Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800-2000: The Transformation of Oral Space

Description

From the Famine to political hunger strikes, from telling tales in the pub to Beckett's tortured utterances, the performance of Irish identity has always been deeply connected to the oral. Exploring how colonial modernity transformed the spaces that sustained Ireland's oral culture, this book explains why Irish culture has been both so creative and so resistant to modernization. David Lloyd brings together manifestations of oral culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing how the survival of orality was central both to resistance against colonial rule and to Ireland's modern definition as a postcolonial culture. Specific to Ireland as these histories are, they resonate with postcolonial cultures globally. This study is an important and provocative new interpretation of Irish national culture and how it came into being.

David Lloyd is Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

'Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800-2000 is not a patched-together 'greatest hits' type of book: the studies that make up this compelling publication are strongly convergent, and by gathering them together in one volume, Lloyd has ensured that their themes are given new resonances.' Modern Philology '... one of the most important books at the intersection of Irish literary and postcolonial studies. Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity makes a worthy companion.' Matthew Spangler, Nineteenth-Century Literature '... a book which consistently deals with that which defies rationalisation and which is another excellent contribution by David Lloyd to the field of Irish cultural studies.' Fiona McCann, Etudes irlandaises 'Reading a scholarly work on Ireland by David Lloyd feels, for me, like entering a parallel universe in that the strange and yet familiar world we are presented with appears to be a funfair mirror version of Ireland that we find in more conventional historical narratives. Then realization strikes: as was so often the case with the science fiction classics of my youth, the parallel universe turns out to be the world we have been living in all along. So it is with the Ireland of Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800-2000.' Heather Laird, Modern Philology