eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors
The author recounts his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn as the child of Irish immigrants who decide to return to worse poverty in Ireland when his infant sister dies. 40,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo. First serial, The New Yorker.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s masterful memoir of his childhood in Ireland. “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness. Angela’s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.
Get the Summary of Frank McCourt's Angelas Ashes in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Frank McCourt's memoir recounts his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland, after his family's return from New York. His father, Malachy, is an alcoholic who squanders their money, while his mother, Angela, struggles to provide for the family. Frank's upbringing is marked by hunger, illness, and the deaths of his siblings. Despite the community's scorn and the family's reliance on charity, Frank's narrative is interspersed with moments of humor and childlike innocence...
Essay from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: A , Manchester Metropolitan University Business School (Department of Modern Languages), course: Seminar "20th century writing in English" Course: EFL and English Literature, 5 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: "When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” ( p. 1 ) These sentences at the beginning of Angela`s Ashes summarize very briefly what this novel is about: the survival of a miserable Irish Catholic childhood. Indeed this childhood was shaped by a strict religious upbringing, by poverty and starvation, humiliating experiences, diseases and even death. So what does make this story an exception worth to be read? It obviously must have to do something with "survival". How come the hero of this story did not go mad like one of his classmate’s mother who had regularly been carried to the lunatic asylum? How come he did not resign like his mother permanently desperate over their miserable situation? Why did he not become like his father and many other Irish men described in the book, drinking their wages and singing sad songs about brave soldiers ready to die for Ireland? Was he just lucky or where there any special factors which enabled him to come through the first 19 years of his life? What are the reasons for his pure physical but also mental survival? In this essay I am trying to find possible answers to all the questions raised above by analysing Frank`s relationship to his family, especially to his father and mother, and to other people who played an important role in his life.
Roy Foster is one of the leaders of the iconoclastic generation of Irish historians. In this opinionated, entertaining book he examines how the Irish have written, understood, used, and misused their history over the past century. Foster argues that, over the centuries, Irish experience itself has been turned into story. He examines how and why the key moments of Ireland's past--the 1798 Rising, the Famine, the Celtic Revival, Easter 1916, the Troubles--have been worked into narratives, drawing on Ireland's powerful oral culture, on elements of myth, folklore, ghost stories and romance. The result of this constant reinterpretation is a shifting "Story of Ireland," complete with plot, drama, suspense, and revelation. Varied, surprising, and funny, the interlinked essays in The Irish Story examine the stories that people tell each other in Ireland and why. Foster provides an unsparing view of the way Irish history is manipulated for political ends and that Irish poverty and oppression is sentimentalized and packaged. He offers incisive readings of writers from Standish O'Grady to Trollope and Bowen; dissects the Irish government's commemoration of the 1798 uprising; and bitingly critiques the memoirs of Gerry Adams and Frank McCourt. Fittingly, as the acclaimed biographer of Yeats, Foster explores the poet's complex understanding of the Irish story--"the mystery play of devils and angels which we call our national history"--and warns of the dangers of turning Ireland into a historical theme park. The Irish Story will be hailed by some, attacked by others, but for all who care about Irish history and literature, it will be essential reading.
In New Perspectiveson the Irish Diaspora, Charles Fanning incorporates eighteen fresh perspectives on the Irish diaspora over three centuries and around the globe. He enlists scholarly tools from the disciplines of history, sociology, literary criticism, folklore, and culture studies to present a collection of writings about the Irish diaspora of great variety and depth.
Ruth Barton argues that in order to understand the position of filmmaking in Ireland and the inheritance on which contemporary filmmakers draw, definitions of the Irish culture and identity must take into account the Irish diaspora and engage with its cinema.
