonnets is that Petrarch used closely related images such as love and a rose, whereas the metaphysical poets used unusual images which did not appear to correspond with each other. The most famous conceit is found in Donne's 'A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, ' where he uses the images of a compass to describe two lovers. Chapter Three will cover the Victorian period. After the age of John Milton, the sonnet form experienced a decline but it was revived during the Victorian period. Gerard Manly Hopkins' (1844-1889) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) were famous Victorian poets who wrote many excellent sonnets. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a famous English poet, who not only converted to Catholicism but also became a Jesuit priest. He wrote 'The Windhover' on 30 May 1877, and he dedicated the poem to Christ our Lord. Hopkins considered it one of his best poems. One of the paradoxes of Victorian sonnet writing is that while such poets as the Rossettis or Elizabeth Barrett Browning strive to maintain the personal intensity of the romantics, they also return to forms of the sonnet sequence, which they evidently consider improvements on their Elizabethan predecessors. But sequences like The House of Life, Monna Innominata, and Sonnets From The Portuguese have been completely transformed by the autobiographical shift of the romantics. Chapter Four will concentrate on contemporary sonnets. Although modern sonnets do not have to follow a particular pattern or rhyme scheme, at the same time, they are still expected to be fourteen lines long and to express a story, which is personal and memorable. Tony Barnstone is Professor of English at Whittier College. He has reinvented the sonnet, while retaining its basic form and comments: It is large enough to include Whitman and Borges, to include free-verse practices and aesthetics and Greek and Latin rhetoric, large enough to include experiments with line, stanza, and rhyme. Chapter Five will deal exclusively with Seamus Heaney's Glanmore Sonnets. The Glanmore Sonnets are found in the Field Work Anthology, which was published in 1979. The sequence consists of ten sonnets, and Heaney referred to them as "marriage poems." As Tony Curtis argues, "The references to Wordsworth and to Wyatt rather than Yeats, the choice of the sonnet sequence itself, these are clear expressions of a need to draw on the strengths of mainstream English literature." A line from Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon's 'Bop: The North Star' sums up the paradox of the sonnet: 'teach the sonnet's a cell-: now try to escape-'. The formulaic fourteen lines may seem like a cell but in fact as each century passes, the cell becomes a liberator. The rules may loosen and the form may be subverted or parodied but if the poet retains the basic form, if he bends the rules but does not break them, a sonnet or a sonnet sequence of staggering genius wil

This book examines representations of women and war in female-authored drama composed in seventeenth-century England, between the years 1645 and 1689. It examines how women's writing was influenced by the war and how at the same time women were creating a discourse of war. It examines the legacy of the bloody events of the Civil War and their representation in early modern women's drama. The study focuses on three key areas: representations of women's communities, representations of female warriors, and representations of women as peacemakers. The plays are thus considered thematically, rather than chronologically. The book is organized around focal points starting with the representations of women's community in early modern drama in chapters two and three, moving on to representations of female warriors in chapters four and five, and finally considering representations of peacemakers in chapters six and seven. The present research shows that the work of these extraordinary women was created by the Civil War culture and that because of their interaction with the war, they were also shaping a literary discourse of war. Attention to these women's texts reveals their "social embedment" in early modern history and discloses "the historicity of texts and the textuality of history." This book sets a precedent by establishing a model for women's war drama; this has never been done before in previous studies, and thus this book makes an innovative and significant contribution to the field. Extremely well researched, this book provides the reader with an understanding of theoretical perspectives, relevant criticism, and women's dramatic writing of the seventeenth century.