Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800–2000
The Transformation of Oral Space

A provocative study of Irish orality in literature, popular culture and politics.

David Lloyd (Author)

9781107008977, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 September 2011

298 pages, 5 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.57 kg

'Reading a scholarly work on Ireland by David Lloyd feels, for me, like entering a parallel universe in that the strange and yet familiar world we are presented with appears to be a funfair mirror version of Ireland that we find in more conventional historical narratives. Then realization strikes: as was so often the case with the science fiction classics of my youth, the parallel universe turns out to be the world we have been living in all along. So it is with the Ireland of Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800–2000.' Heather Laird, Modern Philology

From the Famine to political hunger strikes, from telling tales in the pub to Beckett's tortured utterances, the performance of Irish identity has always been deeply connected to the oral. Exploring how colonial modernity transformed the spaces that sustained Ireland's oral culture, this book explains why Irish culture has been both so creative and so resistant to modernization. David Lloyd brings together manifestations of oral culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing how the survival of orality was central both to resistance against colonial rule and to Ireland's modern definition as a postcolonial culture. Specific to Ireland as these histories are, they resonate with postcolonial cultures globally. This study is an important and provocative new interpretation of Irish national culture and how it came into being.

Introduction: a history of the Irish orifice
1. Irish hunger: the political economy of the potato
2. Closing the mouth: disciplining oral space
3. Counterparts: the public house, masculinity and temperance nationalism
4. 'Going nowhere': oral space in the cell block
5. The breaker's yard: from forensic to interrogation modernity
6. On extorted speech: back to How It Is
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]