Versions Of Ireland: Empire, Modernity And Resistance In Irish Culture
Author: Eóin Flannery
Date Of Publication: Oct 2006
Isbn13: 9781847180506
Isbn: 1-84718-050-7
Versions of Ireland brings a refined postcolonial theoretical optic to bear on many of the most urgent questions within contemporary Irish cultural studies. Drawing on, and extending, the most advanced critical work within the discipline, the book offers a subtle critical genealogy of the development of Ireland’s diverse postcolonial projects. Furthermore, it reflects on the relevance and the effectiveness of postcolonial and subaltern historiographical methodologies in an Irish context, interrogating the ethical and political problematics of such discursive importation. Flannery’s work highlights the operative dynamics of imperial modernity, together with its representational agents, in Ireland, and also divines moments of explicit and implicit resistance to modernity’s rationalising and accumulative urges.

The book is pioneering in the facility and ease with which it navigates the interdisciplinary terrain of Irish studies. Flannery provides enabling and challenging new readings of the poetry of the bi-lingual poet, Michael Hartnett; the politically imaginative vistas of the republican mural tradition in the North of Ireland; the gothic anxieties inherent in the fiction of Eugene McCabe and the semi-fictional writing of Seamus Deane, and the differential codes of visual surveillance apparent in Irish tourist posters and late nineteenth century photography in Ireland. Versions of Ireland does not dwell on the exclusively theoretical, but offers rich critical analyses of a range of Irish cultural artefacts in terms of Ireland’s protracted colonial history and contested postcolonial condition.

Eóin Flannery teaches in the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Limerick in Ireland. He is the author of several articles on Irish poetry, contemporary Irish fiction, postcolonial studies and visual culture. He has three other books forthcoming, including: Fanon’s One Big Idea: Ireland and Postcolonial Studies; Ireland in Focus: Film, Photography and Popular Culture and Enemies of Empire: New Perspectives on Imperialism, Literature and History.

"Versions of Ireland brims with ideas and imagination, striving to push Irish studies to its limits and beyond, and the book has a critical integrity and coherence of its own. Its individual chapters are strongly researched and reverberate beyond their immediate context into wider meta-critical debates, and it is here that the real strength of the work is found. Eóin Flannery is one of the most promising critics currently working in Irish studies and Versions of Ireland reveals his talents to their full."

Dr. Colin Graham.

"There are certain scholars whose first books cause you to sit up and pay attention, so immediately evident is the quality of the writing. My first reaction to Versions of Ireland was a mixture of awe and empathy. Throughout the book whose attractive presentation by Cambridge Scholars Press deserves high praise, the reader is carried along by the compelling fluidity of arguments that are based on the most scrupulous research and mature reflection on how the author's thesis differs from, or is in agreement with, the theories put forward by other cultural commentators... When you finish the final essay, you are aware of having learned many new things as well as having been forced to reappraise other long-held and cherished opinions that have been revealed to be deficient or unsustainable. In conclusion, all I can say is that as a first offering these essays are a tour de force. Eoin Flannery is a young critic who will undoubtedly write many more books and, on the evidence of Versions of Ireland, we will await their arrival with bated breath."

-Eamon Maher (Director of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in ITT Dublin (Tallaght) and an Associate Editor of the Irish Book Review (The Irish Book Review, vol. 2, No. 4, Autumn 2007)

"Versions of Ireland is an exciting and innovative addition to the body of Irish and international postcolonial criticism. Flannery is an engaging and persuasive critic whose writings are both theoretically informed and politically engaged. The range of his work is exhilarating from Northern Irish murals to the poetry of Michael Hartnett to the configuration of Ireland as a tourist destination and throughout his analyses there is a keen respect for his primary materials alongside a robust and invigorating re-assessment of their meanings and importance.

A signal virtue of Flannery’s writing is to remind his readers that Empire has by no means disappeared or been made redundant by new political arrangements. On the contrary, the force of Versions of Ireland comes from the extreme topicality of his insights into the way in which power, coercion and oppression operate and are justified. What is more, Flannery demonstrates how strategies of resistance are elaborated and how these bring with them emancipatory potential. Versions of Ireland is an important and timely book and deserves the widest possible readership in Ireland and beyond."

Professor Michael Cronin, Dublin City University, author of Translating Ireland

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