The Best Are Leaving: Emigration and Post-War Irish Culture

ISBN-13: 9781107048409 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 218 str.

Clair Wills

Opis

Clair Wills's The Best Are Leaving is an important and wide-ranging study of post-war Irish emigrant culture. Wills analyses representations of emigrants from Ireland and of Irish immigrants in Britain across a range of discourses, including official documents, sociological texts, clerical literature, journalism, drama, literary fiction, and popular literature and film. This book, written by a leading critic of Irish literature and culture, discusses topics such as the loss of the finest people from rural Ireland and the destruction of traditional communities; the anxieties of women emigrants and their desire for the benefits of modern consumer society; the stereotype of the drunken Irishman; the charming and authentic country Irish in the city; and the ambiguous meanings of Irish Catholicism in England, which was viewed as both a threatening and civilising force. Wills explores this theme of emigration through writers as diverse as M. J. Molloy, John B. Keane, Tom Murphy, and Edna O'Brien.

Recenzje

'[This] book … brings to the forefront an often overlooked era in twentieth-century Irish culture … [the author shows us] that this period of departure and radical social change deserves the same rigorous engagement that so frequently attends to global political concerns and earlier twentieth-century periods in Ireland … Wills' focus brings insight and originality born from top-notch research throughout the book.' Maria McGarrity, Irish Literary Supplement

Spis treści

1. The best are leaving: fitness, marriage, and the crisis of the national family; 2. Pink witch: women, modernity, and urbanisation; 3. British paddies: realism and the Irish immigrant; 4. The vanishing Irish: assimilation, ethnicisation, and literary caricature; 5. Clay is the flesh: looking at manual labour.