You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The influence of revivalism is writ large in the history of modern Ireland, particularly as we commemorate a 'decade of centenaries'. Yet, whether in Ireland or elsewhere, no study of revivalism as a critical cultural practice exists, rather one tends to speak of specific revivals such as the Gothic Revival, the Gaelic Revival and so on. Surely, beyond the specific circumstances of these revivals, lies a set of fundamental concerns which arise from our experience of time, cultural memory and the quest for continuity? This book seeks to address this question by firstly locating revivalism within the broader history of ideas and, secondly, undertaking a conceptual case study of revivalism with...
This collection of essays explores Belfast's relationship with the Irish language from its earliest roots through to the cultural pioneers of the 19th-century revival, the urban Gaeltacht of the 1960s, the Belfast of the Good Friday Agreement and beyond. Contents: Ciaran Carson (QUB) Belfast and the Irish language; Pat McKay (QUB) The place-names of Belfast; A.J. Hughes (UU) Robert MacAdam & the 19th-century Gaelic revival; Fionntan de Brun (St Mary's U College) The Fadgies: an 'Irish-speaking colony' in 19th-century Belfast; Aodhan Mac Poilin (Iontaobhas Ultach/Ultach Trust) The Irish language revival in Belfast, 1900-1960; Gabrielle Nig Uidhir (St Mary's U College) Shaws Road urban Gaeltacht; Gordon McCoy (Iontaobhas Ultach) Protestants and the Irish language; Sean Mac Corraidh (Belfast Education and Library Board) Irishmedium education; Sean Misteil (Mitchell Kane Assoc.) Belfast's new Gaeltacht quarter
Two decades after the publication of Clifford and Marcus’ volume Writing Culture, this collection provides a fresh and diverse reassessment of the debates that this pioneering volume unleashed. At the same time, Beyond Writing Culture moves the debate on by embracing the more fundamental challenge as to how to conceptualise the intricate relationship between epistemology and representational practices rather than maintaining the original narrow focus on textual analysis. It thus offers a thought-provoking tapestry of new ideas relevant for scholars not only concerned with ‘the ethnographic Other’, but with representation in general.
Middle-Class Life in Victorian Belfast vividly reconstructs the social world of upper middle-class Belfast from c.1830 to 1890. Using extensive primary material, the book draws a rich portrait of Belfast's middle-class society, covering themes of civic activism, working lives, philanthropy, associational culture, evangelicalism, recreation, marriage and family life.
The Irish Revival has inspired a richly diverse and illuminating body of scholarship that has enlarged our understanding of the movement and its influence. The general tenor of recent scholarly work has involved an emphasis on inclusion and addition, exploring previously neglected texts, authors, regional variations, and international connections. Such work, while often excellent, tends to see various revivalist figures and projects as part of a unified endeavor, such as political resistance or self-help. In contrast, The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision seeks to reimagine the field by interpreting the Revival through the concept of “complexity,” a theory recently developed in the informa...
This groundbreaking book shatters historical stereotypes, demonstrating that, in the century before 1870, Ireland was not an anglicized kingdom and was capable of articulating modernity in the Irish language. It gives a dynamic account of the complexity of Ireland in the nineteenth century, developments in church and state, and the adaptive bilingualism found across all regions, social levels, and religious persuasions.
Focusing on Irish speakers in Catholic West Belfast, this ethnography on Irish language and identity explores the complexities of changing, and contradictory, senses of Irishness and shifting practices of 'Irish culture' in the domains of language, music, dance and sports. The author’s theoretical approach to ethnicity and ethnic revivals presents an expanded explanatory framework for the social (re)production of ethnicity, theorizing the mutual interrelations between representations and cultural practices regarding their combined capacity to engender ethnic revivals. Relevant not only to readers with an interest in the intricacies of the Northern Irish situation, this book also appeals to a broader readership in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history and political science concerned with the mechanisms behind ethnonational conflict and the politics of culture and identity in general.
This volume focuses on literary and other cultural texts that use the graveyard as a liminal space within which received narratives and social values can be challenged, and new and empowering perspectives on the present articulated. It argues that such texts do so primarily by immersing the reader in a liminal space, between life and death, where traditional certainties such as time and space are suspended and new models of human interaction can thus be formulated. Essays in this volume examine the use of liminality as a vehicle for social critique, paying particular attention to the ways in which liminal spaces facilitate the construction of alternative perspectives.
Yeats, Revivalism, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism offers a new understanding of a writer whose revivalist commitments are often regarded in terms of nostalgic yearning and dreamy romanticism. It counters such conventions by arguing that Yeats's revivalism is an inextricable part of his modernism. Gregory Castle provides a new reading of Yeats that is informed by the latest research on the Irish Revival and guided by the phenomenological idea of worldmaking, a way of looking at literature as an aesthetic space with its own temporal and spatial norms, its own atmosphere generated by language, narrative, and literary form. The dialectical relation between the various worlds created in the work of art generate new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. It is just this worldmaking power that links Yeats's revivalism to his modernism and constructs new grounds for recognizing his life and work.