Disability And Life Writing In Post Independence Ireland

This book is the first to examine life writing and disability in the context of Irish culture. It will be valuable to readers interested in Disability Studies, Irish Studies, autobiography and life writing, working-class literature, popular culture, and new media. Ranging from Sean O’Casey’s 1939 childhood memoir to contemporary blogging practices, Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland analyzes a century of autobiographical writing about the social, psychological, economic, and physical dimensions of living with disabilities. The book examines memoirs of sight loss with reference to class and labor conditions, the harrowing stories of residential institutions and the advent of the independent living movement, and the autobiographical fiction of such acknowledged literary figures as Christy Brown and playwright Stewart Parker. Extending the discussion to the contemporary moment, popular genres such as the sports and celebrity autobiography are explored, as well as such newer phenomena as blogging and self-referential performance art.

Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies begins with the reversal in Irish fortunes after the 2008 global economic crash. The chapters included address not only changes in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland but also changes in disciplinary approaches to Irish Studies that the last decade of political, economic, and cultural unrest have stimulated. Since 2008, Irish Studies has been directly and indirectly influenced by the crash and its reverberations through the economy, political landscape, and social framework of Ireland and beyond. Approaching Irish pasts, presents, and futures through interdisciplinary and theoretically capacious lenses, the chapters in this volume reflect the myriad ways Irish Studies has responded to the economic precarity in the Republic, renewed instability in the North, the complex European politics of Brexit, global climate and pandemic crises, and the intense social change in Ireland catalyzed by all of these. Just as Irish society has had to dramatically reconceive its economic and global identity after the crash, Irish Studies has had to shift its theoretical modes and its objects of analysis in order to keep pace with these changes and upheavals. This book captures the dynamic ways the discipline has evolved since 2008, exploring how the age of austerity and renewal has transformed both Ireland and scholarly approaches to understanding Ireland. It will appeal to students and scholars of Irish studies, sociology, cultural studies, history, literature, economics, and political science. Chapter 3, 5 and 15 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Discourses on Disability bridges academic and personal voices from India to address the diverse and fluid conversations on disability. It seeks to critically engage with the concept of being dis/abled, attempting to deconstruct ableism while advocating for inclusive politics. Narratives from people with bipolar disorder, autism, and locomotor disabilities serve to examine how it feels to exist in a world conditioned by deep-seated cultural taboos about disability. The chapters in this book show how India still has a systemic silence about people with disabilities.

This book focuses on Ireland’s lived experience of tuberculosis as represented in the nation’s fiction; not surprisingly, the disease both manifests and conceals itself with devastating frequency in literature as it did in life. It seeks to place the history of tuberculosis in Ireland, from 1800 until after its virtual eradication in the mid-Twentieth Century, in conversation with fictional representations or repressions of a condition so fearsome that until very recently it was usually referred to by code words and euphemisms rather than by its name.

Presents essays by thirty-five leading scholars of Irish fiction that provide authoritative assessments of the breadth and achievement of Irish novelists and short story writers.

In 1922, following a decade of political ferment and much bloodshed, the Irish Free State was established, became stabilised, and developed along conservative lines. During these years the prevailing impulse was to reprove the actions of republicans who had rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and many significant revolutionary voices were left unheeded. One mind, more agile than most of his contemporaries, belonged to Ernie O’Malley. It was through his vastly popular ‘clipped lyric’ memoirs, especially On Another Man’s Wound in 1936, that many of the complexities of the republican mindset were brought to light for readers worldwide. In Modern Ireland and Revolution, leading Irish and American historians and academics deliver critical essays that consider the life, writings and monumental influence of Ernie O’Malley, and the modern arts that influenced him. After his involvement in the War of Independence and the Civil War, O’Malley developed a modernist approach while living abroad for ten years; he was devoted to the arts, moved in circles that included Georgia O’Keeffe and Paul Strand, and through his probing mind counteracted any notion that republicans of his era were dull, inflexible idealists. In this fascinating collection, art and revolution coincide, enriching every preconception of the minds that supported both sides of the Treaty, and revealing untoward truths about the Irish Free State’s process of remembrance.

Age is a missing category in Irish literary criticism and this book is the first to explore a range of familiar and not so familiar Irish texts through a gerontological lens. Drawing on the latest writing in humanistic, critical and cultural gerontology, this study examines the portrayal of ageing in fiction by Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, Deirdre Madden, Anne Enright, Iris Murdoch, John Banville, John McGahern, Norah Hoult and Edna O’Brien, among others. The chapters follow a logical thematic progression from efforts to hold back time, to resisting the decline narrative of ageing, solitary ageing versus ageing in the community, and dementia and the world of the bedbound and dying. One chapter analyses the changing portrayal of older people in the Irish short story. Recent demographic shifts in Ireland have focused attention on an increasing ageing population, making this study a timely intervention in the field of literary gerontology.

A Bit Different: Disability in Ireland brings the reader on a journey exploring the ideas that influence our thinking about people with disabilities. In the year when Ireland ratified the UN Convention on the rights of people with disabilities, A Bit Different answers the question as to why the road to equal rights for people with disabilities is strewn with so many potholes. Its chapters analyse the impact of the Nazi programme to annihilate people with disabilities and create an ‘Aryan race,’ as well as the Irish habit of placing people with perceived differences into closed institutions. Drawing on examples from Germany, Romania, Italy and the US, the book casts a different or alternative light on the Army Deafness cases of the 1970s and the more recent Tuam discovery of unburied babies. Among its ten chapters, the author provides a new look at the rise of the independent living movement in Ireland among people with disabilities themselves and provides a critical appraisal of the increasing State regulation and enforcement of standards of living in residential centres for people with disabilities. Students of Disability Studies will find the first historical timeline of disability policy events over two centuries, especially useful in understanding the history of disability rights in Ireland. The intended readership for this book is among the 600,000 Irish people who describe themselves as having a disability or long-standing health condition, their friends, families, advocates, carers, social care supporters, work colleagues and employers.