Hidden Ireland

Although modern research into the period has been significant, Daniel Corkery's study of Irish poetry and culture in eighteenth century Munster is widely acknowledged as having had a profound influence on the shaping of modern Anglo-Irish literature.

This book is based mainly on the experience of the townland of Ballykilcline, a community of small farmers and laborers living on an obscure estate in the Irish midlands near the provincial market town of Strokestown, County Roscommon.

Daniel Corkery's classic book The Hidden Ireland is a study of Irish language poetry and culture in eighteenth-century Munster. The 'Hidden Ireland' of the title is literary Ireland: Corkery's famous book is an attempt to reclaim Munster's Irish language poets from the hands of grammarians who read them only for their preposition and participle use and to restore them to their rightful place as vibrant and vital lyricists and visionaries.The Hidden Ireland, an instant classic when first published in 1924, was listed as one of the top 50 most influential Irish books in The Books That Define Ireland by Tom Garvin and Bryan Fanning. The Hidden Ireland was revolutionary in its recognition of the contribution of Irish language poets to Irish culture, a contribution that had previously been minimised or even erased in the Anglo-Irish versions of history that preceded it. Corkery's groundbreaking study of Irish poetry and culture in eighteenth century Munster is widely acknowledged as having had a profound influence on the shaping of modern Anglo-Irish literature in its foregrounding of the role of the Irish language in literature as a repository of Irishness and a specifically Irish worldview .Daniel Corkery's The Hidden Ireland (1924), arguing for an Irish cultural revival based on the Gaelic tradition of Munster in the eighteenth century, became almost official dogma after 1924, and led to impassioned debate among Irish writers and academics for decades afterwards, including Sean O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor, Corkery's rebellious students.Tom Garvin and Bryan Fanning, The Books That Define Ireland (2014)

"Writing Ireland is a provocative and wide-ranging examination of culture, literature and identity in nine-teenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. Moving beyond the reductionist reading of the historical moment as a backdrop to cultural production, the authors deploy contemporary theories of discourse and the constitution of the colonial subject to illuminate key texts in the cultural struggle between the colonizer and the colonized. The book opens with a consideration of the originary moment of the colonial relationsip of England and Ireland through re-reading of works by Shakespeare and Spenser. Cairns and Richards move then to the constitution of the modern discourse of Celticism in the nineteenth century. A fundamental re-reading of the period of the Literary Revival through the works of Yeats, Synge, Joyce and O'Casey locates them in a social moment illuminated by detailed considerations of poems, playwrights and polemicists such as D. P. Moran, Arthur Griffith, Patrick Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh. Writing Ireland examines the psychic, sexual and social costs of the decolonisation struggle in the society and culture of the Irish Free State and its successor. Beckett, Kavanagh and O'Faolain registered the enervation and paralysis consequent upon sustaining a repressive view of Irish identity. The book concludes in the contemporary moment, as Ireland's post-colonial culture enters crisis and writers like Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Seamus Deane grapple with the notion of alternative identities. Writing Ireland provides students of literature, history, cultural studies and Irish studies with a lucid analysis of Ireland's colonial and post-colonial situation on which an innovative methodology transcends disciplinary divisions."--

"A study of some of the Munster Gaelic poets of the eighteent century" (introduction).

How did the political climate of "ancien régime" Ireland, with its colonial-style landlord system, its Penal Laws, and its total cultural segregation, give way to the mounting nationalist groundswell of the nineteenth century? This pilot study attempts to sidestep ingrained and outworn debates, and argues that Irish developments around 1800 can be fruitfully studied in the light of historical models elaborated for Continental Europe. Between 1780 and 1830 a cultural transfer took place from native, Gaelic-speaking Ireland to urban academic and professional circles, and between 1820 and 1850 the Catholic part of the population came to appropriate Ireland's public sphere.

Many thousands of Irish peasants fled from the country in the terrible famine winter of 1847-48, following the road to the ports and the Liverpool ferries to make the dangerous passage across the Atlantic. The human toll of "Black '47," the worst year of the famine, is notorious, but the lives of the emigrants themselves have remained largely hidden, untold because of their previous obscurity and deep poverty. In The End of Hidden Ireland, Scally brings their lives to light. Focusing on the townland of Ballykilcline in Roscommon, Scally offers a richly detailed portrait of Irish rural life on the eve of the catastrophe. From their internal lives and values, to their violent conflict with the English Crown, from rent strikes to the potato blight, he takes the emigrants on each stage of their journey out of Ireland to New York. Along the way, he offers rare insights into the character and mentality of the immigrants as they arrived in America in their millions during the famine years. Hailed as a distinguished work of social history, this book also is a tale of adventure and human survival, one that does justice to a tragic generation with sympathy but without sentiment.