Youghal town, in County Cork has a long history which predates most others in Ireland. The area was settled by vikings (Danes) and later, the town was fortified with walls built by the Normans in the 1100s. For centuries after, the town was a hub of trading activity and a vital port during the early stages of the English empire's expansion. This book looks at a period which saw all the elements and dynamics of this history come together in the town from the Mayorship of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1586 to the Witchtrial of Florence Newton in 1661, taking in en route, Richard Boyle (the first millionaire colonialist), the Munster rebellion, the 'burnings' by Lord Inchiquin, Cromwell's invasion and Robert Boyle's chemistry.
Annie Caulfield's early years were spent by the seaside in Ireland. However, the family shifted to Sixties London and soon she wasn't sure who she was - was she English, was she Irish, and if so, what kind of Irish? Watching the news of The Troubles, she was unable to recognise the country she'd left behind. On return journeys to visit her family over the last thirty years, she discovers how much The Troubles have caused weird and successful aspects of the country's life and history to be overlooked. Caulfield's background is religiously and politically mixed, giving her a unique and often astute perspective on The Troubles. This is an Irish emigrant's tale, asking whether you can ever really go back to your roots. If you were a punk rocker when others were on hunger strike, can you really put your hand on your heart and say 'my people'? If you get a headache and go home to watch Big Brother on 12th July, are you just too flippant to understand your own country? There are many books on the recent history of Northern Ireland, but none give such a funny insight into the lives of ordinary people as Annie Caulfield's affectionate portrait of 'Alternative Ulster'.
The legacy of Oliver Cromwell is still haunts the Irish imagination. His alleged directive to the Catholic Irish to get ""to Hell or Connaught,"" and the policy that drove it, permanently altered the ownership of Irish soil.The Parliamentary forces' civil war against Charles I were enmeshed in a ruthless campaign against popery and the Catholic perpetrators of the assault on the Protestant colonists of 1641. The legacy of sectarianism has marred Irish politics to this day. Prendergast's research reveals his keen eye for evidence. His dismissal of the colonists' claims about the nature of the uprising of 1641 and his attitudes to race are contested, but he was a man of his times. More significantly his prejudices did not blind him and he lets his sources speak for themselves, while his analytical mind identifies the underlying economic motivation and forces behind the apparently civilising religious mission driving the settlement.
Providing a full account of second-generation Irish cultural music production in post-war England, this book examines the work of artists such as Shane MacGowan, Kevin Rowland, Johnny Marr and Morrissey.
This is the first comprehensive analysis of late eighteenth-century Irish patriot thought and its development into 1790s radical republicanism. The book is a history of the rich political ideas and languages that emerged from the tumultuous events and colourful individuals of this pivotal period in Irish history. Patriots, radicals, and republicans played key roles in the movements for free trade, legislative independence, parliamentary reform, Catholic relief and independence fromBritain; and many of their ideas helped precipitate the rebellion in 1798. Stephen Small explains the ideological background to these issues, sheds new light on the origins of Irish republicanism, and places late eighteenth-century Irish political thought in the wider context of British, Atlantic,and European ideas.Dr Small argues that Irish patriotism, radicalism, and republicanism were constructed out of five key political 'languages': Protestant superiority, ancient constitutionalism, commercial grievance, classical republicanism, and natural rights. These political languages, which were Irish dialects of languages shared with the English-speaking and European world, combined in the late 1770s to construct the classic expression of Irish patriotism. This patriotism was full of contradictions,containing the seeds of radical reform, Catholic emancipation, and republican separatism - as well as a defence of Protestant Ascendancy.Over the next two decades, the American and French Revolutions, the reform movement, popular politicization, Ascendancy reaction, and Catholic political revival disrupted and transformed these languages, causing the fragmentation of a broad patriot consensus and the emergence from it of radicalism and republicanism. These developments are explained in terms of tensions and interactions between Protestant assumptions of Catholic inferiority, the increasing popularity of natural rights, and theenduring centrality of classical republican concepts of virtue to all types of patriot thought.
In 1847 when the Great Potato Blight devastates all of Ireland and the Law of Coercion is passed, Hugh McMillan and his family are forced from their small cabin out onto the road with nothing but the clothes on their backs to starve to death like so many of their neighbors had already succumbed. Survival tests their courage and hardships shape their destiny as they leave their beloved Ireland for the land of promise, America. Here they search for love and help to form their new country as they bravely fight for her freedom in war after war. Love, laughter, sorrow and tragedy outline their lives. A story of the true Irish heart in all its stubbornness, merriment, devotion, love for life and a drink or two or ?
With five Nobel Prize-winners, seven Pulitzer Prize-winners and two Booker Prize-winning novelists, modern Irish writing has contributed something special and permanent to our understanding of the twentieth century. Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century provides a useful, comprehensive and pleasurable introduction to modern Irish literature in a single volume. Organized chronologically by decade, this anthology provides the reader with a unique sense of the development and richness of Irish writing and of the society it reflected. It embraces all forms of writing, not only the major forms of drama, fiction and verse, but such material as travel writing, personal memoirs, journalism, interviews and radio plays, to offer the reader a complete and wonderfully varied sense of Ireland's contribution our literary heritage. David Pierce has selected major literary figures as well as neglected ones, and includes many writers from the Irish diaspora. The range of material is enormous, and ensures that work that is inaccessible or out of print is now easily available. The book is a delightful compilation, including many well known pieces and captivating "discoveries," which anyone interested in literature will long enjoy browsing and dipping into.
Loving Arms examines the war-related writings of five British women whose works explore the connections among gender, war, and story-telling. While not the first study to relate the subjects of gender and war, it is the first within a growing body of criticism to focus specifically on British culture during and after World War II. Evoking the famous "St. Crispin's Day" speech from Henry V and then her own father's account of being moved to tears on V-J Day because he had been too young to fight, Karen Schneider posits that the war story has a far-reaching potency. She admits—perhaps for all of us—that such stories "had powerfully shaped my consciousness in ways I could not completely resist." How a story is narrated and by whom are matters of no small importance. As widely defined and accepted, war stories are men's stories. If we are to hear an "other" story of war, then we must listen to the stories women tell. Many of the war stories written by women insist that war is not the condition of men but rather the condition of humanity, beginning with relations between the sexes. For the five women whose work is examined in Loving Arms—Stevie Smith, Katharine Burdekin, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Doris Lessing—this latter point was particularly relevant. Their positions as women within a patriarchal, militarist culture that was externally threatened by an overtly fascist one led to an acute ambivalence, says Schneider. Though all five women perceived the war from substantially different perspectives, each in her own way exposed and critiqued the seductive power of war and war stories, with their densely interwoven tropes of masculinity and nationalism. Yet these writers' conflicting impulses of loyalty to England and resistance to the war betray their ambivalence. Loving Arms will interest students of twentieth-century British literature and culture, gender studies, and narratology. Even today, we maintain an unabated love affair with the war story. But unless we listen to what the women had to say fifty years ago, we are doomed to hear only "the same old story."
