Liffey and Lethe

Author : Patrick R. O'Malley
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2017-03-01
ISBN : 0192507648
Pages : 280 pages
Rating : 4.9/5 (925 Download)

Download Full Liffey and Lethe PDF by Patrick R. O'Malley Full Free and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book desc: Focusing on literary and cultural texts from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, Patrick R. O'Malley argues that in order to understand both the literature and the varieties of nationalist politics in nineteenth-century Ireland, we must understand the various modes in which the very notion of the historical past was articulated. He proposes that nineteenth-century Irish literature and culture present two competing modes of political historiography: one that eludes the unresolved wounds of Ireland's violent history through the strategic representation of a unified past that could be the model for a liberal future; and one that locates its roots not in a culturally triumphant past but rather in an account of colonial and specifically sectarian bloodshed and insists upon the moral necessity of naming that history. From myths of pre-Christian Celtic glories to medieval Catholic scholarship to the rise of the Protestant Ascendancy to narratives of colonial violence against Irish people by British power, Irish historiography strove to be the basis of a new nationalism following the 1801 Union with Great Britain, and yet it was itself riven with contention.