A History of Irish Working-Class Writing

This book constitutes a wide-ranging and authoritative chronicle of the writing of Irish working-class experience.

Michael Pierse (Edited by)

9781107149687, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 November 2017

478 pages
23.5 x 16 x 3.1 cm, 0.83 kg

'Michael Pierse has done a great service to Irish studies in editing this first comprehensive examination of Irish working-class writing. A real joy of reading this volume is the nuanced and stimulating social analyses alongside literary readings, showing how reading outside the national framework opens up striking new ways of reading the fabric of the nation itself.' Muireann Leech, Biography

A History of Irish Working-Class Writing provides a wide-ranging and authoritative chronicle of the writing of Irish working-class experience. Ground-breaking in scholarship and comprehensive in scope, it is a major intervention in Irish Studies scholarship, charting representations of Irish working-class life from eighteenth-century rhymes and songs to the novels, plays and poetry of working-class experience in contemporary Ireland. There are few narrative accounts of Irish radicalism, and even fewer that engage 'history from below'. This book provides original insights in these relatively untilled fields. Exploring workers' experiences in various literary forms, from early to late capitalism, the twenty-two chapters make this book an authoritative and substantial contribution to Irish studies and English literary studies generally.

Foreword Declan Kiberd
Introduction Michael Pierse
1. Writing and theorising the Irish working class David Convery
2. Representing labour: notes towards a political and cultural economy of Irish working-class experience Christopher J. V. Loughlin
3. Working-class writing in Ireland before 1800: 'some must be poor – we cannot all be great' Andrew Carpenter
4. 'We wove our ain wab': the Ulster Weaver poets' working lives, myths and afterlives Frank Ferguson
5. Sub-literatures?: Folk song, memory and Ireland's working poor John Moulden
6. Writing working-class Irish women Heather Laird
7. 'Unwriting' the city: narrating class in early twentieth-century Belfast and Dublin (1900–1929) Elizabeth Mannion
8. Class during the Irish revolution: British soldiers, 1916, and the abject body James Moran
9. 'An sinne a bhí sa chónra?' – Writing death on the margins in twentieth-century Irish working-class writing Michael Pierse
10. Writing Irish nurses in Britain Tony Muray
11. The view from below: solidarity and struggle in Irish-American working-class literature Margaret Hallissy and John Lutz
12. Irish working-class writing in Australasia, 1860–1960: contrasts and comparisons Peter Kuch
13. Irish working-class poetry 1900–1960 Niall Carson
14. 'A system that inflicts suffering upon the many' Paul Delaney
15. Drama, 1900–1950 Paul Murphy
16. Seán O'Casey and Brendan Behan: aesthetics, democracy, and the voice of labour John Brannigan
17. Reshaping well-worn genres: novels of progress and precarity 1960–1998 Mary McGlynn
18. Locked out: working-class lives in Irish drama 1958–1998 Victor Merriman
19. Poetry and the working class in Northern Ireland during the troubles Adam Hanna
20. Class politics and performance in troubles drama: 'history isn't over yet' Mark Phelan
21. Twentieth-century workers' biography Claire Lynch
22. Multiple class consciousnesses in writings for theatre during the Celtic Tiger Era Eamonn Jordan
Afterword overdue: the recovery and study of Irish working-class writing, an international perspective H. Gustav Klaus.

Subject Areas: Literature & literary studies [D]