Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland – serie

It has often been argued that ‘modern’ leisure was born in the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of World War One. Then, it has been suggested, that if leisure was not ‘invented’ its forms and meanings changed.Despite the recent expansion of the literature on Irish popular cultures – perhaps most strikingly sport – the conceptions, purposes, and practical manifestations of leisure among the Irish during this critical period have yet to receive the attention they deserve. This collection represents an attempt to address this.In twelve essays that explore vibrant expressions of associational culture, the emergence of new leisure spaces, literary manifestations and representations of leisure, the pleasures and purposes of travel, and the leisure pursuits of elite women the collection offers a variety of perspectives on the volume’s theme. As becomes apparent in these studies, all manner of activity, from music to football, reading to dining, travel to photography, dancing to dining, visiting to cycling, child’s play to fighting and attitudes to these were shaped not just by the drive to pleasure but by ideas of class, respectability, improvement and social control as well as political, social, educational, medical and religious ideologies.List of contributors: Leeann Lane, William Murphy, John Borgonovo, Brendan Power, Vanessa Rutherford, Orla Fitzpatrick, Matthew Potter, James H. Murphy, Kevan O’Rourke, Patrick Maume, Philip McEvansoneya, Brian Griffin, Maeve O’Riordan and Rachel Murphy.

Urban spaces in nineteenth-century Ireland is a wide-ranging and innovative collection of essays, which offers new insights on the Irish urban experience. Adopting a spatial approach, the essays presented in this collection move beyond study of events that happened and people who lived in the towns and cities of nineteenth-century Ireland, instead exploring the ways in which particular urban spaces were constructed and experienced. Focusing on a range of urban spaces, from individual streets and districts, to schools, asylums and entire cities, they highlight both the multifaceted nature of the Irish urban experience and the potential of the spatial approach to the study of history.

This volume of essays explores the multiple forms and functions of reading and writing in nineteenth-century Ireland. This century saw a dramatic transition in literacy levels and in the education and language practices of the Irish population, yet the processes and full significance of these transitions remains critically under explored. This book traces how understandings of literacy and language shaped national and transnational discourses of cultural identity, and the different reading communities produced by questions of language, religion, status, education and audience. Essays are gathered under four main areas of analysis: Literacy and Bilingualism; Periodicals and their readers; Translation, transmission and transnational literacies; Visual literacies. Through these sections, the authors offer a range of understandings of the ways in which Irish readers and writers interpreted and communicated their worlds. List of contributors: Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, Muireann O’Cinneide, Niall Ó Ciosáin, Máire Nic an Bhaird, Liam Mac Mathúna, James Quinn, Nicola Morris, Elizabeth Tilley, Darragh Gannon, Florry O’Driscoll, Michèle Milan, Nessa Cronin and Stephanie Rains.

The environmental humanities are one of the most exciting and rapidly expanding areas of interdisciplinary study, and this collection of essays is a pioneering attempt to apply these approaches to the study of nineteenth-century Ireland. By bringing together historians, geographers and literary scholars, new insights are offered into familiar subjects and unfamiliar subjects are brought out into the light. Essays re-considering O’Connellism, Lord Palmerston and Isaac Butt rub shoulders with examinations of agricultural improvement, Dublin’s animal geographies and Ireland’s healing places. Literary writers like Emily Lawless and Seumas O’Sullivan are looked at anew, encouraging us to re-think Darwinian influences in Ireland and the history of the Irish literary revival, and transnational perspectives are brought to bear on Ireland’s national park history and the dynamics of Irish natural history.  Much modern Irish history is concerned with access to natural resources, whether this reflects the catastrophic effect of the Great Famine or the conflicts associated with agrarian politics, but historical and literary analyses are rarely framed explicitly in these terms. The collection responds to the ‘material turn’ in the humanities and contemporary concern about the environment by re-imagining Ireland’s nineteenth century in fresh and original ways.List of contributors: Matthew Kelly, Helen O’Connell, David Brown, Colin W. Reid, Huston Gilmore, Ronan Foley, Juliana Adelman, Mary Orr, Patrick Maume and Seán Hewitt.

This interdisciplinary collection investigates the forms that authority assumed in nineteenth-century Ireland, the relations they bore to international redefinitions of authority, and Irish contributions to the reshaping of authority in the modern age. At a time when age-old sources of social, political, spiritual and cultural authority were eroded in the Western world, Ireland witnessed both the restoration of older forms of authority and the rise of figures who defined new models of authority in a democratic age. Using new comparative perspectives as well as archival resources in a wide range of fields, the essays gathered here show how new authorities were embodied in emerging types of politicians, clerics and professionals, and in material extensions of their power in visual, oral and print cultures. These analyses often eerily echo twenty-first-century debates about populism, suspicion of scholarly and intellectual expertise, and the role of new technologies and forms of association in contesting and recreating authority. Several contributions highlight the role of emotion in the way authority was deployed by figures ranging from Daniel O’Connell to W.B. Yeats, foreshadowing the perceived rise of emotional politics in our own age. This volume demonstrates that many contested forms of authority that now look ‘traditional’ emerged from nineteenth-century crises and developments, as did the challenges that undermine authority.CONTRIBUTORS: Marguerite Corporaal, Patrick Geoghegan, Patrick Maume, Michelle McCann, Caroline M. McGee, James H. Murphy, Shane Nagle, Niamh NicGhabhann, Richard Parfitt, Colleen M. Thomas, Tom Walker

One of the most enduring tropes of modern Irish history is the MOPE thesis, the idea that the Irish were the Most Oppressed People Ever. Political oppression, forced emigration and endemicpoverty have been central to the historiography of nineteenth-century Ireland. This volume problematises the assumption of generalised misery and suggests the many different, and often surprising, ways in which Irish people sought out, expressed and wrote about happiness. Bringing together an international group of established and emerging scholars, this volume considers the emerging field of the history of emotion and what a history of happiness in Ireland might looklike. During the nineteenth century the concept of happiness denoted a degree of luck or good fortune, but equally was associated with the positive feelings produced from living a good and moral life. Happiness could be found in achieving wealth, fame or political success, but also in the relief of lulling a crying baby to sleep. Reading happiness in historical context indicates more than a simple expression of contentment. In personal correspondence, diaries and novels, the expression of happiness was laden with the expectations of audience and author and informed by cultural ideas about what one could or should be happy about. This volume explores how the idea of happiness shaped social, literary, architectural and aesthetic aspirations across the century. CONTRIBUTORS: Ian d'Alton, Shannon Devlin, Anne Dolan, Simon Gallaher, Paul Huddie, Kerron Ó Luain, David McCready, Ciara Thompson, Andrew Tierney, Kristina Varade, Mai Yatani

This volume of essays explores the multiple forms and functions of reading and writing in nineteenth-century Ireland. This century saw a dramatic transition in literacy levels and in the education and language practices of the Irish population, yet the processes and full significance of these transitions remains critically under explored. This book traces how understandings of literacy and language shaped national and transnational discourses of cultural identity, and the different reading communities produced by questions of language, religion, status, education and audience. Essays are gathered under four main areas of analysis: Literacy and Bilingualism; Periodicals and their readers; Translation, transmission and transnational literacies; Visual literacies. Through these sections, the authors offer a range of understandings of the ways in which Irish readers and writers interpreted and communicated their worlds. List of contributors: Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, Muireann O’Cinneide, Niall Ó Ciosáin, Máire Nic an Bhaird, Liam Mac Mathúna, James Quinn, Nicola Morris, Elizabeth Tilley, Darragh Gannon, Florry O’Driscoll, Michèle Milan, Nessa Cronin and Stephanie Rains.

The study of crime and violence in all its multifarious forms remains one of the most productive areas of enquiry for Irish historians. Considered an inordinately violent and unruly society by many contemporaries, nineteenth-century Ireland was notorious for sectarian unrest, agrarian disorder, alcohol-fuelled casual fighting, the seditious activities of various illegal underground organisations, as well as a host of other ‘outrages’. The image of an Ireland in an almost perpetual state of tumult during the nineteenth century, however, is a false one, invariably pedalled by partisan observers with a particular political or religious agenda to satisfy. Modern historical scholarship has corrected many lingering assumptions about the extent and character of Irish violence, but much work remains to be done. This important collection of essays, based on original research delivered at one of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland’s most successful annual conferences, draws together some of Ireland’s leading historians as well emerging talents to examine a broad range of topics under the banner of crime and violence. Irish secret societies, agrarian disorder, security and the law, sectarian violence, and a host of similar topics benefit from innovative methodological perspectives and advanced historical scholarship.List of contributors: Kyle Hughes, Donald M. MacRaild, Michael Huggins, Terence M. Dunne, Jess Lumsden Fisher, John McGrath, Richard J. Butler, Colin W. Reid, Richard A. Keogh, Ciara Breathnach, Laurence M. Geary, Ian d’Alton, Daragh Curran, Gemma Clark, Patrick Maume, Teresa O’Donnell and Virginia Crossman.

Urban Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Ireland is a wide-ranging and innovative collection of essays, which offers new insights on the Irish urban experience. Adopting a spatial approach, the essays presented in this collection move beyond study of events that happened and people who lived in the towns and cities of nineteenth-century Ireland, instead exploring the ways in which particular urban spaces were constructed and experienced. Focusing on a range of urban spaces, from individual streets and districts, to schools, asylums and entire cities, they highlight both the multifaceted nature of the Irish urban experience and the potential of the spatial approach to the study of history. List of contributors: Olwen Purdue, Jonathan Jeffrey Wright, Laura Johnstone, Matthew Potter, Jonathan Jeffrey Wright, Mary Hatfield, Olwen Purdue, Gillian Allmond, Georgina Laragy, Mary Jane Boland and Oliver Betts.

This interdisciplinary collection focuses on the history of the future and in particular how Irish people in the nineteenth century thought about their future, in many different ways and contexts. It spans the long nineteenth century from c. 1800 to c. 1914 and includes both people living on the island of Ireland and the Irish abroad, women and men, the religious and the secular, the governing and the governed. It explores – both individually and collectively – the various hopes, dreams, fears and visions of the future that permeated through nineteenth-century Ireland and Irish life. The collection also analyses how the Irish future was conceptualized and understood in different cultural contexts, how visions of the future shifted in relation to the present and the past, and how the future was instrumentalized for political, religious or other social agendas. It attempts to go beyond the usual political or religious discourses on what the future might hold for Irish people and consider a broader spectrum of witnesses from a mixture of historical and literary sources.CONTRIBUTORS: Patrick Bethel, Richard J. Butler, Pauline Collombier-Lakeman, Sophie Cooper, Catherine Healy, Peter Hession, Raphaël Ingelbien, Jim Kelly, Fiona Lyons, Aoife O'Leary McNeice, Patrick Maume, Christopher P. Morash, Loughlin J. Sweeney.

The environmental humanities are one of the most exciting and rapidly expanding areas of interdisciplinary study, and this collection of essays is a pioneering attempt to apply these approaches to the study of nineteenth-century Ireland. By bringing together historians, geographers and literary scholars, new insights are offered into familiar subjects and unfamiliar subjects are brought out into the light. Essays re-considering O’Connellism, Lord Palmerston and Isaac Butt rub shoulders with examinations of agricultural improvement, Dublin’s animal geographies and Ireland’s healing places. Literary writers like Emily Lawless and Seumas O’Sullivan are looked at anew, encouraging us to re-think Darwinian influences in Ireland and the history of the Irish literary revival, and transnational perspectives are brought to bear on Ireland’s national park history and the dynamics of Irish natural history.  Much modern Irish history is concerned with access to natural resources, whether this reflects the catastrophic effect of the Great Famine or the conflicts associated with agrarian politics, but historical and literary analyses are rarely framed explicitly in these terms. The collection responds to the ‘material turn’ in the humanities and contemporary concern about the environment by re-imagining Ireland’s nineteenth century in fresh and original ways.List of contributors: Matthew Kelly, Helen O’Connell, David Brown, Colin W. Reid, Huston Gilmore, Ronan Foley, Juliana Adelman, Mary Orr, Patrick Maume and Seán Hewitt.

What did it mean to have an ‘Irish’ dwelling in the nineteenth century? How did Irish people write about, think about, visually represent or imagine what constituted home? Showcasing research from scholars based in Ireland, the United Kingdom and further afield, this interdisciplinary volume seeks to answer these questions by exploring the physicality and symbolism of Irish dwellings, and the home as a place of repose, exercise and work. Using a range of methodological approaches including history, folklore and literature, this volume offers new perspectives on the material culture of home, fictionalized homes, social housing schemes, suburban living spaces, home and social mobility, institutional living, migration and memories of the home-house, and gender and eviction. Rather than focus on the Big House, which has already received considerable scholarly attention, this volume foregrounds dwelling spaces that were especially vulnerable to economic forces: the homes of the urban and rural poor. Additionally, the book acknowledges the importance to nineteenth-century Ireland of a class that has arguably received even less attention in Irish scholarship than the poor, a rising urban/suburban middle class, exploring their impact on housing and on cultural and leisure activities.An Open Access version of Christopher Cusack's chapter '"Back into the old homestead": The Irish Cottage in Irish-American Fiction, 861−1910' will be made available on publication.

What did it mean to have an ‘Irish’ dwelling in the nineteenth century? How did Irish people write about, think about, visually represent or imagine what constituted home? Showcasing research from scholars based in Ireland, the United Kingdom and further afield, this interdisciplinary volume seeks to answer these questions by exploring the physicality and symbolism of Irish dwellings, and the home as a place of repose, exercise and work. Using a range of methodological approaches including history, folklore and literature, this volume offers new perspectives on the material culture of home, fictionalized homes, social housing schemes, suburban living spaces, home and social mobility, institutional living, migration and memories of the home-house, and gender and eviction. Rather than focus on the Big House, which has already received considerable scholarly attention, this volume foregrounds dwelling spaces that were especially vulnerable to economic forces: the homes of the urban and rural poor. Additionally, the book acknowledges the importance to nineteenth-century Ireland of a class that has arguably received even less attention in Irish scholarship than the poor, a rising urban/suburban middle class, exploring their impact on housing and on cultural and leisure activities.An Open Access version of Christopher Cusack's chapter '"Back into the old homestead": The Irish Cottage in Irish-American Fiction, 861−1910' will be made available on publication.

This interdisciplinary collection focuses on the history of the future and in particular how Irish people in the nineteenth century thought about their future, in many different ways and contexts. It spans the long nineteenth century from c. 1800 to c. 1914 and includes both people living on the island of Ireland and the Irish abroad, women and men, the religious and the secular, the governing and the governed. It explores – both individually and collectively – the various hopes, dreams, fears and visions of the future that permeated through nineteenth-century Ireland and Irish life. The collection also analyses how the Irish future was conceptualized and understood in different cultural contexts, how visions of the future shifted in relation to the present and the past, and how the future was instrumentalized for political, religious or other social agendas. It attempts to go beyond the usual political or religious discourses on what the future might hold for Irish people and consider a broader spectrum of witnesses from a mixture of historical and literary sources.CONTRIBUTORS: Patrick Bethel, Richard J. Butler, Pauline Collombier-Lakeman, Sophie Cooper, Catherine Healy, Peter Hession, Raphaël Ingelbien, Jim Kelly, Fiona Lyons, Aoife O'Leary McNeice, Patrick Maume, Christopher P. Morash, Loughlin J. Sweeney.

Conflict is a well-trod theme in the study of nineteenth-century Ireland and ‘the Irish’. While this is especially clear in the more traditional fields of politics, religion and the military, conflict was equally manifest in every arena of Irish people’s lives, both in Ireland and abroad, including in areas such as gender, class, culture and identity in domestic or personal spaces, institutional life, education and medicine. Yet, despite a broad and multi-disciplinary historiography, this is the first book to focus solely on this rich theme.New Perspectives on Conflict and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century brings together a group of scholars based around the world and in multiple disciplines who engage with the manifestations, representations and histories of conflict pertaining to Ireland and Irish people throughout the long nineteenth century.