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Family and Community in Ireland
Second Edition
Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball
Harvard University Press

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Family and Farm in Pre-Famine Ireland
The Parish of Killashandra
Kevin O'Neill
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985

Now available in paperback, Kevin O’Neill’s highly praised study of rural Ireland in the years leading up to the "Great Hunger" of the 1840s explicates the social, economic, and demographic conditions of the era. He argues that overpopulation and deprivation were inextricably linked to a third variable—the rapid economic development of rural Ireland that was shaped by British interests.

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Famine Pots
The Choctaw–Irish Gift Exchange, 1847–Present
LeAnne Howe
Michigan State University Press, 2020
The remarkable story of the money sent by the Choctaw to the Irish in 1847 is one that is often told and remembered by people in both nations. This gift was sent to the Irish from the Choctaw at the height of the potato famine in Ireland, just sixteen years after the Choctaw began their march on the Trail of Tears toward the areas west of the Mississippi River. Famine Pots honors that extraordinary gift and provides further context about and consideration of this powerful symbol of cross-cultural synergy through a collection of essays and poems that speak volumes of the empathy and connectivity between the two communities. As well as signaling patterns of movement and exchange, this study of the gift exchange invites reflection on processes of cultural formation within Choctaw and Irish society alike, and sheds light on longtime concerns surrounding spiritual and social identities. This volume aims to facilitate a fuller understanding of the historical complexities that surrounded migration and movement in the colonial world, which in turn will help lead to a more constructive consideration of the ways in which Irish and Native American Studies might be drawn together today.
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The Feminization of Famine
Expressions of the Inexpressible?
Margaret Kelleher
Duke University Press, 1997
Contemporary depictions of famine and disaster are dominated by female images. The Feminization of Famine examines these representations, exploring, in particular, the literature arising from the Irish "Great Famine" of the 1840s and the Bengali famine of the 1940s. Kelleher illuminates recurring motifs: the prevalence of mother and child images, the scrutiny of women’s starved bodies, and the reliance on the female figure to express the largely "inexpressible" reality of famine. Questioning what gives these particularly feminine images their affective power and analyzing the responses they generate, this historical critique reveals striking parallels between these two "great" famines and current representations of similar natural disasters and catastrophes.
Kelleher begins with a critical reading of the novels and short stories written about the Irish famine over the last 150 years, from the novels of William Carleton and Anthony Trollope to the writings of Liam O’Flaherty and John Banville. She then moves on to unveil a lesser-known body of literature—works written by women. This literature is read in the context of a rich variety of other sources, including eye-witness accounts, memoirs, journalistic accounts, and famine historiography. Concluding with a reading of the twentieth-century accounts of the famine in Bengal, this book reveals how gendered representations have played a crucial role in defining notions of famine.
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The Fenians
Irish Rebellion in the North Atlantic World, 1858–1876
Patrick Steward
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
Aspirations of social mobility and anti-Catholic discrimination were the lifeblood of subversive opposition to British rule in Ireland during the mid-nineteenth century.  Refugees of the Great Famine who congregated in ethnic enclaves in North America and the United Kingdom supported the militant Fenian Brotherhood and its Dublin-based counterpart, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), in hopes of one day returning to an independent homeland.  Despite lackluster leadership, the movement was briefly a credible security threat which impacted the history of nations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Inspired by the failed Young Ireland insurrection of 1848 and other nationalist movements on the European continent, the Fenian Brotherhood and the IRB (collectively known as the Fenians) surmised that insurrection was the only path to Irish freedom.  By 1865, the Fenians had filled their ranks with battle-tested Irish expatriate veterans of the
Union and Confederate armies who were anxious to liberate Ireland.  Lofty Fenian ambitions were ultimately compromised by several factors including United States government opposition and the resolution of volunteer Canadian militias who repelled multiple Fenian incursions into New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba.  The Fenian legacy is thus multi-faceted.  It was a mildly-threatening source of nationalist pride for discouraged Irish expatriates until the organization fulfilled its pledge to violently attack British soldiers and subjects.  It also encouraged the confederation of Canadian provinces under the 1867 Dominion Act.

In this book, Patrick Steward and Bryan McGovern present the first holistic, multi-national study of the Fenian movement.  While utilizing a vast array of previously untapped primary sources, the authors uncover the socio-economic roots of Irish nationalist behavior at the height of the Victorian Period.  Concurrently, they trace the progression of Fenian ideals in the grassroots of Young Ireland to its de facto collapse in 1870s.  In doing so, the authors change the perception of the Fenians from fanatics who aimlessly attempted to free their homeland to idealists who believed in their cause and fought with a physical and rhetorical force that was not nonsensical and hopeless as some previous accounts have suggested.

PATRICK STEWARD works in the Mayo Clinic Development Office in Rochester, Minnesota. He obtained a Ph.D. in Irish History at University of Missouri under the direction of Kerby Miller.  Patrick additionally holds two degrees from Tufts University and he was a strategic intelligence analyst at the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington, D.C. early in his professional career.

BRYAN MCGOVERN is an associate professor of history at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia.  He is author of the widely praised 2009 book John Mitchel, Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist and has written various articles, chapters, and book reviews on Irish and Irish-American nationalism.

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Five Irish Writers
The Errand of Keeping Alive
John Hildebidle
Harvard University Press, 1989

Liam O'Flaherty, Kate O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O'Faolain, and Frank O'Connor--theirs were among the most distinctive voices in Irish fiction in the twentieth century. Born within a few years of each other near the turn of the century, they represented the first literary generation to come of age in the shadow of Ireland's twin monuments, Joyce's Ulysses and the poetry of William Butler Yeats, and their work has too long remained in that shadow.

Raised in different parts of Ireland and in widely differing milieux, all five lived through the turmoil of the revolution and civil war that gave birth to the Irish Republic and on into the disappointments of the thirties and forties. As their talents matured, each developed a unique vision of Ireland, comic or homely, angry or despairing. Despite its diversity, their fiction shares a sense of disillusionment, loneliness, and radical detachment from both culture and self.

John Hildebidle offers the first serious critical assessment of these writers. He examines the common themes and concerns that run through their work, among them family, war, the Troubles, myth, death, and exile. As he demonstrates, all five authors saw in the Ireland that grew out of the events of 1916-1923 a nation that stifled the creative energies and bright hopes of its youth, and their fiction can be seen as responding in diverse ways to that reality. Hildebidle's perceptive analysis of their works should do much to win these authors a place in the canon of modern fiction in English.

The extensive annotated bibliography includes writings by and about not only these five authors but also the Irish fiction writers who succeeded them.

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Folktales of Ireland
Edited by Sean O'Sullivan
University of Chicago Press, 1966
Few countries can boast such a plentitude of traditional folktales as Ireland. In 1935, the creation of The Irish Folklore Commission set in motion the first organized efforts of collecting and studying a multitude of folktales, both written as well as those of the Irish oral tradition. The Commission has collected well over a million pages of manuscripts. Folktales of Ireland offers chief archivist Sean O'Sullivan's representation of this awe-inspiring collection. These tales represent the first English language collection of Gaelic folktales.

"Without doubt the finest group of Irish tales that has yet been published in English."—The Guardian

"O'Sullivan writes out of an intimacy with his subject and an instinctive grasp of the language of the originals. He tells us that his archives contain more than a million and a half pages of manuscript. If Mr. O'Sullivan translates them, I'll read them."—Seamus Heaney, New Statesman

"The stories have an authentic folktale flavor and will satisfy both the student of folklore and the general reader."—Booklist

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Folktales of Ireland
Edited by Sean O'Sullivan
University of Chicago Press, 1966
Few countries can boast such a plentitude of traditional folktales as Ireland. In 1935, the creation of The Irish Folklore Commission set in motion the first organized efforts of collecting and studying a multitude of folktales, both written as well as those of the Irish oral tradition. The Commission has collected well over a million pages of manuscripts. Folktales of Ireland offers chief archivist Sean O'Sullivan's representation of this awe-inspiring collection. These tales represent the first English language collection of Gaelic folktales.

"Without doubt the finest group of Irish tales that has yet been published in English."—The Guardian

"O'Sullivan writes out of an intimacy with his subject and an instinctive grasp of the language of the originals. He tells us that his archives contain more than a million and a half pages of manuscript. If Mr. O'Sullivan translates them, I'll read them."—Seamus Heaney, New Statesman

"The stories have an authentic folktale flavor and will satisfy both the student of folklore and the general reader."—Booklist

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Following in Father’s Footsteps
Social Mobility in Ireland
Michael Hout
Harvard University Press, 1989

This is the first systematic study of patterns of social mobility in Ireland. It covers a recent period—the 1960s—when Ireland was undergoing rapid economic growth and modernization. The author thus was able to test the widely accepted hypothesis that growth weakens class barriers. To his surprise he found that it did not. Social mobility increased somewhat, but among mobile men the better jobs still went to those from advantaged social class origins. Despite economic development and demographic change, the underlying link between social origins and career destinations remained unchanged.

In chapters on education, life cycle, religion, and farming, Michael Hout shows how inequality persists in contemporary Ireland. In the last chapter he reviews evidence from other countries and concludes that governments must take action against class barriers in education and employment practices if inequality is to be reduced. Economic growth creates jobs, he argues, but economic growth alone cannot allocate those jobs fairly.

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The Formation of College English
Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces
Thomas P. Miller
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997

In the middle of the eighteenth century, English literature, composition, and rhetoric were introduced almost simultaneously into colleges throughout the British cultural provinces.  Professorships of rhetoric and belles lettres were established just as print was reaching a growing reading public and efforts were being made to standardize educated taste and usage.  The provinces saw English studies as a means to upward social mobility through cultural assimilation.  In the educational centers of England, however, the introduction of English represented a literacy crisis brought on by provincial institutions that had failed to maintain classical texts and learned languages.

Today, as rhetoric and composition have become reestablished in the humanities in  American colleges, English studies are being broadly transformed by cultural studies, community literacies, and political controversies.  Once again, English departments that are primarily departments of literature see these basic writing courses as a sign of a literacy crisis that is undermining the classics of literature.  The Formation of College English reexamines the civic concerns of rhetoric and the politics that have shaped and continue to shape college English.

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Formations of Violence
The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland
Allen Feldman
University of Chicago Press, 1991

"A sophisticated and persuasive late-modernist political analysis that consistently draws the reader into the narratives of the author and those of the people of violence in Northern Ireland to whom he talked. . . . Simply put, this book is a feast for the intellect"—Thomas M. Wilson, American Anthropologist

"One of the best books to have been written on Northern Ireland. . . . A highly imagination and significant book. Formations of Violence is an important addition to the literature on political violence."—David E. Schmitt, American Political Science Review

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Fosterage in Medieval Ireland
An Emotional History
Thomas O'Donnell
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Fosterage was a central feature of medieval Irish society, yet the widespread practice of sending children to another family to be cared for until they reached adulthood is a surprisingly neglected topic. Where it has been discussed, fosterage is usually conceptualised and treated as a purely legal institution. This work seeks to outline the emotional impact of growing up within another family. What emerges is a complex picture of deeply felt emotional ties binding the foster family together. These emotions are unique to the social practice of fosterage, and we see the language and feelings originating within the foster family being used to describe other relationships such as those in the monastery or between humans and animals. This book argues that the more we understand how people felt in fosterage, the more we understand medieval Ireland.
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From Cape Wrath to Finisterre
Sailing the Celtic Fringe
Bjorn Larsson
Haus Publishing, 2005
From Cape Wrath to Finisterre is a travelogue and an homage to Celtic lands and waters, from their northern to their south western landfalls. Cape Wrath points towards the Arctic Circle at Scotland's furthest northerly limit. "Perhaps I was looking for a homeland, perhaps not, or at any rate a place where it would be worth trying to live for a while as well as one can for as long as it lasts." Finisterre, the furthest point in Galicia in northern Spain, was so named for being "The End of the Earth," Larsson's contemplative musings on life as seen from the cockpit and deck of his yacht enliven this journey from Denmark around Scotland, through the Irish Sea and onwards to Brittany and Spain. "Yes, I admit to rootlessness and impermanence," he admits. "But restlessness, on the other hand, is a scourge. It and its modern variant, stress, the futility of running round in circles, are to be avoided at all costs. It is far from certain, of course, that this way of life would suit everybody, but if it instils in someone the desire to experiment with alternatives. I shall be happy."
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