BiblioVault - Books about Ireland

The Land Question and the Irish Economy, 1870-1903

Barbara Lewis Solow

Harvard University Press, 1971

Here is a perceptive and convincing reinterpretation of economic development of Ireland after the Great Famine. Barbara Lewis Solow explodes the myth that Ireland’s economic difficulties were caused by defects in the land tenure system. In fact, she argues, the Irish economy made impressive progress in the decades between the famine of 1845 and the late 1870s. She investigates the sources and patterns of this progress, and, basing her conclusions on new quantitative estimates of significant economic variables, she reveals that there were determinants of Irish economic development much more important than the land system.

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Language, Power, and Resistance

Mainstreaming Deaf Education

Elizabeth S. Mathews

Gallaudet University Press, 2017

The current policy of educating d/Deaf and h/Hard of hearing (DHH) students in a mainstream setting, rather than in the segregated environments of deaf schools, has been portrayed as a positive step forward in creating greater equality for DHH students. In Language, Power, and Resistance, Elizabeth S. Mathews explores this claim through qualitative research with DHH children in the Republic of Ireland, their families, their teachers, and their experiences of the education system. While sensitive to the historical context of deaf education, Mathews focuses on the contemporary education system and the ways in which the mainstreaming agenda fits into larger discussions about the classification, treatment, and normalization of DHH children.
The research upon which this book is based examined the implications that mainstreaming has for the tensions between the hegemonic medical model of deafness and the social model of Deafness. This volume explores how different types of power are used in the deaf education system to establish, maintain, and also resist medical views of deafness. Mathews frames this discussion as one of power relations across parents, children, and professionals working within the system. She looks at how various forms of power are used to influence decisions, to resist decisions, and to shape the structure and delivery of deaf education. The author’s findings are a significant contribution to the debates on inclusive education for DHH students and will resonate in myriad social and geographic contexts.

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Language, Resistance and Revival

Republican Prisoners and the Irish Language in the North of Ireland

Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh

Pluto Press, 2013

Language, Resistance and Revival tells the untold story of the truly groundbreaking linguistic and educational developments that took place among Republican prisoners in Long Kesh prison from 1972-2000.

During a period of bitter struggle between Republican prisoners and the British state, the Irish language was taught and spoken as a form of resistance during incarceration. The book unearths this story for the first time and analyses the rejuvenating impact it had on the cultural revival in the nationalist community beyond the prison walls.

Based on unprecedented interviews, Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh explores a key period in Irish history through the original and 'insider' accounts of key protagonists in the contemporary Irish language revival.

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Latin American and Caribbean Library Resources in the British Isles

A Directory

Alan Biggins and Valerie Cooper

University of London Press, 2001

Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process

Edited by Timothy J. White; Foreword by Martin Mansergh

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

From the early 1970s through the mid-1990s, Northern Ireland was the site of bitter conflict between those struggling for reunification with the rest of Ireland and those wanting the region to remain a part of the United Kingdom. After years of strenuous negotiations, nationalists and unionists came together in 1998 to sign the Good Friday Agreement. Northern Ireland's peace process has been deemed largely successful. Yet remarkably little has been done to assess in a comprehensive fashion what can be learned from it.

Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process incorporates recent research that emphasizes the need for civil society and a grassroots approach to peacebuilding while taking into account a variety of perspectives, including neoconservatism and revolutionary analysis. The contributions, which include the reflections of those involved in the negotiation and implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, also provide policy prescriptions for modern conflicts.

This collection of essays in Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process fills a void by articulating the lessons learned and how—or whether—the peace processes can be applied to other regional conflicts.

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The Letters of the First Duchess of Ormonde

Elizabeth Butler

Iter Press, 2022

This volume is the first to bring together the entire extant correspondence of one of the most significant women in early modern Ireland, Elizabeth Butler, first Duchess of Ormonde. She was the wife of James Butler, twelfth Earl and first Duke of Ormonde, who, as Ireland’s only duke and three times its lord lieutenant, was a figure of considerable importance in seventeenth-century Ireland. But far from being overshadowed by her powerful husband, Butler was a person of significant power and influence in her own right. Descended from the tenth Earl of Ormonde, she brought a hefty portion of the Ormonde estate to the marriage. As Countess, Marchioness, then Duchess of Ormonde, as well as three times vicereine and a high-status courtier, she sat at the pinnacle of Irish and English society, unmatched by any other Irish woman of the period in terms of her wealth, social standing, and power. Her surviving correspondence reveals her importance within the Ormonde-Butler family and in the social, cultural, and political life of seventeenth-century Ireland.

The volume comprises more than three hundred letters written by Ormonde to her husband and family, agents and servants, and friends and clients. Spanning six decades, these letters are meticulously transcribed, edited, and annotated, and the volume includes a substantial scholarly introduction, family trees, a glossary, and other resources.

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The Luck of Barry Lyndon

A Romance of the Last Century. By Fitz-Boodle.

William Makepeace Thackeray

University of Michigan Press, 1999

The Thackeray Edition proudly announces two additions to its collection: Catherine and The Luck of Barry Lyndon. The Thackeray Edition is the first full-scale scholarly edition of William Makepeace Thackeray's works to appear in over seventy years, and the only one ever to be based on an examination of manuscripts and relevant printed texts. It is also a concrete attempt to put into practice a theory of scholarly editing that gives new insight into Thackeray's own compositional process.

The Luck of Barry Lyndon, serialized in Fraser's Magazine in 1844, is a wonderfully hard-edged advance upon Thackeray's previous writing: a tour de force dramatization at novelistic length of the moral vacuity of its first person narrator. The inner workings of this narrator are far more complicated than in earlier Thackeray writings, and are presented in a far more subtle, yet not humorless, manner. The mock-Bildungsroman aspect of the novel is brought about by the non-enlightenment of the title-figure, his failure to find a meaningful love-relationship, and his inability to discover a calling that identifies both a significant direction for his individual existence and, at the same time, an appropriate accommodation to his duties to society. Achieved in brilliant, accomplished style, Barry Lyndon is a significant and progressive experiment in narration for Thackeray.

Sheldon F. Goldfarb is an independent scholar who received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia.

Edgar F. Harden is Professor of English, Simon Fraser University.

Peter L. Shillingsburg is Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, Lamar University.

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