Browse

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

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

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

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