Feis Na NGleann
Feis Na NGleann

Author: Eamon Phoenix

Publisher: Ulster Historical Foundation

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9781903688496

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The Glens of Antrim formed one of the last Irish-speaking areas of Ulster until the early 1900s. Until the opening of the Antrim coast road in the 1850s Irish was universally spoken in the Glens and on Rathlin. The turn of the 19th century saw the Gaelic Revival which in the north of Ireland involved both Unionists and Nationalists in an effort to preserve Irish as a spoken language. It was against this background of cultural renaissance that Feis na nGleann ('The Glens Feis') was founded in 1904 as the first Gaelic cultural festival in east Ulster. That inaugural Feis harnessed the talents of the Glens folk and a group of leading "Big House" figures in the locality, among them Miss Rose Young of Galgorm Castle, Miss Ada McNeill of Cushendun, and Miss Margaret Dobbs. Others included Sir Roger Casement, then a recent convert to Irish nationalism, Eoin MacNeill, Glensman and language revivalist, Francis Joseph Bigger, lawyer and antiquarian, John 'Benmore' Clarke and Joseph Campbell, the Belfast poet. This book traces the origins of Feis na nGleann in that 'crease in time' between Parnell and the 1916 Rising. In a series of scholarly chapters, experts profile the historic founders of the Feis and record the history of Irish in the district. There are special sections on the traditional arts and crafts fostered by the Feis, the once famous Glens toy-making industry, the role of hurling and the rich literary legacy of the Feiseanna. The book is lavishly illustrated with unique contemporary photographs. The result is attractive and readable volume which will appeal to all those interested in the history and culture of the Glens and the fortunes of the Irish language in the north of Ireland.

Home Place, Heart Place
Home Place, Heart Place

Author: R J O’Donnell

Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

Published: 2022-11-29

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1803135352

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This travelogue moves along by Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way, by the Burren, a land of strange beauty that inspired Tolkien, by the ruins of remotely-placed monastic shrines and chanting monks. Memories of W B Yeats, G B Shaw, John Millington Synge, Raftery and others are revived in Lady Gregory’s Coole Park, the nineteenth century literary workshop of Ireland where they planned the founding of the Abbey theatre. A trip by the royal sites of Ireland’s Ancient East opens up a lost world where at times history dissolves into myth – Tara of the high kings, the royal hill of Uisneach, Rathcroghan, seat of the warrior Queen Medb, Emain Macha, home of the kings of the Red Branch of Ulster. Viking raids occupy these pages too and King Henry Vlll’s dismantling of the monasteries one by one. The heady days of the nineteenth century land agitation are remembered when the forces of revolution joined with parliamentarians – Davitt and Parnell – giving the people the leadership they so tragically lacked during the Great Famine. Holding these ages together is the landscape, sedate and unchanged since it convulsed into shape when continents shifted in the great volcanic shake-up millions of years ago. But above all, it is the journeying companions that firmly plant this trip in the present – poets Michael Farry, the Kennelly brothers, singer-songwriter Christy Moore, local historian Gearoid O’Brien among other generous people, who come along to offer a vision of their youthful world.

Grand Opportunity
Grand Opportunity

Author: Timothy G. McMahon

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2008-05-09

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 9780815631842

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In this groundbreaking work, Timothy McMahon reexamines the significance of the Gaelic revival in forming Ireland’s national identity. In their determination to preserve and extend the use of Irish as a spoken language and artistic medium, members of the Gaelic League profoundly influenced Irish culture and literature in the twentieth century. McMahon explores that influence by scrutinizing the ways in which society absorbed their messages, tracing the interaction between the ideas propagated by the League and the variety of meanings ordinary people attached to Ireland and to being Irish. Comparing press and police reports with census data and local directories, the author establishes the first comprehensive profile of League membership. McMahon’s ability to access both English- and Irish-language sources offers readers a rare and richly detailed analysis of primary materials. Grand Opportunity addresses questions that are central to understanding modern Irish identity and makes an indispensable contribution to the wider study of national identity formation.

Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives
Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives

Author: Martin Dowling

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-24

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1317008413

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Written from the perspective of a scholar and performer, Traditional Music and Irish Society investigates the relation of traditional music to Irish modernity. The opening chapter integrates a thorough survey of the early sources of Irish music with recent work on Irish social history in the eighteenth century to explore the question of the antiquity of the tradition and the class locations of its origins. Dowling argues in the second chapter that the formation of what is today called Irish traditional music occurred alongside the economic and political modernization of European society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dowling goes on to illustrate the public discourse on music during the Irish revival in newspapers and journals from the 1880s to the First World War, also drawing on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan to place the field of music within the public sphere of nationalist politics and cultural revival in these decades. The situation of music and song in the Irish literary revival is then reflected and interpreted in the life and work of James Joyce, and Dowling includes treatment of Joyce’s short stories A Mother and The Dead and the 'Sirens' chapter of Ulysses. Dowling conducted field work with Northern Irish musicians during 2004 and 2005, and also reflects directly on his own experience performing and working with musicians and arts organizations in order to conclude with an assessment of the current state of traditional music and cultural negotiation in Northern Ireland in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Forgetful Remembrance
Forgetful Remembrance

Author: Guy Beiner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-11-09

Total Pages: 728

ISBN-13: 0191066338

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Forgetful Remembrance examines the paradoxes of what actually happens when communities persistently endeavour to forget inconvenient events. The question of how a society attempts to obscure problematic historical episodes is addressed through a detailed case study grounded in the north-eastern counties of the Irish province of Ulster, where loyalist and unionist Protestants—and in particular Presbyterians—repeatedly tried to repress over two centuries discomfiting recollections of participation, alongside Catholics, in a republican rebellion in 1798. By exploring a rich variety of sources, Beiner makes it possible to closely follow the dynamics of social forgetting. His particular focus on vernacular historiography, rarely noted in official histories, reveals the tensions between professed oblivion in public and more subtle rituals of remembrance that facilitated muted traditions of forgetful remembrance, which were masked by a local culture of reticence and silencing. Throughout Forgetful Remembrance, comparative references demonstrate the wider relevance of the study of social forgetting in Northern Ireland to numerous other cases where troublesome memories have been concealed behind a veil of supposed oblivion.

All Dressed Up
All Dressed Up

Author: Joan FitzPatrick Dean

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2014-11-25

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0815652844

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In the early twentieth century, publicly staged productions of significant historical, political, and religious events became increasingly popular—and increasingly grand—in Ireland. These public pageants, a sort of precursor to today’s opening ceremonies at the Olympic games, mobilized huge numbers of citizens to present elaborately staged versions of Irish identity based on both history and myth. Complete with marching bands, costumes, fireworks, and mock battles, these spectacles were suffused with political and national significance. Dean explores the historical significance of these pageants, explaining how their popularity correlated to political or religious imperatives in twentieth-century Ireland. She uncovers unpublished archival findings to present scripts, programs, and articles covering these events. The book also includes over thirty photographs of pageants, program covers, and detailed designs for costumes to convey the grandeur of the historical pageants at the beginning of the century and their decline in production standards in the 1970s and 1980s. Tracing the Irish historical pageant phenomenon through the twentieth century, Dean presents a nation contending with the violence and political upheaval of the present by reimagining the past.

The Musical Traditions of Northern Ireland and Its Diaspora
The Musical Traditions of Northern Ireland and Its Diaspora

Author: David Cooper

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9781409419204

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Northern Ireland remains a divided community in which traditional culture is widely understood as a marker of religious affiliation and ethnic identity. David Cooper provides an analysis of the characteristics of traditional music performed in Northern Ireland, as well as an ethnographic and ethnomusicological study of a group of traditional musicians from County Antrim. In particular, he offers a consideration of the cultural dynamics of Northern Ireland with respect to traditional music.

Protestant Nationalists in Ireland, 1900–1923
Protestant Nationalists in Ireland, 1900–1923

Author: Conor Morrissey

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-10-10

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1108473865

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An innovative and original analysis of Protestant advanced nationalists, from the early twentieth century to the end of the Irish Civil War.

Irish Ethnologies
Irish Ethnologies

Author: Diarmuid Ó Giolláin

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2017-10-30

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0268102406

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Irish Ethnologies gives an overview of the field of Irish ethnology, covering representative topics of institutional history and methodology, as well as case studies dealing with religion, ethnicity, memory, development, folk music, and traditional cosmology. This collection of essays draws from work in multiple disciplines including but not limited to anthropology and ethnomusicology. These essays, first published in French in the journal Ethnologie française, illuminate the complex history of Ireland and exhibit the maturity of Irish anthropology. Martine Segalen contends that these essays are part of a larger movement that “galvanized the quiet revolution in the domain of the ethnology of France.” They did so by making specific examples, in this instance Ireland, inform a larger definition of a European identity. The essays, edited by Ó Giolláin, also significantly explain, expand, and challenge “Irish ethnography.” From twelfth-century accounts to Anglo-Irish Romanticism, from topographical surveys to statistical accounts, the statistical and literary descriptions of Ireland and the Irish have prefigured the ethnography of Ireland. This collection of articles on the ethnographic disciplines in Ireland provides an instructive example of how a local anthropology can have lessons for the wider field. This book will interest academics and students of anthropology, folklore studies, history, and Irish Studies, as well as general readers. Contributors: Martine Segalen, Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Hastings Donnan, Anne Byrne, Pauline Garvey, Adam Drazin, Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, Joseph Ruane, Ethel Crowley, Dominic Bryan, Helena Wulff, Guy Beiner, Sylvie Muller, and Anthony McCann.