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

by David Lloyd

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781139140195
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/22/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Introduction: a history of the Irish orifice; 1. Irish hunger: the political economy of the potato; 2. Closing the mouth: disciplining oral space; 3. Counterparts: the public house, masculinity and temperance nationalism; 4. 'Going nowhere': oral space in the cell block; 5. The breaker's yard: from forensic to interrogation modernity; 6. On extorted speech: back to How It Is; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

'A provocative work, Lloyd's Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800-2000 makes substantial contributions to Irish Studies.' James Joyce Literary Supplement

'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, Études 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

From the Publisher