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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2021

        The Irish tower house

        Society, economy and environment, c. 1300–1650

        by Victoria L. McAlister

        The Irish tower house examines the social role of castles in late-medieval and early modern Ireland. It uses a multidisciplinary methodology to uncover the lived experience of this historic culture, demonstrating the interconnectedness of society, economics and the environment. Of particular interest is the revelation of how concerned pre-modern people were with participation in the economy and the exploitation of the natural environment for economic gain. Material culture can shed light on how individuals shaped spaces around themselves, and tower houses, thanks to their pervasiveness in medieval and modern landscapes, represent a unique resource. Castles are the definitive building of the European Middle Ages, meaning that this book will be of great interest to scholars of both history and archaeology.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2009

        Irish Literature Since 1990

        by Michael Parker, Scott Brewster

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2021

        Acts of supremacy

        by J. Bratton, Richard Cave, Brendan Gregory, Michael Pickering

        Imperialist discourse interacted with regional and class discourses. Imperialism's incorporation of Welsh, Scots and Irish identities, was both necessary to its own success and one of its most powerful functions in terms of the control of British society. Most cultures have a place for the concept of heroism, and for the heroic figure in narrative fiction; stage heroes are part of the drama's definition of self, the exploration and understanding of personal identity. Theatrical and quasi-theatrical presentations, whether in music hall, clubroom, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre or the streets and ceremonial spaces of the capital, contributed to that much-discussed national mood. This book examines the theatre as the locus for nineteenth century discourses of power and the use of stereotype in productions of the Shakespearean history canon. It discusses the development of the working class and naval hero myth of Jack Tar, the portrayal of Ireland and the Irish, and the portrayal of British India on the spectacular exhibition stage. The racial implications of the ubiquitous black-face minstrelsy are focused upon. The ideology cluster which made up the imperial mindset had the capacity to re-arrange and re-interpret history and to influence the portrayal of the tragic or comic potential of personal dilemmas. Though the British may have prided themselves on having preceded America in the abolition of slavery and thus outpacing Brother Jonathan in humanitarian philanthropy, abnegation of hierarchisation and the acceptance of equality of status between black and white ethnic groups was not part of that achievement.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2017

        Asia in Western fiction

        by Robin Winks

        Any reader who has ever visited Asia knows that the great bulk of Western-language fiction about Asian cultures turns on stereotypes. This book, a collection of essays, explores the problem of entering Asian societies through Western fiction, since this is the major port of entry for most school children, university students and most adults. In the thirteenth century, serious attempts were made to understand Asian literature for its own sake. Hau Kioou Choaan, a typical Chinese novel, was quite different from the wild and magical pseudo-Oriental tales. European perceptions of the Muslim world are centuries old, originating in medieval Christendom's encounter with Islam in the age of the Crusades. There is explicit and sustained criticism of medieval mores and values in Scott's novels set in the Middle Ages, and this is to be true of much English-language historical fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even mediocre novels take on momentary importance because of the pervasive power of India. The awesome, remote and inaccessible Himalayas inevitably became for Western writers an idealised setting for novels of magic, romance and high adventure, and for travellers' tales that read like fiction. Chinese fictions flourish in many guises. Most contemporary Hong Kong fiction reinforced corrupt mandarins, barbaric punishments and heathens. Of the novels about Japan published after 1945, two may serve to frame a discussion of Japanese behaviour as it could be observed (or imagined) by prisoners of war: Black Fountains and Three Bamboos.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2022

        The Irish parliament, 1613–89

        The evolution of a colonial institution

        by Coleman A. Dennehy

        The Irish parliament was both the scene of frequent political battles and an important administrative and legal element of the state machinery of early modern Ireland. This institutional study looks at how parliament dispatched its business on a day-to-day basis. It takes in major areas of responsibility such as creating law, delivering justice, conversing with the executive and administering parliamentary privilege. Its ultimate aim is to present the Irish parliament as one of many such representative assemblies emerging from the feudal state and into the modern world, with a changing set of responsibilities that would inevitably transform the institution and how it saw both itself and the other political assemblies of the day.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        Catholics and the law in Restoration Ireland

        by Paul Smith

        In 1660 Charles II was restored to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, but his hold on power was precarious. In particular, Ireland was fundamentally unstable - Catholics formed the majority of the population in a country where Protestantism was the established religion, a state of affairs unique in Europe. It was through the law that the restored Stuart monarchy governed its subjects and its colonial dependencies, and this book examines how Catholics engaged with and experienced English common law primarily through the eyes of Catholic clerics and Gaelic poets. It also examines how Catholics engaged with the Courts and the particular challenges they faced as lawyers. The book draws on an extensive body of primary source materials, including Irish-language poetry and little-used archival material relating to elite Catholic families.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2017

        Scottishness and Irishness in New Zealand since 1840

        by Angela McCarthy, Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie

        This book examines the distinctive aspects that insiders and outsiders perceived as characteristic of Irish and Scottish ethnic identities in New Zealand. When, how, and why did Irish and Scots identify themselves and others in ethnic terms? What characteristics did the Irish and the Scots attribute to themselves and what traits did others assign to them? Did these traits change over time and if so how? Contemporary interest surrounding issues of ethnic identities is vibrant. In countries such as New Zealand, descendants of European settlers are seeking their ethnic origins, spurred on in part by factors such as an ongoing interest in indigenous genealogies, the burgeoning appeal of family history societies, and the booming financial benefits of marketing ethnicities abroad. This fascinating book will appeal to scholars and students of the history of empire and the construction of identity in settler communities, as well as those interested in the history of New Zealand.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2024

        Exhibiting Irishness

        Empire, race and nation, c. 1850-1970

        by Shahmima Akhtar

        Exhibiting Irishness analyses how exhibitions enabled Irish individuals and groups to work out (privately and publicly) their politicised existences across two centuries. As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures. Fair organisers responded to the contexts of famine and poverty, migration and diasporic settlement, independence movements and partition, as well as post-colonial nation building. My research demonstrates how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs and successive Irish governments curated Irishness. The central malleability of Irish identity on display emerged in tandem with the unfolding of Ireland's political transformation from a colony of the British Empire, a migrant community in the United States, to a divided Ireland in the form of the Republic and Northern Ireland.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2023

        Democracy and dissent in the Irish Free State

        by Jason Knirck

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2025

        Through the fiction of Phebe Gibbes (1764–90)

        Women, alienation, and prodigality in the long eighteenth century

        by Kathryn Freeman

        Through the Fiction of Phebe Gibbes places this prolific, newly recovered English writer at the centre of the revolutionary period. Gibbes's novels mark the struggles of women for agency in an expanding British empire, from the Seven Years' War to revolutions in American, Haiti and France. With Gibbes as a nexus in a lineage of women writers from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Kathryn S. Freeman offers a valuable perspective on the 'long eighteenth century', with Gibbes' own evolution mirroring that of the larger period. The study traces the development of Gibbes' authorial voice from satire to irony through a range of female characters subverting patriarchal oppression. Freeman guides the reader through patterns of narrative voice, concerns with gender and sexuality, and elements of wordplay through detailed discussion of five novels representing Gibbes' evolving representation of a subversive female subjectivity.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        February 2025

        Nietzsche and Irish modernism

        by Patrick Bixby

      • Trusted Partner
        Business, Economics & Law
        July 2016

        Drafting the Irish Free State Constitution

        by Laura Cahillane

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2023

        The penny politics of Victorian popular fiction

        by Rob Breton

        Penny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan's longest and most significant people's movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2024

        Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean

        Interdisciplinary perspectives

        by Finola O'Kane, Ciarán O'Neill

        Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean is a complex and ground-breaking collection of essays. Grounded in history, it integrates perspectives from art historians, architectural and landscape historians, and literary scholars to produce a genuinely interdisciplinary collection that spans from 1620-1830: the high point of European colonialism. By exploring imperial, national and familial relationships from their building blocks of plantation, migration, property and trade, it finds new ways to re-create and question how slavery made the Atlantic world.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 1998

        Irish Home Rule

        by Alan O'Day, Mark Greengrass

        Irish Home Rule considers the pre-eminent issue in British politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. It is the first account to explain the various self-government plans, to place these in context and examine the motives for putting the schemes forward. The book distinguishes between moral and material home rulers, making the point that the first appealed especially to outsiders, some Protestants and the intelligentsia, who saw in self-government a means to reconcile Ireland's antagonistic traditions. In contrast, material home rulers viewed a Dublin Parliament as a forum of Catholic interests. This account appraises the home rule movement from a fresh angle, distinguishing it from the usual division drawn between physical force and constitutional nationalists It maintains that an ideological continuity runs from Young Ireland, the Fenians, the early home rulers including Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell, to the Gaelic Revivalists to the Men of 1916. These nationalists are distinguishable from material home rulers not on the basis of methods or strategy but by a fundamental ideological cleavage. ;

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