Vivid Faces

A masterful history of Ireland’s Easter Rising told through the lives of ordinary people who forged a revolutionary generation. On Easter Monday, 1916, Irish rebels poured into Dublin’s streets to proclaim an independent republic. Ireland’s long struggle for self-government had suddenly become a radical and bloody fight for independence from Great Britain. Irish nationalists mounted a week-long insurrection, occupying public buildings and creating mayhem before the British army regained control. The Easter Rising provided the spark for the Irish revolution, a turning point in the violent history of Irish independence. In this highly original history, acclaimed scholar R. F. Foster explores the human dimension of this pivotal event. He focuses on the ordinary men and women, Yeats’s “vivid faces,” who rose “from counter or desk among grey / Eighteenth-century houses” and took to the streets. A generation made, not born, they rejected the inherited ways of the Church, their bourgeois families, and British rule. They found inspiration in the ideals of socialism and feminism, in new approaches to love, art, and belief. Drawing on fresh sources, including personal letters and diaries, Foster summons his characters to life. We meet Rosamond Jacob, who escaped provincial Waterford for bustling Dublin. On a jaunt through the city she might visit a modern art gallery, buy cigarettes, or read a radical feminist newspaper. She could practice the Irish language, attend a lecture on Freud, or flirt with a man who would later be executed for his radical activity. These became the roots of a rich life of activism in Irish and women’s causes. Vivid Faces shows how Rosamond and her peers were galvanized to action by a vertiginous sense of transformation: as one confided to his diary, “I am changing and things around me change.” Politics had fused with the intimacies of love and belief, making the Rising an event not only of the streets but also of the hearts and minds of a generation.

A masterful history of Ireland’s Easter Rising told through the lives of ordinary people who forged a revolutionary generation. On Easter Monday, 1916, Irish rebels poured into Dublin’s streets to proclaim an independent republic. Ireland’s long struggle for self-government had suddenly become a radical and bloody fight for independence from Great Britain. Irish nationalists mounted a week-long insurrection, occupying public buildings and creating mayhem before the British army regained control. The Easter Rising provided the spark for the Irish revolution, a turning point in the violent history of Irish independence. In this highly original history, acclaimed scholar R. F. Foster explores the human dimension of this pivotal event. He focuses on the ordinary men and women, Yeats’s “vivid faces,” who rose “from counter or desk among grey / Eighteenth-century houses” and took to the streets. A generation made, not born, they rejected the inherited ways of the Church, their bourgeois families, and British rule. They found inspiration in the ideals of socialism and feminism, in new approaches to love, art, and belief. Drawing on fresh sources, including personal letters and diaries, Foster summons his characters to life. We meet Rosamond Jacob, who escaped provincial Waterford for bustling Dublin. On a jaunt through the city she might visit a modern art gallery, buy cigarettes, or read a radical feminist newspaper. She could practice the Irish language, attend a lecture on Freud, or flirt with a man who would later be executed for his radical activity. These became the roots of a rich life of activism in Irish and women’s causes. Vivid Faces shows how Rosamond and her peers were galvanized to action by a vertiginous sense of transformation: as one confided to his diary, “I am changing and things around me change.” Politics had fused with the intimacies of love and belief, making the Rising an event not only of the streets but also of the hearts and minds of a generation.

The Irish Citizen Army (ICA) was born from the Dublin Lockout of 1913, when industrialist William Martin Murphy ‘locked out’ workers who refused to resign from the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, sparking one of the most dramatic industrial disputes in Irish history. Faced with threats of police brutality in response to the strike, James Connolly, James Larkin and Jack White established the ICA in the winter of 1913. By the end of March 1914, the ICA espoused republican ideology and that the ownership of Ireland was ‘vested of right in the people of Ireland’. The ICA was in the process of being totally transformed, going on to provide significant support to the IRA during the 1916 Rising. Despite Connolly’s execution and the internment of many ICA members, the ICA reorganised in 1917, subsequently developing networks for arms importation and ‘intelligence’, and later providing operative support for the War of Independence in Dublin. The most extensive survey of the movement to date, The ‘Labour Hercules’ explores the ICA’s evolution into a republican army and its legacy to the present day.

The story of the 1916 Easter Rising and its aftermath from a new persepectiveThe Abbey Theatre played a leading role in the politicisation of the revolutionary generation that won Irish freedom, but comparatively little is known about the men and women who formed the lifeblood of the institution: those whose radical politics drove them to fight in the 1916 Rising.Drawing on a huge range of previously unpublished material, The Abbey Rebels of 1916 explores the experiences, hopes and dreams of these remarkable but largely forgotten individuals: Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh, the Abbey's first leading lady; Peadar Kearney, author of the national anthem; feminist Helena Molony, the first female political prisoner of her generation; Seán Connolly, the first rebel to die in the Rising; carpenter Barney Murphy; usherette Ellen Bushell; and Hollywood star Arthur Shields.Invigorating and provocative, this is the story of how, in the years following the Easter Rising, the radical ideals that inspired their revolution were gradually supplanted by a conservative vision of the nation Ireland would become. Lavishly illustrated with 200 documents and images, it provides a fresh and compelling account of the Rising and its aftermath.

The Irish Revival has inspired a richly diverse and illuminating body of scholarship that has enlarged our understanding of the movement and its influence. The general tenor of recent scholarly work has involved an emphasis on inclusion and addition, exploring previously neglected texts, authors, regional variations, and international connections. Such work, while often excellent, tends to see various revivalist figures and projects as part of a unified endeavor, such as political resistance or self-help. In contrast, The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision seeks to reimagine the field by interpreting the Revival through the concept of “complexity,” a theory recently developed in the information and biological sciences. Taken as a whole, these essays show that the Revival’s various components operated as parts of a network but without any overarching aim or authority. In retrospect, the Revival’s elements can be seen to have come together under the heading of a single objective; for example, decolonization broadly construed. But this volume highlights how revivalist thinkers differed significantly on what such an aspiration might mean or lead to: ethnic authenticity, political autonomy, or greater collective prosperity and well-being. Contributors examine how relationships among the Revival’s individual parts involved conflict and cooperation, difference and similarity, continuity and disruption. It is this combination of convergence without unifying purpose and divergence within a broad but flexible coherence that Valente and Howes capture by reinterpreting the Revival through complexity theory.

This edited collection is the first to address the topic of adolescence in Irish history. It brings together established and emerging scholars to examine the experience of Irish young adults from the 'affective revolution' of the early nineteenth century to the emergence of the teenager in the 1960s.

Upholding literature and film together as academically interwoven, Perpetual Carnival underscores the everlasting coexistence of realism and modernism, eschewing the popularly accepted view that the latter is itself a rejection of the former. Mining examples from both film and literature, Colin MacCabe asserts that the relationship between film and literature springs to life a wealth of beloved modernist art, from Jean-Luc Godard's Pierre le Fou to James Joyce's Ulysses, enriched by realism's enduring legacy. The intertextuality inherent in adaptation furthers this assertion in MacCabe's inclusion of Roman Polanski's Tess, a 1979 adaptation of Thomas Hardy's nineteenth-century realist novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Showcasing essays enlivened by cosmopolitan interests, theoretical insight, and strong social purpose, Perpetual Carnival supports a humanities which repudiates narrow specialization and which seeks to place the discussion of film and literature firmly in the reality of current political and ideological discussion. It argues for the writers and directors, the thinkers and critics, who have most fired the contemporary imagination.

A dramatic history of Ireland s Easter Rising told through the lives of ordinary people who forged a revolutionary generation."