His first biography, written by his friend and collaborator Duffy, was published in 1890, and is an invaluable source for Davis's life and his part in the Irish nationalist struggle. Duffy's work was as well a eulogy, presenting Davis in so favorable a light that he seems at times unreal. To provide a more thorough, objective portrait of Davis, historian Helen F. Mulvey here presents a scholarly examination of Davis's life and thoughts.".
In 1935, the English writer Stephen Spender wrote that the historical pressures of his era should "turn the reader's and writer's attention outwards from himself to the world." Combining historical, formalist, and archival approaches, Thomas S. Davis examines late modernism's decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder. The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that reflect the decline of the British Empire and seismic shifts in the global political order. Davis follows the rise of documentary film culture and the British Documentary Film Movement, especially the work of John Grierson, Humphrey Jennings, and Basil Wright. He then considers the influence of late modernist periodical culture on social attitudes and customs, and presents original analyses of novels by Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Colin MacInnes; the interwar travel narratives of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and George Orwell; the wartime gothic fiction of Elizabeth Bowen; the poetry of H. D.; the sketches of Henry Moore; and the postimperial Anglophone Caribbean works of Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and George Lamming. By considering this group of writers and artists, Davis recasts late modernism as an art of scale: by detailing the particulars of everyday life, these figures could better project large-scale geopolitical events and crises.
David Harris was the most famous draft resister of the Vietnam War. A former student body president of Stanford University, he refused to accept induction and be sent to Vietnam. As a consequence, he spent nearly two years in a federal prison. With his marriage to Joan Baez, he emerged as the leading moral voice of his generation. For the past two decades, he has largely remained silent as the antiwar movement he led stood accused by critics and politicians of everything from cowardice to stab-in-the-back betrayal to frivolity. Now, in Our War, he speaks out in defense of a generation torn by one of the more divisive wars in America's history. Neither a history nor an autobiography, though containing aspects of both. Our War is a compelling, even fevered account of stalking the war's moral shadow through the decades since its ignominious end. It is a powerful rumination on the war, the protest movement, and America's need, even now, so many years later, for a reckoning. Our War is a one-of-a-kind look at who we were, what we did, why we did it, and what those actions made of us, seen through the eyes of a unique and significant American figure and one of our most gifted writers. Part memoir, part polemic, all passion. Our War is a disturbing book, a cry from the heart of an anguished American.
"This book, written by some of our leading historians, tells the story of the Great War in Irish history which saw over 200,000 Irish soldiers fighting. It relays the experience of ordinary Irish people during the war and chronicles the effect this war had, and still has, on Irish society. Soldiers in the trenches, volunteer nurses, politicians, women and the workforce are all examined. Archival letters, diaries, wills and illustrations are reproduced which document the pride, fear, anxiety and sorrow felt by soldiers, nurses, sweethearts, families and friends."--BOOK JACKET.
The Young Ireland Movement of the 1840's was one of the most influential in Irish history. Its leaders were the first to propose a theory of cultural nationalismothe idea that the Irish were racially differentiated from the English to the point that they must have separate political institutions. This not only led many of the Movement's leaders towards a radical republicanism, it also introduced contemporary ideas of romantic nationalism from Europe into Ireland for the first time. The author presents the first modern overview of the personalities and ideology of this crucial link in the chain of Irish nationalism.
Opening up a topic long closed to debate, this is the first study ever to survey the developments of musical thought in modern Irish cultural history. Its purpose is to register the function of music as a dynamic agent in the history of Irish ideas in the period 1770-1970 by means of three prevailing themes: the integrity of sectarian culture, the political expression of cultural independence, and the symbolic force of Celticism. The Keeper's Recital aims to identify and distinguish between the symbolic power of Irish music and its failure to generate a durable aesthetic comparable to that which infused the Literary Revival.
This is the first study of Irish improvement fiction, a neglected genre of nineteenth-century literary, social, and political history.Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement shows how the fiction of Mary Leadbeater, Charles Bardin, Martin Doyle, and William Carleton attempted to lure Irish peasants and landowners away from popular genres such as fantasy, romance, and 'radical' political tracts as well as 'high' literary and philosophical forms of enquiry. These writersattempted to cultivate a taste for the didactic tract, an assertively realist mode of representation. Accordingly, improvement fiction laboured to demonstrate the value of hard work, frugality, and sobriety in a rigorously realistic idiom, representing the contentment that inheres in a plain social order free ofexcess and embellishment. Improvement discourse defined itself in opposition to the perceived extremism of revolutionary politics and literary writing, seeking (but failing) to exemplify how both political discontent and unhappiness could be offset by a strict practicality and prosaic realism. This book demonstrates how improvement reveals itself to be a literary discourse, enmeshed in the very rhetorical abyss it sought to escape. In addition, the proudly liberal rhetoric of improvement isshown to be at one with the imperial discourse it worked to displace.Helen O'Connell argues that improvement discourse is embedded in the literary and cultural mainstream of modern Ireland and has hindered the development of intellectual and political debate throughout this period. These issues are examined in chapters exploring the career of William Carleton; peasant 'orality'; educational provision in the post-Union period; the Irish language; secret society violence; Young Ireland nationalism; and the Irish Revival.
