Inishkillane

This volume offers a reasoned critical account of a wide range of travel writing about rural Ireland. The focus is on work by English travellers who visited Ireland for pleasure, from the ’scenic tourists’ of the post-Romantic period to Eric Newby in the 1980s. Ryle also discusses accounts by American and English anthropologists, as well as writing by Irish authors including J.M. Synge, George Moore, Sean O’Faolain and Colm Tóibín. The materials reviewed and discussed here, including many books which are now difficult to find, offer illuminating and sometimes entertaining evidence about the development of tourism. Ryle also shows how the discourses and practices of pleasurable travel have intersected with and been marked by the dimensions of power and proprietorship, hegemony, and resistance, which have characterised Anglo-Irish and Hiberno-English cultural relations over the last two centuries. Journeys in Ireland will interest all those concerned with the literature and history of those relations, and will be an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers and students concerned with travel writing and tourism with and beyond these islands.

The Western Isles of Scotland appear to the popular imagination as romantic and remote islands where the inhabitants cling to an archaic culture which is barely integrated into modern industrial society. In this book Judith Ennew dispels such myths, and confronts the social problems of an economically depressed region without denying its unique cultural aspects. She traces the history of the Western Isles as a dynamic process, and shows that even the crofting way of life is of recent origin. What is so often taken to be an ancient way of life is not a static structure but the continuing result of the development of capitalism. Its history is as modern as that of any other living pattern within the United Kingdom. Dr Ennew examines the history of land tenure and economy, showing how the islands have been integrated into industrial society in the last two hundred years. She then explores the current way of life in the area, particularly in the northern island of Lewis. Finally, she considers the future prospects of the islands, demonstrating how the inhabitants are trying to develop a consciousness of their own history with which to combat present social ills.

Rural Community Studies in Europe presents a study of village societies of the different regions of Europe and their importance to the economic and social life of nations. The book seeks to describe and analyze the local economic and social systems, traditions, power structures, and other aspects of European rural communities, specifically in the countries of Great Britain, Ireland, Poland, Turkey, Romania, France, and Spain. The book is divided into four parts: a historical review of the main trends and developments of rural community studies; an annotated bibliography; analytical summaries; and a location map. Sociologists, economists, ethnologists, political scientists, and students in allied fields will find the book a good reference material.

The pub has been at the centre of Irish life for centuries. It has played many roles: funeral home, restaurant, grocery shop, music venue, job centre and meeting place for everyone from poets to revolutionaries. Often plain and unpretentious, it is a neutral ground, a leveller – a home away from home. From the feasts of high kings, through the heady gang-ruled pubs of nineteenth-century New York, right up to the gay bars and superpubs of today, this is an entertaining journey through the evolution of the Irish pub. Our 'locals' have become a global phenomenon: the export of the Irish pub, its significance to emigrants and its portrayal in cinema, television and literature are engagingly explored. The story of the Irish pub is the story of Ireland itself. "Fascinating ... endlessly surprising." – Irish Independent. "Full of brilliant anecdotes, packed with legal, literary, religious and historical bits and pieces that will keep you talking in the pub all night." – Neil Delamere, Today FM. "An enjoyable romp through the ephemera and facts surrounding that most Irish of institutions." – Irish Examiner. "Fascinating ... a great gift." – Mark Cagney, TV3

"Arranged chronologically by decade, from the 1890s to the 1990s, each decade is divided into two different types of writing: critical/documentary and imaginative writing, and is accompanied by a headnote which situates it thematically and chronologically. The Reader is also structured for thematic study by listing all the pieces included under a series of topic headings. The wide range of material encompasses writings of well-known figures in the Irish canon and neglected writers alike. This will appeal to the general reader, but also makes Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century ideal as a core text, providing a unique focus for detailed study in a single volume."--BOOK JACKET.

A radical new perspective revealing the truth behind the making of modern Ireland from economic rebirth to entering the EEC.

In early April of 1888, sixteen-year-old Mary Ann Donovan stood alone on the quays of Queenstown in county Cork waiting to board a ship for Boston in far-off America. She was but one of almost 700,000 young, usually unmarried women, traveling alone, who left their homes in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a move unprecedented in the annals of European emigration. Using a wide variety of sources—many of which appear here for the first time—including personal reminiscences, interviews, oral histories, letter, and autobiographies as well as data from Irish and American census and emigration repots, Janet Nolan makes a sustained analysis of this migration of a generation of young women that puts a new light on Irish social and economic history. By the late nineteenth century changes in Irish life combined to make many young women unneeded in their households and communities; rather than accept a marginal existence, they elected to seek a better life in a new world, often with the encouragement and help of a female relative who had already emigrated. Mary Ann Donovan's journey was representative of thousands of journeys made by Irish women who could truly claim that they had seized control over their lives, by themselves, alone. This book tells their story.

The first anthropological account of the Irish diaspora in Europe in the 21st century, this book provides a culture-centric examination of the Irish diaspora. Focusing less on an abstract or technical definition of Irish self-identification, the author allows members of this group to speak through vignettes and interview excerpts, providing an anthropological lens that allows the reader to enter a frame of self-reference. This book therefore provides architecture to understand how diasporic communities might understand their own identities in a new way and how they might reconsider the role played by mobility in changing expressions of identity. Providing firsthand, experiential and narrative insight into the Irish diaspora in Europe, this volume promises to contribute an anthropological perspective to historical accounts of the Irish overseas, theoretical works in Irish studies, and sociological examinations of Irish identity and diaspora.