Modern Irish Autobiography

LIAM HARTE is a Lecturer in Irish and Modern Literature at the University of Manchester, UK. His books include Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (2000, co-edited with Michael Parker) and Ireland Beyond Boundaries: Mapping Irish Studies in the Twenty-First Century (2006, co-edited with Yvonne Whelan).

'Each of these writers explores the possibility that autobiography in Ireland may in some sense also be the autobiography of Ireland. The result is a set of meditations which does justice to many different Irelands, at home and overseas, in Irish and English, of the past and of the present. Liam Harte has assembled a strong team which shows how the making of Irish people is always a work-in-progress' - Professor Declan Kiberd, Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, University College Dublin, Ireland 'The autobiographical genre has been accentuated of late in Ireland as people begin to explore the territory between official narratives and their own experiences. With originality and insight, the essays in this collection broach the process of mapping a history of Irish self-writing. Theoretically engaged and critically astute throughout, Modern Irish Autobiography puts the I into Ireland, establishing self-writing as central to the project of modern Irish Studies.' - Dr Gerry Smyth, Liverpool John Moores University, UK

• Notes on Contributors Introduction: Autobiography and the Irish Cultural Moment; L.Harte 'With a Heroic Life and a Governing Mind': Irish Nationalist Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century; S.Ryder Creating the Self, Recreating the Nation: The Politics of Irish Literary Autobiography from Moore to Behan; B.Schrank 'Life Purified and Reprojected': Autobiography and the Modern Irish Novel; E.Patten Pilgrimage to the Self: Autobiographies by Twentieth-Century Irish Women; T.S.Napier 'Loss, Return, and Restitution': Autobiography and Irish Diasporic Subjectivity; L.Harte Breaking the Silence: Emigration, Gender and the making of Irish Cultural Memory; B.Gray Twentieth-Century Gaelic Autobiography: from lieux de mémoire to Narratives of Self-Invention; M.Nic Eoin 'Drawing the Line and making the Tot': Aspects of Irish Protestant Life Writing; B.Sloan Fighting without Guns?: Political Autobiography in Contemporary Northern Ireland; S.Hopkins 'Voice Itself': The Loss and Recovery of Boyhood in Irish Memoir; D.Sampson Memoirs of an Autobiographer; G.O'Brien Bibliography Index