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Art and the Nation State: The Reception of Modern Art in Ireland

Róisín Kennedy

Art and the Nation State is a wide-ranging study of the reception and critical debate on modernist art in Ireland from the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the end of the modernist era ... More

Art and the Nation State is a wide-ranging study of the reception and critical debate on modernist art in Ireland from the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the end of the modernist era in the 1970s. Drawing on media coverage, reviews, writings and the private papers of key Irish and international artists, critics and commentators, the study explores the significant contribution of Irish modern art to post-independence cultural debate and diverging notions of Irish national identity. Through an analysis of significant controversies and debates on modern art, the book examines how the reputations of major Irish artists was moulded by the prevailing demands of national identity, modernization and the dynamics of the international art world. Disputes about the relevance of the work of leading international modernists such as the Irish-American sculptor, Andrew O’Connor; the French expressionist painter, Georges Rouault; the British sculptor Henry Moore and the Irish born, but ostensibly, British artist, Francis Bacon to Irish cultural life is also analysed, as is the equally problematic positioning of Northern Irish artists.Less

Before the War, and After the Union: An Autobiography by Sam Aleckson (Samuel Williams)

Samuel "Aleckson" Williams

Susanna Ashton (ed.)

Sam Aleckson was the pen name for Samuel Williams, a man born into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote a memoir about his life and the world around him during and after his bondage. It ... More

Sam Aleckson was the pen name for Samuel Williams, a man born into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote a memoir about his life and the world around him during and after his bondage. It is published here for the first time under his own name and with biographical and interpretive context. Published privately by his family, Before the War and After the Union traces Williams’s life from his earliest memories of being enslaved and forced to serve Confederate soliders in army camps, through the post–Civil War years as his family struggled to reconnect and build a new life during Reconstruction. It the ends with tales about his life as the head of a Southern Black family newly relocated to Vermont at the turn-of-the-century. When he wrote his memoir nearly sixty years after emancipation, Williams was an elderly man, far from the site of his childhood in South Carolina, but his memories and analysis were keen and veer from occasional fraught nostalgia to sharply bitter analysis, creating a fascinating American story of suffering and transcendence.Less

Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust

Natalia Aleksiun

This book highlights the historical scholarship that is one of the lasting legacies of interwar Polish Jewry and analyses its political and social context. As Jewish citizens struggled to assert ... More

This book highlights the historical scholarship that is one of the lasting legacies of interwar Polish Jewry and analyses its political and social context. As Jewish citizens struggled to assert their place in a newly independent Poland, a dedicated group of Jewish scholars fascinated by history devoted themselves to creating a sense of Polish Jewish belonging while also fighting for their rights as an ethnic minority. The political climate made it hard for these men and women to pursue an academic career; instead they had to continue their efforts to create and disseminate Polish Jewish history by teaching outside the university and publishing in scholarly and popular journals. By introducing the Jewish public to a pantheon of historical heroes to celebrate and anniversaries to commemorate, they sought to forge a community aware of its past, its cultural heritage, and its achievements — though no less important were their efforts to counter the increased hostility towards Jews in the public discourse of the day. In highlighting the role of public intellectuals and the social role of scholars and historical scholarship, this book adds a new dimension to the understanding of the Polish Jewish world in the interwar period.Less

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

Martyn Bennett, Raymond Gillespie, and Scott Spurlock (eds)

In this collection of essays, a range of established and early-career scholars explore a variety of different perspectives on Oliver Cromwell’s involvement with Ireland, in particular his military ... More

In this collection of essays, a range of established and early-career scholars explore a variety of different perspectives on Oliver Cromwell’s involvement with Ireland, in particular his military campaign of 1649-1650. In England and Wales Cromwell is regarded as a figure of national importance; in Ireland his reputation remains highly controversial. The essays gathered together here provide a fresh take on his Irish campaign, reassessing the backdrop and context of the prevailing siege warfare strategy and offering new insights into other major players such as Henry Ireton and the Marquis of Ormond. Other topics include, but are not limited to, the Cromwellian land settlement, deportation of prisoners and popular memory of Cromwell in Ireland. Overall, a picture emerges of a more moderate Cromwell than the version that has been passed down in Irish history, tradition and folklore.Less

The Global Challenge of Peace: 1919 as a Contested Threshold to a New World Order

Matt Perry (ed.)

This book scrutinizes the events of 1919 from below: the global underside of the Wilsonian moment. During 1919 the Great Powers redrew the map of the world with the Treaties of Paris and established ... More

This book scrutinizes the events of 1919 from below: the global underside of the Wilsonian moment. During 1919 the Great Powers redrew the map of the world with the Treaties of Paris and established the League of Nations intending to prevent future war. Yet, that 1919 was a complex threshold between war and peace contested on a global scale is often missed. This process began prior to war’s end with mutinies, labour and consumer unrest, colonial revolt but reached a high point in 1919. Most obviously, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 continued into 1919 which signalled a decisive year for the Bolshevik regime. While the leaders of the Great Powers famously drew up new states in their Parisian hotel rooms, state formation also had a popular dynamic. The Irish Republic was declared. Afghanistan gained independence. Labour unrest was widespread. This year witnessed the emergence of anti-colonial insurgency and movements across Europe’s colonies; in metropolitan centres of Empire, race riots took place in the UK and during the ‘red summer’ in the US, anti-colonial movements, as well as an important moment of political enfranchisement for women but their expulsion from the wartime labour force. 1919 has many legacies: the first Arab spring, with the awakening of nationalism in the Wilsonian and Bolshevik context; the moment (after Amritsar) that Britain definitively lost its moral claim to India; the definitive announcement of Black presence in the UK; the great reversal of women’s participation in the skilled occupations; the first Fascist movement was founded.Less

Ireland's Gramophones: Material Culture, Memory, and Trauma in Irish Modernism

Zan Cammack

Gramophonic technology grew up alongside Ireland’s progressively more outspoken and violent struggles for political autonomy and national stability. As a result, Irish Modernism inherently links the ... More

Gramophonic technology grew up alongside Ireland’s progressively more outspoken and violent struggles for political autonomy and national stability. As a result, Irish Modernism inherently links the gramophone to representations of these dramatic cultural upheavals. Many key works of Irish literary modernism—like those by James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sean O’Casey—depend upon the gramophone for their ability to record Irish cultural traumas both symbolically and literally during one of the country’s most fraught developmental eras. In each work the gramophone reveals its own complexity as a physical object and its multiform value in the artistic development of textual material. In each work, too, the object seems virtually self-placed—less an aesthetic device than a “thing” belonging primordially to the text. The machine is also often an agent and counterpart to literary characters. The gramophone, therefore, points to a deeper connection between object and culture than we perceive if we consider it as only an image, enhancement, or instrument. This book examines the gramophone as an object that refuses to remain in the background of scenes in which it appears, forcing us to confront its mnemonic heritage during a period of Irish history burdened with political and cultural turbulence.Less

Oasts and Hop Kilns: A History

Patrick Grattan

The book recounts for the first time the 400-year history of oasts and hop kilns, vernacular farm buildings uses for drying hops. They are found in three regions of England: Kent and Sussex, ... More

The book recounts for the first time the 400-year history of oasts and hop kilns, vernacular farm buildings uses for drying hops. They are found in three regions of England: Kent and Sussex, Hampshire and Farnham, Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The evolution of the kilns, the drying methods and the machinery used is pieced together from surviving buildings, agricultural books, archives and local lore. 250 diagrams, sketches and photographs present a graphic picture of hop drying and the impact of oasts and kilns on the countryside. Hop growing expanded to meet the demands of Industrial Revolution Britain, its army and navy. The commercial and political drama of hop farming, drying and marketing is present in the book. Fortunes were made and lost. Gambling and dodgy dealing on hops and taxes was common. No crop was more volatile than hops. Political battles over tariffs and free trade are reported. The hop drying buildings in continental Europe – notably Flanders, Alsace, Bavaria and the Czech Republic- and in parts of the USA are described. They demonstrate that hop drying buildings in England were unmatched in the 17th-19th centuries, but that in the 20th century modern drying machinery in the USA and Germany left England behind.Less

Pamela Colman Smith: Artist, Feminist, and Mystic

Elizabeth Foley O'Connor

Today, Pamela Colman Smith is primarily remembered for designing the storied 1909 tarot deck that served as the model for T. S. Eliot’s Madame Sosostris and “her wicked pack of cards” in The Waste ... More

Today, Pamela Colman Smith is primarily remembered for designing the storied 1909 tarot deck that served as the model for T. S. Eliot’s Madame Sosostris and “her wicked pack of cards” in The Waste Land. For almost one hundred years it was known as the Rider-Waite deck, named for the mystic A. E. Waite, who is credited with conceiving the deck, and the London publisher, William Rider. This omission perfectly encapsulates Colman Smith’s gendered erasure from the cultural imagination, a type of misogyny that affected many women artists and writers at the turn of the twentieth century but, in her case, was also tinged with racism. Colman Smith was much more than the graphic designer of the tarot deck. Active from the mid-1890s through the 1920s, Colman Smith had a burgeoning career as an American artist, writer, folklore performer, editor, publisher, stage designer, and suffrage activist. Colman Smith’s letters to friends, patrons, publishers, and gallery owners reveal an irrepressible spirit who was committed to rooting out all types of hypocrisy and prejudice, including classism, sexism, and racism, but who, nonetheless, capitalized on racial stereotypes through her Afro-Jamaican Anansi performances. Taken as a whole, Colman Smith’s prodigious body of work is particularly notable for its ability to take on, and often as quickly cast aside, a range of personas and identities.Less

Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945-1960

Pierre-Philippe Fraiture

This book examines French and Francophone intellectual history in the period leading to the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa (1945-1960). The analysis favours the epistemological links between ... More

This book examines French and Francophone intellectual history in the period leading to the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa (1945-1960). The analysis favours the epistemological links between ethnology, museology, sociology, and (art) history. In this discussion, a specific focus is placed on temporality and the role ascribed by these different disciplines to African pasts, presents, and futures. It is argued here that the post-war context, characterized, inter alia, by the creation of UNESCO, the birth of Présence Africaine and the prevalence of existentialism, bore witness to the development of new regimes of historicity and to the partial refutation of a progress-based modernity. This investigation is predicated on case studies from West and Central Africa (AOF, AEF and Belgian Congo) and, whilst adopting a postcolonial methodology, it explores African and French authors such as Georges Balandier, Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Chris Marker, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Alain Resnais, Jean-Paul Sartre and Placide Tempels. Past Imperfect analyses the legacies of the ‘long nineteenth century’ and the difficulty encountered by these authors to articulate their anti-colonial agenda away from the modern methodologies of the ‘colonial library’. By focussing on issues of intellectual alienation, this book also demonstrates that the post-WW2 period foreshadowed twenty-first century debates on extroversion, racial inequalities, the decolonization of history, and cultural (mis)appropriation.Less

Reappraising the History of the Jews in the Netherlands

J.C.H Blom, David J. Wertheim, Hetty Berg, and Bart T. Wallet (eds)

The two decades since the last authoritative general history of Dutch Jews was published have seen such substantial developments in historical understanding that new assessment has become an ... More

The two decades since the last authoritative general history of Dutch Jews was published have seen such substantial developments in historical understanding that new assessment has become an imperative. This book offers an indispensable survey from a contemporary viewpoint that reflects the new preoccupations of European historiography and allows the history of Dutch Jewry to be more integrated with that of other European Jewish histories. Historians from both older and newer generations shed significant light on all eras, providing fresh detail that reflects changed emphases and perspectives. In addition to such traditional subjects as the Jewish community's relationship with the wider society and its internal structure, its leaders, and its international affiliations, new topics explored include the socio-economic aspects of Dutch Jewish life seen in the context of the integration of minorities more widely; a reassessment of the Holocaust years and consideration of the place of Holocaust memorialization in community life; and the impact of multiculturalist currents on Jews and Jewish politics. Memory studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, and digital humanities all play their part in providing the fullest possible picture.Less

Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Modern Orthodoxy

Haym Soloveitchik

The essay that forms the core of this book is an attempt to understand the developments that have occurred in Orthodox Jewry in America in the last seventy years, and to analyse their implications. ... More

The essay that forms the core of this book is an attempt to understand the developments that have occurred in Orthodox Jewry in America in the last seventy years, and to analyse their implications. The prime change is what is often described as ‘the swing to the right’, a marked increase in ritual stringency, a rupture in patterns of behaviour that has had major consequences not only for Jewish society but also for the nature of Jewish spirituality. For the book's author, the key feature at the root of this change is that, as a result of migration to the ‘New Worlds’ of England, the United States, and Israel and acculturation to its new surroundings, American Jewry—indeed, much of the Jewish world—had to reconstruct religious practice from normative texts: observance could no longer be transmitted mimetically, on the basis of practices observed in home and street. In consequence, behaviour once governed by habit is now governed by rule. This new edition allows the author to deal with criticisms raised since the essay, long established as a classic in the field, was originally published, and enables readers to gain a fuller perspective on a topic central to today's Jewish world and its development.Less

'The Age-Old Struggle': Irish republicanism from the Battle of the Bogside to the Belfast Agreement, 1969-1998

Jack Hepworth

Drawing upon a wide range of archival material and oral histories, this book analyses the internal dynamics of Irish republicanism since the outbreak of conflict in 1969. Examining more than 500 ... More

Drawing upon a wide range of archival material and oral histories, this book analyses the internal dynamics of Irish republicanism since the outbreak of conflict in 1969. Examining more than 500 political periodicals and ephemera, ‘The age-old struggle’ assesses the complexity of republicanism’s composition, intellectual and ideological influences, and internal dynamics amid tactical and strategic reorientation. Moreover, engaging the perspectives of more than 250 republican activists, this book illuminates how the movement’s base experienced the conflict, and how it is remembered today. Through five thematic chapters, this book explains how class, place, and networks within the movement alternately sustained, complicated, and fragmented republican politics. Republicans experienced class and interacted with class politics differently. Activists spatialised and historicised their struggle locally, nationally, and internationally. At moments of crisis and transformation in their campaign, republicans mobilised in contrasting networks which either advocated or repudiated ‘new departures’. These competing milieux mediated individual interpretations of strategic change and power dynamics within republicanism. This book’s conclusions have implications for assessments of radical movements beyond Ireland, and for understanding Irish republicanism today.Less

UNITE History Volume 1 (1880-1931): The Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU): Representing a mass trade union movement

Mary Davis and John Foster

This is volume 1 of 6 accessible volumes covering UNITE’s history from 1880-2010. This book covers the formation of the TGWU, rooted as it was in an era in which, from the 1880’s a mass trade union ... More

This is volume 1 of 6 accessible volumes covering UNITE’s history from 1880-2010. This book covers the formation of the TGWU, rooted as it was in an era in which, from the 1880’s a mass trade union movement evolved. The drive to amalgamate the unions was spearheaded by Ernest Bevin and resulted in the creation of the TGWU, 1920-22 - a period that witnessed the intensification of pre and post war militancy which continued, unevenly, until the 1926 General Strike – a watershed moment in British labour history in which the TGWU played a key role both in the strike itself but also in its aftermath. Politically the union had a close relationship with the Labour Party and its two minority governments. This volume examines the role of the TGWU in both, as well as its response to the underlying economic, political and industrial issues of this turbulent period.Less

Wyndham Lewis's Cultural Criticism and the Infrastructures of Patronage

Nathan O'Donnell

Wyndham Lewis was both a serious proponent and forthright critic of modernism. His assault upon his contemporaries foreshadowed the twenty-first century scholarly interest in the networks, ... More

Wyndham Lewis was both a serious proponent and forthright critic of modernism. His assault upon his contemporaries foreshadowed the twenty-first century scholarly interest in the networks, professions, and coteries – rather than the myths and heroics – of modernism. Lewis, after a long period of neglect, now sits increasingly at the heart of a revised field of modernist studies. This book explores Lewis’s cultural criticism as a valuable body of writing which posed questions that have yet to be answered about subsidy and the function of the artist, about professionalism and ethics, about who should pay for the arts, and what the artist’s obligations should be in return. It is the first book-length study of this body of critical writing, through which Lewis articulated the central and most lasting of his critical preoccupations: the question of how the work of the artist is to be valued, and the artist to be paid, in a professionalised society. This book makes an important contribution to the long overdue reassessment of a complex, contrarian figure, spanning the disciplines of literature and the visual arts, who asked pressing questions about the role and status of the artist, and ultimately about the value (economic, civic, political) of the work of art.Less