A provocative history of Ulysses and the Easter Rising as harbingers of decolonization. When revolutionaries seized Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising, they looked back to unrequited pasts to point the way toward radical futures—transforming the Celtic Twilight into the electric light of modern Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. For Luke Gibbons, the short-lived rebellion converted the Irish renaissance into the beginning of a global decolonial movement. James Joyce and the Irish Revolution maps connections between modernists and radicals, tracing not only Joyce’s projection of Ireland onto the world stage, but also how revolutionary leaders like Ernie O’Malley turned to Ulysses to make sense of their shattered worlds. Coinciding with the centenary of both Ulysses and Irish independence, this book challenges received narratives about the rebellion and the novel that left Ireland changed, changed utterly.
"2022 is the centenary both of the founding of the Irish State and the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. In this book, which describes a more radical edge than previous treatments of Joyce, Luke Gibbons counters much of the Joyce and modernism scholarship, while challenging popular historical accounts of events from 1913 to 1923. He takes up two, widely held notions: first, that Joyce and his writerly contemporaries were set apart from events in Ireland of the period, especially during the writing of Ulysses; and second, that Joyce was not appreciated in his native Ireland at the time, and only came to widespread notice as he was embraced by non-Irish critics much later in the century (during the 1980s and 90s). In contrast, Gibbons here shows multiple points of intersection between the modernist avant-garde and figures and events in the Irish Revolution. As Gibbons suggests, the Ireland of Joyce and Ulysses was the same culture that produced the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution. How is it, he asks, that societies "not yet modern" are able to produce breakthrough works in modernism? Gibbons here redefines the Easter Rising as a modern event, not a belated, resurgent mythic gesture of a bygone Romantic Ireland. By reconceiving the revolution as modern, not as the revival of Celtic pride, as earlier studies claim, Gibbons is able to connect Joyce to other, forward-facing projects, to Yeats's radically conceived Abbey theater, for example, or the Victorian Gael of Standish O'Grady and the insular Catholic nationalism movement. He also places Joyce in a wider modernist community of artists and thinkers, including Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Alfred Döblin, and Hermann Broch, and beyond Europe to writers in America, among them, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, H. L. Mencken, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Claude MacKay. Thus Gibbons recasts what has gone before in a new, unexpected light, placing Ulysses and the Irish Revolution, not at the end of a process or an Irish "renaissance," but at the beginning of global decolonization, a new way of understanding Irish history at the turn of the century, and Joyce in the context of world literature. The book will be read-and contested-by scholars of modern Irish history and the development of modernism across the arts"--
In Dublin with your friend Remy, the reader--Indiana Jones--witnesses the struggle for Irish independence and meets such historical figures as James Joyce, Sean O'Casey, and William Butler Yeats. Original.
In 1922, following a decade of political ferment and much bloodshed, the Irish Free State was established, became stabilised, and developed along conservative lines. During these years the prevailing impulse was to reprove the actions of republicans who had rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and many significant revolutionary voices were left unheeded. One mind, more agile than most of his contemporaries, belonged to Ernie O’Malley. It was through his vastly popular ‘clipped lyric’ memoirs, especially On Another Man’s Wound in 1936, that many of the complexities of the republican mindset were brought to light for readers worldwide. In Modern Ireland and Revolution, leading Irish and American historians and academics deliver critical essays that consider the life, writings and monumental influence of Ernie O’Malley, and the modern arts that influenced him. After his involvement in the War of Independence and the Civil War, O’Malley developed a modernist approach while living abroad for ten years; he was devoted to the arts, moved in circles that included Georgia O’Keeffe and Paul Strand, and through his probing mind counteracted any notion that republicans of his era were dull, inflexible idealists. In this fascinating collection, art and revolution coincide, enriching every preconception of the minds that supported both sides of the Treaty, and revealing untoward truths about the Irish Free State’s process of remembrance.
Recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction “The arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer . . . A measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to the book’s landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say Yes to Ulysses.
'... (MacCabe is) the most lucid, least blinkered expounder of the post-structuralist mysteries I have ever come across. This is an important, challenging book, which no Joycean can afford to ignore.'' David Lodge '... (this is) the most exciting and original book on Joyce to have appeared for many years ...' Terry Eagleton, New Statesman
The first comprehensive account to record and analyze all deaths arising from the Irish revolution between 1916 and 1921 This account covers the turbulent period from the 1916 Rising to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921—a period which saw the achievement of independence for most of nationalist Ireland and the establishment of Northern Ireland as a self-governing province of the United Kingdom. Separatists fought for independence against government forces and, in North East Ulster, armed loyalists. Civilians suffered violence from all combatants, sometimes as collateral damage, often as targets. Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin catalogue and analyze the deaths of all men, women, and children who died during the revolutionary years—505 in 1916; 2,344 between 1917 and 1921. This study provides a unique and comprehensive picture of everyone who died: in what manner, by whose hands, and why. Through their stories we obtain original insight into the Irish revolution itself.
"In a very real sense, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh can . . . be said to be the last, or one of the last Irish Republicans. Studies of the Provisional movement to date have invariably focused more on the Northerners and the role of people like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. But an understanding of them is not possible without appreciating where they came from and from what tradition they have broken. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh is that tradition and that is why this account of his life and politics is so important." —from the foreword by Ed Moloney, author of A Secret History of the IRA At his death in 2013, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh remained a divisive and influential figure in Irish politics and the Irish Republican movement. He was the first person to serve as chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army, as president of the political party Sinn Féin, and to have been elected, as an abstentionist, to the Dublin parliament. He was a prominent, uncompromising, and articulate spokesperson of those Irish Republicans who questioned the peace process in Northern Ireland. His concern was rooted in his analysis of Irish history and his belief that the peace process would not achieve peace. He believed that it would support the continued partition of Ireland and result in continued, inevitable, conflict. The child of Irish Republican veterans, Ó Brádaigh led IRA raids, was arrested and interned, escaped and lived "on the run," and even spent a period of time on a hunger strike. Because he was an effective spokesman for the Irish Republican cause, he was at different times excluded from Northern Ireland, Britain, the United States, and Canada. He was also a key figure in the secret negotiation of a bilateral IRA-British truce in the mid-1970s. In a brief afterword for this new edition, author Robert W. White addresses Ó Brádaigh's continuing influence on the Irish Republican Movement, including the ongoing "dissident" campaign. Whether for good or bad, this ongoing dissident activity is a part of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh's enduring legacy.
