The Vanishing World of the Islandman: Narrative and Nostalgia

ISBN-13: 9783030257743 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 187 str.

Mairead Nic Craith

Recenzje

"Máiread Nic Craith shows great sensitivity towards her field. She manages to go well beyond a traditionalist or nostalgic interpretation of Tomas's memoir. She eventually shows that different sort of nostalgias are expressed in memoirs, at the intersection between a more local perspective and more external visions." (Laurent Sébastien Fournier, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, Vol. 30 (1), 2021)

Spis treści

Prologue

Acknowledgements

Series Editor's Preface

Chapter 1. The Lure of the Primitive

Salvage Ethnography

Anthropological Exo-nostalgia

In Search of Folklore

Chapter 2. Writing the Past

European Literary Influences

The Phenomenology of Writing

Editorial Incarnations

Chapter 3. Narrative and Voice

Individual or Collective Narrative?

A Singular Voice?

Narrative and Authenticity

Chapter 4. Translating Place

From Land to Image

Translation and Anglicisation

Mapping and Landscape

Chapter 5. Native American and Indigenous Irish Narratives

Black Elk and Tomás Ó Criomhthain

Tapestry of Voices

The Vanishing Native Trope

Chapter 6. A Continental Epic

The European Journey

The "Task of the Translator"

Continental Nostalgia

Chapter 7. Museum and Memoir

The interpretive Centre

Representing the Islandman

At the Interface

Chapter 8. Irish-American Networks

Cosmopolitan Connections

Tomás’s Literary Legacy

Reflective Nostalgia and Loss

Bibliography

Index.

O autorze

Máiréad Nic Craith is Professor and Chair in Cultural Heritage and Anthropological Studies and Director of the Intercultural Centre at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.

Blurb

‘The beauty of this book, crafted by Máiréad Nic Craith with sensitivity and dedication, is the insight provided into The Islandman (and its ilk) without claiming definitive answers or finally disambiguating its mysteries. It is a remarkable literary journey between island and world, tradition and modernity, materiality and nostalgia.’

—Nigel Rapport, Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies, University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK

‘Ninety years after its first publication, Máiréad Nic Craith offers a welcome reexamination of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s Blasket Island autobiography An t-Oileánach. Situating it within the wider contexts of early twentieth-century ethnographies and ethnographic theory, translation studies, the interface of orality and literacy, and the history of the book, Nic Craith shows how Ó Criomhthain’s book fits into the history of twentieth-century Western anthropology and literature.’

—Catherine McKenna, Margaret Brooks Robinson Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, USA

Exploring An t-Oileánach (anglicised as The Islandman), an indigenous Irish-language memoir written by Tomás Ó Criomhthain (Tomás O'Crohan), Máiréad Nic Craith charts the development of Ó Criomhthain as an author; the writing, illustration, and publication of the memoir in Irish; and the reaction to its portrayal of an authentic, Gaelic lifestyle in Ireland. As she probes the appeal of an island fisherman’s century-old life-story to readers in several languages—considering the memoir’s global reception in human, literary and artistic terms—Nic Craith uncovers the indelible marks of Ó Criomhthain’s writing closer to home: the Blasket Island Interpretive Centre, which seeks to institutionalize the experience evoked by the memoir, and a widespread writerly habit amongst the diasporic population of the Island. Through the overlapping frames of literary analysis, archival work, interviews, and ethnographic examination, nostalgia emerges and re-emerges as a central theme, expressed in different ways by the young Irish state, by Irish-American descendants of Blasket Islanders in the US today, by anthropologists, and beyond.