Parnell and his Times

The run-up to Irish independence (1910–1920) was driven by the need to come to terms with Parnell's defeat and death.

Joep Leerssen (Edited by)

9781108495264, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 December 2020

338 pages, 17 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 2.2 cm, 0.6 kg

Marked by names such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Patrick Pearse, the decade 1910–1920 was a period of revolutionary change in Ireland, in literature, politics and public opinion. What fed the creative and reformist urge besides the circumstances of the moment and a vision of the future? The leading experts in Irish history, literature and culture assembled in this volume argue that the shadow of the past was also a driving factor: the traumatic, undigested memory of the defeat and death of the charismatic national leader Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891). The authors reassess Parnell's impact on the Ireland of his time, its cultural, religious, political and intellectual life, in order to trace his posthumous influence into the early twentieth century in fields such as political activism, memory culture, history-writing, and literature.

Acknowledgement
List of contributors
List of illustrations
Introduction: charisma and aftermath Joep Leerssen
Part I. Parnell's Ireland and its different temporalities: 1. O'Connell and Parnell Oliver MacDonagh
2. The Paradoxes of Parnell Paul Bew
3. Ireland from Parnell to Pearse R.F. Foster
4. Race, nation, state Denis Donoghue
5. Parnell's other Ireland: religious radicals in late-nineteenth-century Ireland Raymond Gillespie
6. Inside history: storyteller Éamon a' Búrc (1866-1942) and the «little famine» of 1879-1880 Angela Bourke
7. Digesting the past: anthologies and bi-cultural memory in Ireland Joep Leerssen
8. The writing of county histories in Parnell's Ireland Nicholas Canny
Part II. After Parnell: the Irish literary and historical imagination: 9. Joyce's dubliners and Parnell: strategies of failure? Frank McGuinness
10. The rhythm of beauty»: Joyce, Yeats, and the 1890s Edna Longley
11. «Ingenious lovely things»: Yeats's adjectives Helen Vendler
12. Modernism in the streets: Pearse and Joyce Declan Kiberd
13. Modernism, Belfast, and early-twentieth-century Ireland Terence Brown
14. Too rough for verse? Sea crossings in Irish culture Claire Connolly
15. «Myth, fact, and mystery»: F.X. Martin, medievalist and historian of the 1916 rising Thomas Bartlett
16. The Easter rising: four fallacies and some reflections David Fitzpatrick
17. Belatedness and late style Irish style: contemporary Irish poetry and the problem of belatedness Clair Wills
Illustration credits
Index.

Subject Areas: British & Irish history [HBJD1], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary theory [DSA]