Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1724-1874

ISBN-13: 9780268025786 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 344 str.

Leith Davis

Opis

In "Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender", Leith Davis studies the construction of Irish national identity from the early eighteenth until the midnineteenth centuries, focusing in particular on how texts concerning Irish music, as well as the social settings within which those texts emerged, contributed to the imagining of Ireland as "the Land of Song." Through her considerations of collections of Irish music by the Neals, Edward Bunting, and George Petrie, antiquarian tracts by Joseph Cooper Walker and Charlotte Brooke, lyrics and "The Wild Irish Girl" by Sidney Owenson, and songs by Thomas Moore and Samuel Lover, Davis suggests that music served as an ideal means through which to address the terms of the colonial relationship between Ireland and England. Davis also explores the gender issues so closely related to the discourses on both music and national identity during the time, and the influence of print culture and consumer capitalism on the representation of Irish music at home and abroad. Davis argues that the emergence of a mass market for culture reconfigured the gendered ambiguities already inherent in the discourses on Irish music and Irish identity. Davis's book will appeal to scholars within Irish studies, postcolonial studies, print culture, new British history, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, and ethnomusicology.