Sovereignty, Sacrifice and States of Emergency in Colonial Ireland
Sovereignty, Sacrifice and States of Emergency in Colonial Ireland
Chapter one traces the language, rhetoric and imagery of emergency in Anglo-Irish literature and law in colonial Ireland. It begins by considering how the rhetoric of the Fenian threat in newspapers such as The Illustrated London News and novels such as Fred Burnaby’s Our Radicals (1886) could be seen to mirror and prefigure the language of emergency in the Criminal Law and Procedure (Ireland) Act 1887, and the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914. It then proceeds to consider how the British government’s use of emergency measures to counter violent anti-colonial insurgency in Ireland marked a crisis in colonial authority were framed in the Blackwoods anthology Tales of the RIC. Finally, the chapter considers how a discourse of sacrifice has been mobilised in Irish nationalist discourse to affirm the agency of the colonised over their life and death in colonial Ireland.
Keywords: Ireland, British colonial rule, emergency laws, Fenian, sovereignty, sacrifice, W.B. Yeats, Padriac Pearse, Eavan Boland
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