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"Something Dreadful and Grand": American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious takes its title from an essay that introduces John Patrick Shanley's Outside Mullingar, a text that marks over 150 years of the so-called "Irish play" on the New York stage. This book traces the often uncanny relationships between Irish- and Jewish-America, arguing for the centrality of these two diasporic groups to the development of American popular music,fiction, and especially drama. But more than this, the book reads such cultural forms as tenement fiction, Tin Pan Alley music, and melodrama as part of a larger "circum-North Atlantic" world in which texts and performers from Ireland, Europe, and America were and still are involved in a continuous cultural exchange withinwhich stereotypes and performances of Jewishness and Irishness took center stage. For this reason, such Irish writers as James Joyce, Bernard Shaw, and Sean O'Casey played pivotal roles in the development of modern American culture, particularly as they influenced and interacted with writers like Elmer Rice, Clifford Odets, Henry Roth, and many others. Such Irish-American writers as Eugene O'Neill were similarly influenced by their interactions with Jewish-American writers like Michael Goldand Edward Dahlberg.While focusing on the modern period, this project traces a genealogy of modern drama and fiction to the nineteenth century stage in which Irish and Jewish melodrama-and the appearances of international stars in such roles as Shylock and Leah, the Forsaken-shaped the often contradictory and excessive dimensions of ethnicity that are both allosemitic and allohibernian. Borrowing a term from psychoanalytic theory, I also explore the larger dimensions of an Irish-Jewish unconscious underlyingcultural production in America. The closing chapter considers more recent representations of Irish-Jewish interactions by John Banville, Brendan Behan, Norman Mailer, and Harold Pinter; and examples from a newer immigrant literature bring this discussion into the present.

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Frances Drake Nesbitt was murdered in her home in Troy, Ohio in the early '20s and to this day, no one really knows who the true murderer was, even though her husband admitted to killing her and was pardoned some 9 years later for a crime that some people say "he took the wrap for."

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The documents collected in this book provide a window into a challenging and dangerous period in the history of the Salish and Pend d’Oreille Indians of western Montana. Although all of these sources were written or recorded by white people, used carefully, the documents provide important information about the experiences of the tribes. Between 1845 and 1874, the Salish and Pend d’Oreilles faced continued attacks, property loss, and death from the Plains Indian tribes east of the Continental Divide. The population losses the western tribes suffered nearly exterminated them as independent tribal bodies. The Salish and Pend d’Oreilles allied with and adopted warriors from other western tribes to replace some of their war losses. They also reached out for spiritual power from the Christian missionaries who established Saint Mary’s and Saint Ignatius missions. Another coping strategy was their alliance with the white men who invaded the Northern Rocky Mountains and fought the same Plains tribes. During this era, the Salish and Pend d’Oreilles also expanded their farms and horse and cattle herds to compensate for the declining plains buffalo herds.  

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From writer and award-winning poet James Ferace, author of "Imago Mortis: The Stories of James Ferace" and short films such as "Beneath the World," comes the long-awaited collection of darkly intense poetry, "Somnambulism: The Poetry of James Ferace." Profiled in publications such as "Pulse" magazine, Ferace will awe readers with the power and raw beauty of his words. Enthralling, anguished, poignant, and complex, his poetry will caress the senses and stir the fundamental emotions buried deep within each of us. Fans of Ferace's writing will continue to be amazed at the offerings which come from the depths of such a beautiful and tormented mind.

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Available once more, this is a comprehensive, comparative literary philological examination of two enduring bodies of love poetry from the ancient Near East.

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