Irish Story Research Articles

A Socratic Revelation: Sebastian Barry’s Roadmap to Understanding Identity

Critics have suggested that Sebastian Barry’s works provide a platform for omitted narratives within the Irish story. While I agree, I argue that Barry goes further, presenting the readers with a “structural paradigm” for understanding political identity. Grounded in Socratic thought, this paradigm establishes the connection between citizen and state, whereby the internal order of a state is directly linked to the internal order of its citizens. In the absence of such ordered citizens, the state is unlikely to possess a cohesive identity. For Barry, individual self-awareness is requisite for Ireland’s establishment of a unified identity. This Socratic “roadmap” towards understanding political identity is best seen in the turbulent nature of the principal characters in A Long Long Way, On Canaan’s Side, and The Temporary Gentleman.

Conquering the Idols: English Iconoclasm in Ireland, 1649–1660

The English Parliament's conquest of Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century left memories of violence that persist even in modern Ireland. This article considers one important but neglected dimension to the English campaign and subsequent rule: the attack on Irish Catholic devotional objects, including statues, images, vestments. The damage to the physical fabric of Irish Catholicism coincided with the wider effort to suppress all its public rituals and structures and must be considered as a key element to Parliament's campaign to punish, reform, and convert the Irish. Reconsidering both older and recently published sources allows for significant new insights and contextual questions surrounding parliamentarian iconoclasm, its Irish manifestations, and indeed early modern iconoclasm more widely. In particular, it is argued here that this is not and cannot be an Irish story alone: while previous accounts have emphasized Ireland's tragedy in these years, there are wider English and British contexts that must be brought to bear. Irish iconoclasm can be placed into a chronology of English violence since the late 1630s and points to a wider British preoccupation with popish plots and idolatry, in which the Irish were central characters. The iconoclasm unleashed in Cromwellian Ireland underlines the braided nature of conflict across the mid-seventeenth century.

Food and Power in Sixteenth-Century Ireland: Studying Household Accounts from Dublin Castle

AbstractStudying the food practices of one vast and prominent Irish household reveals a complex history of consumption, status, and power in sixteenth-century Europe. This article is a close analysis of the little studied but unusually detailed household accounts of William Fitzwilliam, lord deputy of Ireland during 1572–5 and 1588–94. It first discusses how early modern historians have probed similar records and how these examples can be interpreted. The following sections examine the specific foods consumed at Dublin Castle and the high cost, distinctive rhythms, and deep symbolism of grand-scale dining at the viceroy's primary residence. This study of the everyday life of one of the most powerful officeholders in England and Ireland offers fresh perspectives on the region's political history. It also adds to the burgeoning study of Irish consumption, showing that the country was connected to continental developments. More than an Irish story, this article offers evidence of Europe-wide changes, like the elaboration of courtly cuisine and the shifting associations of foodstuffs, and how these changes were filtered through local circumstances. It suggests too how historians can make productive use of household accounts, sources well suited to comparison and combination with other disciplinary approaches.

SOME PENITENTIAL ASPECTS OF THE OLD IRISH “VOYAGES” (IMMRAMA)

This article identifies some of the penitential semantic elements from two fragments of “The Voyage of Mail-Duin” and “Voyage of Wa Korr”, which are part of the group of Old Irish stories about voyages (OE Immrama). The first plot is connected with a hermit thief who was forced by God’s providence to give up his riches and retire to the island (episode 10th); the second is connected with the crime of the Wa Korra brothers, who ravaged the churches of Connaught and killed the clerics. As a source base, the early medieval Irish penitentiaries in Latin of the 5th-8th centuries, preserved in the manuscripts of the 9th-12th centuries, are involved: “The First Synod of Patrick”, the penitentiaries of Saints Gilda, Finnian, Columban, Kummene. The penitential aspects of Immrama have been in the orbit of scientific interests of scientists since the beginning of the 20th century and in recent decades, work in this direction is still ongoing. In the course of a comparative analysis, it was found that penitentiaries and these fragments of Immrama have certain connotations in the relationship between offense and sanction. The legal categories of exile, fasting, compensation for material damage find their application in relation to serious crimes or “sins”: murder and theft of church property. However, there are a number of important differences in small details: in the understanding of the category of “expulsion” or “excommunication” in the penitentiaries and in the “Voyages”; in the duration of fasting and repentance. Unfortunately, the hermeneutics of the penitential meaning of “Voyages” in those plots where not clergymen (hermits) but laymen appear, is also difficult.

Ida Milne, Stacking the Coffins: Influenza, War and Revolution in Ireland, 1918-19

The influenza that girded the globe in 1918 and the following years came upon a world in turmoil as it roiled from the global conflict. This turmoil was exacerbated by the highly infectious, novel virus that wrought very high levels of illness, and even though case fatality rates were generally low, the sheer scale of morbidity meant that the attendant mortality was exceptional. Some locations had further upheaval heaped upon these disruptions. Examples include the revolutionary movements in Russia and Ireland. The Russian story is yet to be untangled. Even the apparently rudimentary task of establishing the true level of mortality caused by this pandemic in Russia eludes as state functions such as vital registration were in disarray. There have been recent efforts at telling the Irish story, for example, Catriona Foley’s The Last Irish Plague.1 Foley gave an important and nuanced description of the Irish experience of the pandemic.

Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938 by Aidan Beatty

Reviewed by: Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938 by Aidan Beatty Peter B. Strickland Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938, by Aidan Beatty, pp. 266. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. $100. Timed to coincide with the Paris Olympics, the revival of the Tailteann Games in 1924 was intended as a public display of the strength and vitality of a newly independent Ireland. The Olympic-style competitions were open to all men of Irish descent, with athletes traveling to Ireland from the settler colonies of the British Empire, as well as from Britain itself. Organizers hoped that hosting the games every four years would exhibit Ireland's physical prowess and enthusiastic nationalism. Diminishing budgets hampered the games over the next decade, and because the competitions were largely associated with, and promoted by, the Free State government, the project did not survive the rise of Fianna Fáil. One [End Page 144] could easily dismiss the attempted revival of the Tailteann Games as a shortlived minor event in the history of Irish sport. In Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938, however, Aidan Beatty persuasively examines the event within a much larger context; he repositions the games as a piece of a longer history of the conflation of Irish "national sovereignty and masculine strength." Gender analysis remains a rare commodity in political histories of Ireland; rarer still are studies that employ masculinity as a category for historical analysis. Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism corrects this oversight by placing masculine concerns at the center of the nationalist movement. Beatty demonstrates that, regardless of changes in state power and the varying dominance of political parties, the common denominator of Irish nationalism was the importance it placed on establishing and reinforcing Irish masculinity. Asserting the centrality of masculinity to Irish nationalism allows Beatty to place the revolutionary years into a wider framework, and in doing so, to undermine the very notion of a singular, watershed "Irish Revolution" by connecting the ideas and experiences of Irish nationalists across generations. To accomplish the goal of minimizing the "Irish Revolution," Beatty approaches his subject thematically. He begins with the revolutionary years (1916–1923) in chapter two, and asserts that questions of masculinity were central to each of the dramatic moments of those years. The next three chapters turn to the period before 1916, and the final two chapters shift the discussion to the years after the civil war. In examining such themes as space, land, or the body, each of these chapters uses the histories of organizations and political parties to provide topical focus. This deprioritizing of the revolutionary years allows Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism to connect the muscular vision of Irish nationalism promoted by the GAA in the 1880s (chapter 3), with Fianna Fáil's economic policies toward privately owned farms in the 1930's (chapter 6). This longue durée approach aligns Beatty's interpretation of Irish nationalism with the wider field of postcolonial studies, which seeks to demonstrate the long legacy of the colonial experience. This already ambitious work also seeks to escape the exceptionalism of what Beatty calls the "Irish Sonderweg" by comparing the connections between Irish nationalism and masculinity to similar intersections in other European and postcolonial contexts. In this case, Beatty takes the Zionist movement as his comparative example. Considering both the Irish and the European Jews as "quasi-colonial" peoples, he argues that comparing the two provides a "Zionist mirror" that can reveal many of the intricacies in the relationship between Irish nationalism and masculinity. This is an intriguing interpretive tack, but unfortunately, this comparative turn rarely adds to the study beyond confirming the unsurprising conclusion that ideas and practices in Ireland had analogs in the Zionist experience. In its role as "mirror," the Zionist story itself is not subject [End Page 145] to the same close examination as the Irish story. Beatty's consideration of moments when Zionism, or Jewishness, and Irish nationalism actually intersected result in more effective comparisons. A fine example of this is the third chapter's discussion of a 1924 political cartoon titled "Jew Regard for the Law," which appeared in Guth na Gharda ("The Policeman's...

“The Game as It Is Played”: Essays on Theodore DreiserThe Red Badge of CourageLucy GayheartThe Martyr of Maev and Other Irish Stories

“The Game as It Is Played”: Essays on Theodore DreiserThe Red Badge of CourageLucy GayheartThe Martyr of Maev and Other Irish Stories

Economic crisis, austerity and trade union responses: The Irish case in comparative perspective

This article examines trade union responses to the economic crisis in Ireland. The ‘Irish story’ is primarily one of union accommodation and cooperation. Conflict was present, but was sporadic and generally sectional in nature, and did not reach the scale of mass mobilization witnessed in the other European countries that received financial aid from the Troika. Why was Ireland different? This is explained by the nature of the contextual challenge, unions’ ideological inheritance, their organizational capacity and the opportunity structures available.

‘Nauseous Tides of Seductive Debauchery’: Irish Story Papers and the Anti-Vice Campaigns of the Early Twentieth Century

This essay explores the relationship between anti-vice campaigns and the popular publishing industry of early-twentieth century Ireland. Specifically, it argues that there existed an informal but strongly symbiotic relationship between the two. The Irish anti-vice campaigns emphasised their objections to imported ‘pernicious literature’ in the form of British newspapers and story papers, thus allying themselves with both religious and nationalist movements of the time in Ireland. The Irish popular press, especially the story papers in direct and unequal competition with their large-scale British equivalents such as the Boys Own Paper, were able to use these moral attacks upon their competitors to position themselves as alternative leisure reading which was both wholesome and patriotic. This essay examines the ways in which Irish story papers such as the Emerald and Ireland's Own were able to use social purity rhetoric as a marketing technique against their British competitors. This occurred even though, as the essay outlines, in many cases the content of their stories was equally sensationalist and also had a strong emphasis upon violence, lurid plotlines and sometimes even sexually-suggestive advertising. Despite this, the anti-vice campaigns reserved their condemnations almost entirely for British publications, thus maintaining a co-operation with Irish publications which benefitted both parties.

Manuel Murguía e a lenda de Breogán

Neste traballo fago un estudo da presenza da lenda irlandesa de Breogán dentro dos escritos de Manuel Murguía. Cinco son os aspectos que quero analizar: a narrativa da lenda; a interpretación que fixo dela; a adaptación da lenda á súa particular concepción do pasado galego; as funcións que exerceu dentro da obra de Murguía; e as fontes de información nas que el se baseou para coñecer o relato irlandés. No derradeiro apartado analizo algunhas das achegas do autor á popularización de Breogán dentro da cultura galega.

Going in for Competitions

This article assesses the extensive ‘reader competitions’ run in popular magazines and story papers of the early twentieth century. Using examples from Irish story papers, it examines the appeal of these competitions to both the publishers and the readers. For readers, competitions offered an opportunity to display skills which combined the results of universal education with the more playful knowledge that was part of popular parlour games and other leisure activities of the time. They also offered readers an opportunity to ‘write back’ to the mass media, with indications of an extremely high level of interactivity between readers and editors, including reader suggestions for competition ideas, and disputes regarding the rules and judging of contests. The article goes on to argue that these competitions were themselves significant examples of mass media structures of the time, relying as they did on the specific forms of print culture and upon mechanisms of industrial time and communication processes.

Placing Neoliberalism: The Rise and Fall of Ireland's Celtic Tiger

In this paper we provide an account of the property-led boom and bust which has brought Ireland to the point of bankruptcy. Our account details the pivotal role which neoliberal policy played in guiding the course of the country's recent history, but also heightens awareness of the how the Irish case might, in turn, instruct and illuminate mappings and explanations of neoliberalism's concrete histories and geographies. To this end, we begin by scrutinising the terms and conditions under which the Irish state might usefully be regarded as neoliberal. Attention is then given to uncovering the causes of the Irish property bubble, the housing oversupply it created, and the proposed solution to this oversupply. In the conclusion we draw attention to the contributions which our case study might make to the wider literature of critical human geographies of neoliberalism, forwarding three concepts which emerge from the Irish story which may have wider resonance, and might constitute a useful fleshing out of theoretical framings of concrete and particular neoliberalisms: path amplification, neoliberalism's topologies and topographies, and accumulation by repossession.

The value web

7 LOGOS 22/3 © 2011 LOGOS LOGOS Eoin Purcell Eoin Purcell is a publisher, publishing consultant, and a publishing strategist. He also writes commentary and analysis on the Irish and international publishing industries. He lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. He is the publisher of Irish Publishing News and The Irish Story and runs the publisher and author consultancy, Green Lamp Media. In the past he has worked as Commissioning Editor with Mercier Press, one of Ireland’s oldest independent publishers, and at Nonsuch Ireland (now The History Press Ireland), joining it as a graduate recruit and starting (with two other

Ireland and the Grail (review)

Reviewed by: Ireland and the Grail Matthieu Boyd John Carey, Ireland and the Grail. Celtic Studies Publications xi. Aberystwyth: Celtic Studies Publications, 2007. Pp. xii, 419. ISBN: 978–1–891271–15–1. $29.95. Among specialists of medieval Celtic literature, John Carey has earned a reputation as an unusually meticulous and productive scholar. Ireland and the Grail displays his customary thoroughness and daring. It is a milestone in that, as Carey states, it is ‘the first attempt to present a detailed and text-based case for a Celtic background to the Grail legend since […] 1975, the first argument for such a background to have been undertaken by a specialist in medieval Irish since […] 1955, and the first such argument to propose a new interpretation based on the Irish evidence since […] 1930’ (p. xix). This alone makes the book a must-read. Carey argues that a group of medieval Irish texts, contained in the lost eighthcentury Book of Druim Snechtai, influenced a lost body of Welsh stories, and that these in turn influenced both surviving Welsh texts—such as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and Culhwch ac Olwen—and also the earliest French texts that mention the Grail—especially Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte del Graal and its Continuations, but including Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie and others. (Ch. 20 provides a lucid overview of the entire argument, and non-Celticist readers might well begin there.) Most of the book considers various features, often linked to personal names such as Bran or Mongán/Amangon/etc., that are shared among selected Irish, Welsh, and French tales; Carey seeks to show that these originate in Ireland and are passed on as a cluster all the way to France. In Chs. 9 and 17, he suggests precisely how his Irish stories could have influenced the Welsh ones (Irish scholars regularly visited ninth-century Wales), and how the predecessors of the Welsh stories could, in turn, gain currency on the Continent (the Welsh storyteller named Bleddri who may have visited the count of Poitou in the early twelfth century). Another distinguished Celtic scholar, Patrick Sims-Williams, has taken a skeptical position on both of these issues, and Carey rightly acknowledges the soundness of his views (e.g., pp. 44–45); but he asserts that there is still value in ‘an investigation in terms of concrete details, not of assumptions and generalizations.’ Indeed, all of the specific claims that Carey makes are plausible and warrant serious consideration. We are not likely to see these arguments made more convincingly (though that is not to say they are the only arguments that can be advanced in favor of a Celtic origin for the Grail legend). The related work by Roger Sherman Loomis, notably The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (1963), is largely superseded here; it should be remembered that Loomis, though a fine Arthurian scholar, was never more than an amateur Celticist. A great virtue of the book is that Carey translates generously from the lesser-known texts that he is dealing with, summarizes them [End Page 79] fully, and adverts to any relevant scholarly controversies. Speculative remarks are clearly identified as such. Even readers who are unfamiliar with the medieval Celtic languages and literatures ought to find that Carey leaves them well equipped to make up their own minds on the evidence; even if not fully convinced of the author’s hypotheses, they should continue to find Ireland and the Grail a valuable sourcebook. Ch. 18, though it obviously cannot address all competing theories of Grail origins, is particularly useful in comparing Carey’s work to other approaches, such as the ‘eucharistic approach’ (Carey’s phrase) recently championed by Richard Barber in The Holy Grail (2004). (Another contribution along similar lines is G. Ronald Murphy’s Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram’s Parzifal [2006]). I cannot respond to Carey’s detailed arguments here, and in any case they often hinge on whether certain parallels are found to be convincing; this is partly a subjective matter. However, a few points may be singled out for comment. In Ch. 2, Carey (following Loomis) discusses the many similarities between...

NIALL FROSACH'S 'ACT OF TRUTH': A BARDIC APOLOGUE IN A POEM FOR SIR NICHOLAS WALSH, CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE COMMON PLEAS († 1615)

The Middle Irish story relating Niall Frosach's true judgement concerning a young woman and her fatherless child is told as an apologue in a late-sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century Bardic poem attributed to Tuileagna (mac Torna) Ó Maoil Chonaire, and addressed to Sir Nicholas Walsh, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Speaker of the third parliament convened in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Perrott's parliament of 1585–6. The poem, Labhram ar iongnaibh Éireann, was published in Tomás Ó Raghallaigh's Filí agus filidheacht Chonnacht (1938), but the apologue was censored in that publication. In this article the poem is edited with translation and critical notes from the only manuscript in which it has come down to us—RIA 23 L 17 (RIA 3). The two copies of the Middle Irish text that have survived (from LL and the Liber Flavus Fergusiorum) are also presented and compared in an appendix to the article; and a second appendix provides the text and translation of an Early Modern Irish version of the story found in An Leabhar Eoghanach and published (without translation) by Ó Donnchadha in Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe.

NIALL FROSACH'S 'ACT OF TRUTH': A BARDIC APOLOGUE IN A POEM FOR SIR NICHOLAS WALSH, CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE COMMON PLEAS († 1615)

The Middle Irish story relating Niall Frosach's true judgement concern ing a young woman and her fatherless child is told as an apologue in a late-sixteenthor early-seventeenth-century Bardic poem attributed to Tuileagna (mac Torna) ? Maoil Chonaire, and addressed to Sir Nicholas Walsh, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Speaker of the third par liament convened in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Perrott's parliament of 1585-6. The poem, Labhram ar iongnaibh Eireann, was published in Tomas ? Raghallaigh's Fill agus filidheacht Chonnacht (1938), but the apologue was censored in that publication. In this article the poem is edited with translation and critical notes from the only manuscript in which it has come down to us?RIA 23 L 17 (RIA 3). The two copies of the Middle Irish text that have survived (from LL and the Liber Flavus Fergusiorum) are also presented and compared in an appendix to the arti cle; and a second appendix provides the text and translation of an Early Modern Irish version of the story found in An Leabhar Eoghanach and published (without translation) by O Donnchadha in Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe.

External Association

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Alvin Jackson, ‘Ireland, the Union, and the Empire, 1800–1960’, in Ireland and the British Empire, eds Kevin Kenny and Roger Louis, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, p 123. 2. Jane H Ohlmeyer, ‘A Laboratory for Empire? Early Modern Ireland and English Imperialism’, in Ireland and the British Empire, eds Kevin Kenny and Roger Louis, ibid, pp 28–9. 3. Alvin Jackson, op cit, p 126. 4. Joe Cleary, ‘Misplaced Ideas? Colonialism, Location and Dislocation in Irish Studies’, in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, eds Clare Carroll and Patricia King, Cork University Press, Cork, 2003, p 17. 5. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Fontana Press, London, 1992, p 247. 6. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Ireland since 1790, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, p 183. 7. In particular see Gibbons’s Transformations in Irish Culture, Cork University Press, Cork, 1996; Edmund Burke and Ireland, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003; David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post‐colonial Moment, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1993; Ireland After History, Cork University Press, Cork, 1999 and Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity, Cork University Press, Cork, 1996. 8. R F Foster, ‘Lifting the Blarney Stone that Held Down History: An interview by Sean Coughlan’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 19 October, 2001, pp 20–1. Elsewhere Foster has unilaterally dismissed the rendition of Irish history through the tropes of postcolonial theory as ‘a simplistic application of Frantz Fanon’s One Big Idea to an Irish situation sweepingly redefined as “post‐colonial”’, R F Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland, Allen Lane, London, 2001, p 20. 9. Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne, 1994, p 30. For a particularly virulent assault on the legitimacy of Irish postcolonial studies see Stephen Howe, Ireland Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. 10. Edna Longley, ibid, p 28. 11. Liam Kennedy, ‘Modern Ireland: Post‐Colonial Society or Post‐Colonial Pretensions?’, The Irish Review, Volume 13, 1993, pp 13, 119. 12. Stephen Howe, op cit, p 110. 13. Joe Cleary, op cit, p 29. See also D K Fieldhouse, The West And The Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence And Development, Malden, MA and Blackwell, Oxford, 1999; and George M Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, New York, Oxford University Press, 1981. 14. Neil Lazarus, ‘Academic Capital and Canon Formation in Postcolonial Studies’, unpublished version of the essay, 2002, p 1. 15. Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2001, p 110. 16. Colin Graham, ‘Subalternity and Gender: Problems of post‐colonial Irishness’, Journal of Gender Studies: Special Issue: Gender and Post‐Colonialism, 1996, 5:3, p 368. 17. Richard Kirkland, ‘Questioning the Frame: Hybridity, Ireland, and the Institution’, in Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity, eds Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland, MacMillan Basingstoke, 1999, pp 225–6. 18. Robert J C Young, Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction, Blackwell, Oxford, 2001, p 302.

« La compilation irlandaise de la Vengeance du sang du Christ (Digail Fola Crist). État des recherches »

Middle-Irish tale on The of Christ's Blood (Digail Fola Crist) is not parallel to the apocryph called Vindicta Salvatoris. Based on a compilation drawing mainly from the Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius of Cesarea, the Irish story falls into three parts, a biography of James the first bishop of Jerusalem, ending with the martyrizing of the same, then the signs or wonders foretelling the destruction of Jerusalem, and lastly the description of the siege, AD 70, and of the numerous cruelties which then occurred. These last two parts rely on the War of the Jews by Flavius Josephus, through the quotations made by Eusebius. By its composition, the tale seems to bestow an additional meaning to the word Revenge: what has to be revenged is not only Christ's death, but also (and foremost) the death of his parent, James Minor, as it is suggested by the title, Revenge of Christ's Blood. Obviously, the compiler totally accepts Eusebius' opinion according to which the siege of Jerusalem was an extraor...

The Irish story: telling tales and making it up in Ireland

Roy Foster is one of the leaders of the iconoclastic generation of Irish historians. In this opinionated, entertaining book he examines how the Irish have written, understood, used, and misused their history over the past century. Foster argues that, over the centuries, Irish experience itself has been turned into story. He examines how and why the key moments of Ireland's past--the 1798 Rising, the Famine, the Celtic Revival, Easter 1916, the Troubles--have been worked into narratives, drawing on Ireland's powerful oral culture, on elements of myth, folklore, ghost stories and romance. The result of this constant reinterpretation is a shifting of Ireland, complete with plot, drama, suspense, and revelation. Varied, surprising, and funny, the interlinked essays in The Irish Story examine the stories that people tell each other in Ireland and why. Foster provides an unsparing view of the way Irish history is manipulated for political ends and that Irish poverty and oppression is sentimentalized and packaged. He offers incisive readings of writers from Standish O'Grady to Trollope and Bowen; dissects the Irish government's commemoration of the 1798 uprising; and bitingly critiques the memoirs of Gerry Adams and Frank McCourt. Fittingly, as the acclaimed biographer of Yeats, Foster explores the poet's complex understanding of the Irish story--the mystery play of devils and angels which we call our national history--and warns of the dangers of turning Ireland into a historical theme park. The Irish Story will be hailed by some, attacked by others, but for all who care about Irish history and literature, it will be essential reading.

Review: Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland R. F. Foster

Review: Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland R. F. Foster