Images of Irishness in Nineteenth-Century Travel Literature

Images of Irishness in Nineteenth-Century Travel Literature

Author: Dimitrios Kassis

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-10-23

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 1527520226

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since its annexation to the British Crown, Ireland has never ceased in forming the subject of an ardent national debate in Great Britain which resulted in the demonisation of the Celtic race as subaltern and backward. In its effort to forge a national identity, the British Empire adopted several collective identities on the basis of the racial and cultural findings of the 1850s which gave a new impetus to the systematic view of England as a typically Anglo-Saxon culture, staunchly opposed to the alleged Celtic backwardness and the rebellious spirit of the Irish. In view of the rising anti-Irish wave of sentiment in the British imperialist imagination, Irish nationalism was manifest through a series of uprisings, the majority of which sought to link the country to its ancient Celtic heritage. The Celticist movements of Young Ireland and the Irish Revival revealed the need of Irish Nationalists to acquire a new, collective identity, which proved to be a strenuous task, given the complex historical and ethnic background of the Irish. This book investigates the extent to which Irish identity is affected by the racist and nationalist discourses of the nineteenth century which emerged to either defend or oppose the image of Ireland as a cultural construct. The travelogues explored here include some of the most fundamental representations of Ireland by prominent Irish and British travel writers, whose impressions of the island might be linked to the utopian and dystopian dimensions of the country.


Antiquaries

Antiquaries

Author: Rosemary Sweet

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2004-05-28

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 9781852853099

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Eighteenth-century Britain saw an explosion of interest in its own past, a past now expanded to include more than classical history and high politics. Antiquaries, men interested in all aspects of the past, added a distinctive new dimension to literature in Georgian Britain in their attempts to reconstruct and recover the past. Corresponding and publishing in an extended network, antiquaries worked at preserving and investigating records and physical remains in England, Scotland and Ireland. In doing so they laid solid foundations for all future study in British prehistory, archaeology and numismatics, and for local and national history as a whole. Naturally, they saw the past partly in their own image. While many antiquaries were better at fieldwork and recording than at synthesis, most were neither crabbed eccentrics nor dilettanti. At their best, as in the works of Richard Gough or William Stukeley, antiquaries set new standards of accuracy and perception in fields ranging from the study of the ancient Britons to that of medieval architecture. Antiquaries is the definitive account of a great historical enterprise.


Exploring the History and Heritage of Irish Landscapes

Exploring the History and Heritage of Irish Landscapes

Author: Patrick J. Duffy

Publisher: Four Courts Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"This book highlights the principal themes and elements in the making of the landscape, and the sources which can assist historians and historical geographers in studying and understanding Irish landscape history. Major and local sources relating to the natural environment, cultural landscapes and the built environment are explored. The book also looks at representations of landscapes in literature, painting and other artistic sources which can provide insights into the nature of real and imagined worlds of the past. The ultimate source which features prominently throughout this study is the landscape itself on which generations before us have inscribed the marks of their presence in fields, farms, houses, villages, towns, roads, lanes and the infrastructure of settlement."--BOOK JACKET.


Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character

Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character

Author: William Williams

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2012-02-24

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0299225232

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Picturesque but poor, abject yet sublime in its Gothic melancholy, the Ireland perceived by British visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not fit their ideas of progress, propriety, and Protestantism. The rituals of Irish Catholicism, the lamentations of funeral wakes, the Irish language they could not comprehend, even the landscapes were all strange to tourists from England, Wales, and Scotland. Overlooking the acute despair in England’s own industrial cities, these travelers opined in their writings that the poverty, bog lands, and ill-thatched houses of rural Ireland indicated moral failures of the Irish character.