Women, Press, and Politics explores the literary and historical significance of women writing for the most influential body of nationalist journalism during the Irish revival, the advanced nationalist press. This work studies women’s writings in the Irish national tradition, focusing in particular on leading feminine voices in the cultural and political movements that helped launch the Eater Rising of 1916: Augusta Gregory, Alice Milligan, Maud Gonne, Constance Markievicz, Delia Larkin, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, and Louie Bennett. Karen Steele argues that by examining the innovative work of these writers from the perspective of women’s artistry and women’s political investments, we can best appreciate the expansive range of their cultural productions and the influence these had on other nationalists, who went on to shape Irish politics and culture in the decades to come.

This book is the first collection of essays to focus exclusively on Irish women’s experiences in the First World War period, 1914-18, across the island of Ireland, contextualising the wartime realities of women’s lives in a changing political landscape. The essays consider experiences ranging from the everyday realities of poverty and deprivation, to the contributions made to the war effort by women through philanthropy and by working directly with refugees. Gendered norms and assumptions about women’s behaviour are critically analysed, from the rhetoric surrounding ‘separation women’ and their use of alcohol, to the navigation of public spaces and the attempts to deter women from perceived immoral behaviour. Political life is also examined by leading scholars in the field, including accounts from women on both sides of the ‘Irish question’ and the impact the war had on their activism and ambitions. Finally, new light is shed on the experiences of women working in munitions factories around Ireland and the complexity of this work in the Irish context is explored. Throughout, it is asserted that while there were many commonalities in women’s experiences throughout the British and Irish Isles at this time, the particular political context of Ireland added a different, and in many respects an unexamined, dimension. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s History Review.

Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash examines how women opposed to the feminist campaign for the vote in early twentieth-century Britain, Ireland, and Australia used shame as a political tool. It demonstrates just how proficient women were in employing a diverse vocabulary of emotions – drawing on concepts like embarrassment, humiliation, honour, courage, and chivalry – in the attempt to achieve their political goals. It looks at how far nationalist contexts informed each gendered emotional community at a time when British imperial networks were under extreme duress. The book presents a unique history of gender and shame which demonstrates just how versatile and ever-present this social emotion was in the feminist politics of the British Empire in the early decades of the twentieth century. It employs a fascinating new thematic lens to histories of anti-feminist/feminist entanglements by tracing national and transnational uses of emotions by women to police their own political communities. It also challenges the common notion that shame had little place in a modernizing world by revealing how far groups of patriotic womanhood, globally, deployed shame to combat the effects of feminist activism.

Between the late 1890s and the early 1900s, the young Irish writer John Millington Synge journeyed across his home country, documenting his travels intermittently for ten years. His body of travel writing includes the travel book The Aran Islands, his literary journalism about West Kerry and Wicklow published in various periodicals, and his articles for the Manchester Guardian about rural poverty in Connemara and Mayo. Although Synge’s nonfiction is often considered of minor weight compared with his drama, Bruna argues persuasively that his travel narratives are instances of a pioneering ethnographic and journalistic imagination. J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival is the first comprehensive study of Synge’s travel writing about Ireland, compiled during the zeitgeist of the preindependence Revival movement. Bruna argues that Synge’s nonfiction subverts inherited modes of travel writing that put an emphasis on Empire and Nation. Synge’s writing challenges these grand narratives by expressing a more complex idea of Irishness grounded in his empathetic observation of the local rural communities he traveled amongst. Drawing from critically neglected revivalist travel literature, newspapers and periodicals, and visual and archival documents, Bruna sketches a new portrait of a seminal Irish Literary Renaissance figure and sheds new light on the itineraries of activism and literary engagement of the broader Revival movement.

This collection explores how the British left has interacted with the ‘Irish question’ throughout the twentieth century, the left’s expression of solidarity with Irish republicanism and relationships built with Irish political movements. Throughout the twentieth century, the British left expressed, to varying degrees, solidarity with Irish republicanism and fostered links with republican, nationalist, socialist and labour groups in Ireland. Although this peaked with the Irish Revolution from 1916 to 1923 and during the ‘Troubles’ in the 1970s–80s, this collection shows that the British left sought to build relationships with their Irish counterparts (in both the North and South) from the Edwardian to Thatcherite period. However these relationships were much more fraught and often reflected an imperial dynamic, which hindered political action at different stages during the century. This collection explores various stages in Irish political history where the British left attempted to engage with what was happening across the Irish Sea. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Contemporary British History.

This is the first study of the cultural meanings of advertising in the Irish Revival period. John Strachan and Claire Nally shed new light on advanced nationalism in Ireland before and immediately after the Easter Rising of 1916, while also addressing how the wider politics of Ireland, from the Irish Parliamentary Party to anti-Home Rule unionism, resonated through contemporary advertising copy. The book examines the manner in which some of the key authors of the Revival, notably Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats, reacted to advertising and to the consumer culture around them. Illustrated with over 60 fascinating contemporary advertising images, this book addresses a diverse and intriguing range of Irish advertising: the pages of An Claidheamh Soluis under Patrick Pearse's editorship, the selling of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the advertising columns of The Lady of the House, the marketing of the sports of the Gaelic Athletic Association, the use of Irish Party politicians in First World War recruitment campaigns, the commemorative paraphernalia surrounding the centenary of the 1798 United Irishmen uprising, and the relationship of Murphy's stout with the British military, Sinn Féin and the Irish Free State.

Presents essays by thirty-five leading scholars of Irish fiction that provide authoritative assessments of the breadth and achievement of Irish novelists and short story writers.

This book discusses little-known linkages between two seemingly distant peoples, the Polish and the Irish, whose historical experiences share important similarities. Both Ireland and Poland have been subject to foreign rule, which they overturned in 1916 and 1918 respectively. Their predominantly Catholic societies were among the first to grant voting rights to women a century ago. This volume uses the centenary of both Ireland and Poland (re)gaining national independence and the political empowerment of women in these countries as a point of departure to analyse selected aspects of Polish and Irish people’s struggle for autonomy. Cases of mutual assistance, including the awareness-raising campaigns organized by Western women in support of the independence and suffragist movements in Poland, are presented along with examples of grassroots self-organization, foreign press coverage, and military and diplomatic efforts to empower the Poles and the Irish.

A major new history of the experiences and activities of Irish nationalist women in the early twentieth century.

A particular dark triumph of modern nationalism has been its ability to persuade citizens to sacrifice their lives for a political vision forged by emotional ties to a common identity. Both men and women can respond to nationalistic calls to fight that portray muscular warriors defending their nation against an easily recognizable enemy. This “us versus them” mentality can be seen in sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims, Tamils and Sinhalas, Serbs and Kosovars, and Protestants and Catholics. In Muscular Nationalism, Sikata Banerjee takes a comparative look at India and Ireland and the relationship among gender, violence, and nationalism. Exploring key texts and events from 1914-2004, Banerjee explores how women negotiate “muscular nationalisms” as they seek to be recognized as legitimate nationalists and equal stakeholders in their national struggles. Banerjee argues that the gendered manner in which dominant nationalism has been imagined in most states in the world has had important implications for women’s lived experiences. Drawing on a specific intersection of gender and nationalism, she discusses the manner in which women negotiate a political and social terrain infused with a masculinized dream of nation-building. India and Ireland—two states shaped by the legacy of British imperialism and forced to deal with modern political/social conflict centering on competing nationalisms—provide two provocative case studies that illuminate the complex interaction between gender and nation.