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4147 Inglis–Are the Irish different_BB_Layout 1 29/07/2014 09:27 Page 230 22 A new vision of Irish studies Linda Connolly One of the pervasive concerns in contemporary Irish studies is the core question framing this volume – are ‘the Irish’ different? Numerous studies, particularly in Irish literature and Irish history, have explored whether or not an authentic, coherent and distinctive Irish identity exists. This is often linked to another question. What, in comparative terms, is it that makes ‘the Irish’ different and exceptional as a nation and ethnic group
4147 Inglis–Are the Irish different_BB_Layout 1 29/07/2014 09:27 Page 241 23 Irish studies between the past and the future Michael G. Cronin On 31 August 2013 a commemorative event was held on Dublin’s O’Connell Street to mark the centenary of the Dublin Lockout. Specifically the event commemorated ‘Bloody Sunday’ 1913, when members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police baton-charged a gathering of strikers and their supporters, killing two people and injuring several hundred. The commemoration was presided over by President Michael D. Higgins, and included
This collection of essays explores a largely neglected aspect of the history of Anglo-Irish relations: British Labour Party policy on Ireland during the twentieth century. Much of the literature on the relationship between ‘these islands’ concentrates on the present or the recent past, but by viewing an important dimension of that relationship through a wider lens, this work makes a significant contribution to the field British-Irish studies, one that will inform future research and debate. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Labour Party was broadly supportive of Irish self-government, as reflected in its espousal of a home rule settlement. However, from the end of the First World War, Labour anticipated a place in government. As a modern, maturing party that was intent on proving its ability to govern, it developed a more calculated and measured set of responses to Irish nationalism and to the ‘Irish question’. With contributions from a range of distinguished Irish and British scholars, this collection provides the first full treatment of the historical relationship between the Labour Party and Ireland in the last century, from Keir Hardie to Tony Blair. By examining the party’s responses to crises and debates around home rule, partition, Irish neutrality during WWII, Ireland’s departure from the Commonwealth, and the Northern ‘Troubles’, it offers an original perspective on longer-term dispositions in Labour mentalities towards Ireland.
This monograph examines the ways in which ideas about children, childhood and Ireland changed together in Irish Protestant writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It will focus on different accounts of the child found in the work of a variety of Irish Anglican writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents from the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion. The book is structured around a detailed examination of five ‘versions’ of the child: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the believing child, the enlightened child and the monstrous child. It traces these versions across a wide range of genres (novels, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and children’s bibles), showing how concepts of childhood related to debates about Irish nationality, politics and history across these two centuries.
Revolutionary bodies traces a style of homoerotic writing in twentieth-century and contemporary Irish fiction. As this study demonstrates, writers in that tradition explored a broad spectrum of cultural and political concerns, while experimenting with the conventions of literary realism. We witness how, in these various works, the longing for the male body is insistently associated with utopian political desire. Developing a series of innovative readings, the argument proceeds through three author-centred chapters (Brendan Behan; John Broderick; Colm Tóibín) followed by two chapters on Irish gay fiction and ‘Celtic Tiger’ fiction. The latter two chapters focus on work by Keith Ridgway, Jamie O’Neill, Micheál Ó Conghaile and Barry McCrea, among others. Revolutionary Bodies prompts us to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics, literature and sexual liberation.
9 ‘But his study is out of doors’: Tim Robinson’s place in Irish Studies Eamonn Wall We cannot make the argument that Tim Robinson is a traditional Irish Studies scholar; he is not an academic working and researching at a university; rather, he is a writer, as he says of himself, living with his partner Máiréad in the harbour master’s house they have restored in Roundstone, Co. Galway (see Figure 21). Instead of having a library close at hand, Robinson has the ocean and a garden. Roundstone and its surrounding areas are defined by fishing and farming primarily
crisis of what the future might be by forcing it to exist in a “plethora” of cultural images’.45 The rise of Irish Studies since the 1980s can be seen in the context of this simultaneous exposure to, and critical examination of, the process of globalisation. Literary criticism has remained a central disciplinary component of Irish Studies, and Irish criticism could not remain immune to the theory wars that convulsed literature departments on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s. These debates demonstrated how literary and cultural production could be conceptualised
wayside in Irish university departments ever since the heyday of Irish Studies and postcolonialism. The common reader tradition is more psychological and phenomenological in nature. Catherine Gallagher argues that it can even be regarded as describing something unique about the process of reading itself. Gallagher suggests that ‘even a theoretically inclined reader might become a Common Reader’ if we extend the notion of a common reader to ‘the self-reflective entity of the humanist tradition’ (Knight, 2003:19). The common reader tradition can then be regarded as
political, economic, and social circumstances. Keeping in mind how in the previous fifteen years Irish authors have successfully blurred the lines of seemingly mutually exclusive dichotomies – nationalist vs. unionist, past vs. present, fiction vs. history – I will now offer a case study that underscores this dual identity in action in order to delineate where Irish studies scholars stand with spectrality as a critical lens for analyzing the present and coming fiction about twenty-firstcentury Ireland. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1949, trans. 1953) is a
the national story. Why is this? Is it because these evacuations cannot be blamed on a colonial relationship with Britain? Is it because the main destination for these emigrants was Britain rather than the United States of America? Or is it because the narrative about emigration has been rewritten and, instead of being seen as forced exile, is now cast in terms of opportunities for entrepreneurship? A fully developed interdisciplinary Irish studies would rectify this omission. This is essential because contact and exchanges between the ‘homeland’ (Ireland) and the