Irish Studies in Britain: New Perspectives on History and Literature
Editor: Brian Griffin and Ellen McWilliams
Date Of Publication: Nov 2010
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2412-5
Isbn: 1-4438-2412-7
The history essays in this volume explore how expressions of identity—particularly religious and political identity—shaped the experiences of Irish people from the early seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, both in Ireland and abroad. They consist of an examination of the role played by Bonamargy Friary in the Antrim MacDonnells’ presentation of their family’s status in the early seventeenth century; an exploration of the important role played by Irish courtiers during the years of Charles II’s Continental exile; a discussion of tensions between Irish Presbyterians and Anglicans in the 1720s and 1730s, with a particular focus on James Arbuckle’s Hibernicus’s Letters; an overview of the fraught relations between Irish Presbyterians and their Anglican neighbours on the frontier of Britain’s North American colonies in the middle decades of the eighteenth century; an illustration of the masculinist rhetoric employed by Ulster Unionists during the Home Rule crisis from 1912 to 1914; a discussion of the anti-treaty IRA’s use of arson attacks in three Munster counties during the Irish Civil War; and, finally, an examination of the impact of W. P. Nicholson’s evangelical crusade on Ulster Protestant society in the early 1920s.

The essays in the literature section of this collection represent an eclectic range of interests in Irish literature and Irish literary history. Several of the essays focus on the way in which seminal events in Irish history, in particular the Easter Rising, have been imagined and re-imagined over time; they offer new insight into literary responses to, and representations of, those events and explore fresh contexts for thinking about the same. Others take up the question of literary genre and Irish national identity, while a number of contributors explore intertextuality and influence in twentieth-century Irish writing, with a special focus on Yeatsian and Joycean afterlives. The usefulness of thinking about literary texts alongside other forms of cultural expression is also examined, in particular the interactions of Irish literature and music. Although wide ranging in its interests, the collection addresses key themes central to the interpretation of Irish literature and culture, including changing concepts of national identity, the place of women in Irish history, and the politics of the Irish literary canon.

Brian Griffin is a Senior Lecturer in History at Bath Spa University, England. He is the author of The Bulkies: Police and Crime in Belfast, 1800–1865 (1997), Sources for the Study of Crime in Ireland, 1801–1921 (2005) and Cycling in Victorian Ireland (2006).

Ellen McWilliams is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Bath Spa University, England, and has teaching and research interests in contemporary women’s fiction and twentieth-century Irish writing. She is the author of Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman (Ashgate, 2009). Her second book, Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2012.

"Each of these seven essays, ranging from a study of the influence of Irish Royalists in the exiled court of Charles II to an analysis of the arson attacks of the anti-Treaty IRA during the Civil War, offers important new insights into key areas of Irish historiography. Collectively, in the breadth of their subject matter and the quality of their research and argument, they illustrate the high standard of scholarship that British-based Irish Studies students contribute to the field of Irish history".

—Dr Andrew J. Wilson, Loyola University of Chicago.

“This lively collection of essays offers illuminating rereadings of modern Irish literature. It is often interdisciplinary in scope, but is meticulous rather than modish in its methdologies, drawing on the rich interplay between literary, musical, filmic and historical texts. Its diversity of subject and theme creates a collection that, far from being disparate, diagnoses a series of competing tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first century Irish literature: between the innovative and the inherited, the high and low, the real and the mythic, the appropriated and the imposed. The 1916 Uprising is a historical touchstone that prompts a series of revealing responses; the essays on Irish modernism and music also offer striking and informative reassessments of the prevailing critical consensus. Scrupulously and sensitively edited throughout, it offers a welcome intervention in the ongoing reconsideration and re-evaluation of modern Irish Literature, and is an excellent resource both for students and scholars in the field”.

—Dr. William May, Research Fellow in Humanities, University of Southampton

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