Patrick Pearse And The Politics Of Redemption

Annotation. An intriguing analysis of Pearse within the context of contemporary Irish politics and culture.

A 2001 volume of essays about the relationship between past and present in Irish society.

This book is the first comprehensive critical assessment of the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Augusta Gregory, founder, patron, director, and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It elaborates on her distinctive vision of the social role of a National Theatre in Ireland, especially in relation to the various reform movements of her age: the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the Co-operative Movement, and the Home Industries Movement. It illustrates the impact of John Ruskin on the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Gregory and her circle that included Horace Plunkett, George Russell, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. All of these friends visited the celebrated Gregory residence of Coole Park in Country Galway, most famously Yeats. The study thus provides a pioneering evaluation of Ruskin’s immense influence on artistic, social, and political discourse in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Patrick Pearse was not only leader of the 1916 Easter Rising but also one of the main ideologues of the IRA. Based on new material on his childhood and underground activities, this book places him in a European context and provides an intimate account of the development of his ideas on cultural regeneration, education, patriotism and militarism.

This study aims to supply the first contextually precise account of the male gender anxieties and ambivalences haunting the culture of Irish nationalism in the period between the Act of Union and the founding of the Irish Free State. To this end, Joseph Valente focuses upon the Victorian ethos of manliness or manhood, the specific moral and political logic of which proved crucial to both the translation of British rule into British hegemony and the expression of Irish rebellion as Irish psychomachia. The influential operation of this ideological construct is traced through a wide variety of contexts, including the career of Ireland's dominant Parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell; the institutions of Irish Revivalism--cultural, educational, journalistic, and literary; the writings of both canonical authors (Yeats, Synge, Gregory, and Joyce) and subcanonical authors (James Stephens, Patrick Pearse, Lennox Robinson); and major political movements of the time, including suffragism, Sinn Fein, Na Fianna E Éireann, and the Volunteers. The construct of manliness remains very much alive today, underpinning the neo-imperialist marriage of ruthless aggression and the sanctities of duty, honor, and sacrifice. Mapping its earlier colonial and postcolonial formations can help us to understand its continuing geopolitical appeal and danger.

This book provides the first complete account of Patrick Pearse's educational work at St. Enda's and St. Ita's schools (Dublin). Extensive use of first-hand accounts reveals Pearse as a humane, energetic teacher and a forward-looking and innovative educational thinker. Between 1903 and 1916 Pearse developed a new concept of schooling as an agency of radical pedagogical and social reform, later echoed by school founders such as Bertrand Russell. This placed him firmly within the tradition of radical educational thought as articulated by Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux. The book examines the tension between Pearse's work and his increasingly public profile as an advocate of physical force separatism and, by employing previously unknown accounts, questions the perception that he influenced his students to become active supporters of militant separatism. The book describes the later history of St. Enda's, revealing the ambivalence of post-independence administrations, and shows how Pearse's work, which has long been neglected by historians, has had a direct influence on a later generation of school founders up to the present.

In his exploration of the use of intelligence in Ireland by the British government from the onset of the Ulster Crisis in 1912 to the end of the Irish War of Independence in 1921, Grob-Fitzgibbon analyzes the role that intelligence played during those critical nine years.

This book examines the topic of excess in modern Irish writing in terms of mysticism, materialism, myth and language. The study engages ideas of excess as they appear in works by major thinkers from Hegel, Kierkegaard and Marx through to Nietzsche, Bataille, Derrida and, more recently, Badiou. Poems, plays and fiction by a wide range of Irish authors are considered. These include works by Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, G. B. Shaw, Patrick Pearse, James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, Louis MacNeice, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Roddy Doyle, Seamus Heaney, Marina Carr and Medbh McGuckian. The readings presented illustrate how Matthew Arnold’s nineteenth-century idea of the excessive character of the Celt is itself exceeded within the modernity of twentieth-century Irish writing.