The Folger Shakespeare Library, the nation's most important center for Shakespeare study and scholarship, is also the center for Shakespeare education. At the Library's Teaching Shakespeare Institute, scholars, actors, and teachers from across the country work together at the business of teaching and learning Shakespeare.
This third volume of the Shakespeare Set Free series is written by institute faculty and participants. The volume sparkles with fine recent scholarship and the wisdom and wit of real classroom teachers in all kinds of schools all over the United States.
In...

The overarching purpose of this volume is to show how a discrete tradition of writing about Lough Derg helped contemporary Irish poets rescue, metaphysical inquiry from the grip of nationalism. Linked with the supernatural from pagan times, Lough Derg had by the early twentieth century become an icon of the fusion of the Catholic Church and the Irish nation. Surveying literary treatments of Lough Derg from William Carleton through Denis Devlin, Patrick Kavanagh, and ultimately Seamus Heaney, Peggy O'Brien addresses the role of spirituality in an increasingly cosmopolitan, postmodern,...

The overarching purpose of this volume is to show how a discrete tradition of writing about Lough Derg helped contemporary Irish poets rescue, metaphysical inquiry from the grip of nationalism. Linked with the supernatural from pagan times, Lough Derg had by the early twentieth century become an icon of the fusion of the Catholic Church and the Irish nation. Surveying literary treatments of Lough Derg from William Carleton through Denis Devlin, Patrick Kavanagh, and ultimately Seamus Heaney, Peggy O'Brien addresses the role of spirituality in an increasingly cosmopolitan, postmodern,...

In the title poem, the poet advises her granddaughters metaphorically to "swim in the obscure." In this, her second collection, Peggy O'Brien tries to do just that in order to probe the shadows cast by love in its different forms. She uses the music in poetry to celebrate the prosaic tenacity and patience our most intimate bonds require, not least our hold on life itself. In a book where the color red makes more than a few appearances and war is a frequent backdrop, the poet confronts collective aggression by trying to understand personal anger. Fortunately, when she swims in dangerous...