Remembering the Revolution: Dissent, Culture, and Nationalism in the Irish Free State

ISBN-13: 9780198739159 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 256 str.

Frances Flanagan

Opis

Remembering the Irish Revolution chronicles the ways in which the Irish revolution was remembered in the first two decades of Irish independence. While tales of heroism and martyrdom dominated popular accounts of the revolution, a handful of nationalists reflected on the period in more ambivalent terms. For them, the freedoms won in revolution came with great costs: the grievous loss of civilian lives, the brutalisation of Irish society, and the loss of hope for a united and prosperous independent nation. To many nationalists, their views on the revolution were traitorous. For others, they were the courageous expression of some uncomfortable truths.
This volume explores these struggles over revolutionary memory through the lives of four significant, but under-researched nationalist intellectuals: Eimar O'Duffy, P. S. O'Hegarty, George Russell, and Desmond Ryan. It provides a lively account of their controversial critiques of the Irish revolution, and an intimate portrait of the friends, enemies, institutions and influences that shaped them.
Based on wide-ranging archival research, Remembering the Irish Revolution puts the history of Irish revolutionary memory in a transnational context. It shows the ways in which international debates about war, human progress, and the fragility of Western civilisation were crucial in shaping the understandings of the revolution in Ireland. It provides a fresh context for analysis the major writers of the period, such as Sean O'Casey, W. B. Yeats, and Sean O'Faolain, as well as a new outlook on the genesis of the revisionist/nationalist schism that continues to resonate in Irish society today.

Recenzje

This book is a pioneering and forensic study which adds a great deal to our understanding of the Irish revolution and its ripples through Ireland after partition. In so doing, Flanagan does important work in contextualising debates over Irish culture and society in the 1920s within broader European trends, and as such, her work sits alongside Mo Moulton's recent Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England in resituating the Irish 1920s as a crucial part of a broader European malaise ... in delineating the lives of these men in the period after they had fallen into political irrelevance, Flanagan poses fundamental questions about how Irish historians have chosen narratives and chased stories; as such this book asks broader questions about the nature of historical practice which will be of relevance to all.

O autorze

Frances Flanagan was born in Perth, Western Australia. She obtained bachelor degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Western Australia. After several years as a lawyer, she won a Commonwealth scholarship to read for a DPhil in history at the University of Oxford. She has been a senior scholar at Hertford College Oxford, a Marshall Fellow at the London Institute of Historical Research, and a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Birkbeck, University of London. She currently works at the University of Sydney, and lives in Sydney with her husband and two daughters.