."..for we have rights drawn from the soil and sky;
the use, the pace, the patient years of labour,
...
this is our country also, nowhere else;
and we shall not be outcast on the world."
John Hewitt, The Colony
For many years the Big House in Ireland was very important. In an agrarian society, the estate system formed a backdrop for the economy and culture of the island. The Anglo-Irish Big House is a historical structure that has been employed for various purposes in the literature of a variety of Irish authors. The Big House as a symbol of wealth and social status in Ireland is associated pre-eminently with the Anglo-Irish. The Big Houses of Ireland are very important to gain any understanding of the political, economic and social developments in Ireland between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Some historical as well as literary interpretations are very controversial - because of the controversial role of the Anglo-Irish community in Ireland. In real life an Anglo-Irish Big House was the home of and represented the wealth and power of the Anglo-Irish community and their supreme authority over the local community. Anglo-Irish "big house" dwellers were the personification of the chasm between the native Catholic Irish people and their colonizers, the Protestant Englishmen.
The "big house" novel is not purely Anglo-Irish concept. Ireland has a long history - Celtic and Gaelic tribes lived in the island already centuries before the English or other occupants came. The same happened in many places in the world - America, Canada, Africa and even in the Baltic States. Conquerors came, saw and took the land and power. Occupants seem to adopt a similiar pattern of behaviour everywhere. When they come, they ...
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...th an Introduction by Kathryn J. Kilpatrick. New York: Penguin, 1993
Graham, Colin.,,History, Gender amd the Colonial Moment: Castle Rackrent," in Irish Studies Review (No. 14: 1996, spring)
Johnston, Jennifer. How many Miles to Babylon? London: Penguin Books, 1988
Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1995
Mcmanus, Karen.,,Prodding Republicanism," in Fortnight (1995, April): 36-37.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/lawless/edgeworth/edgeworth.htm
http://www.local.ie/literature/
http://www.irishwriters-online.com
Document 4 says, “The curse of the Popery, with its degrading idolatry and corrupting priesthood, is the root of Irelands misery.” The English Presbyterian that states this represents what the English people thought of the Irish. The Irish were not as developed as the English and the English did go in and industrialize in certain areas such as Ulster and parts of Dublin. Even though Ireland did gain wealth as Document 5 states, most of the money stayed within the Protestant population that came from England and Scotland. Document 5 blames it on the Irish character and the in general stupidity of the Irish people. The English also felt that if the Irish were given “Home Rule” then they would persecute against the Protestants in the north. Document 7 says that the worst people of Ireland (Catholics) will be under control of the best people of Ireland (Protestants). Eventually this was resolved when Ulster stayed a part of the United Kingdom. The Irish Catholics partially got
Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish” tells the story of a sixty-eight-year-old Chinese immigrant and her struggle to accept other cultures different from her own. The protagonist has been living in the United States for a while but she is still critical of other cultures and ethnicities, such as her son-in-law’s Irish family and the American values in which her daughter insists on applying while raising the protagonist’s granddaughter. The main character finds it very hard to accept the American way of disciplining and decides to implement her own measures when babysitting her granddaughter Sophie. When the main character’s daughter finds out that she has been spanking Sophie she asks her mother to move out of the house and breaks any further contact between them by not taking Sophie to visit her grandmother in her new place. The central idea of the story is that being an outsider depends on one’s perspective and that perspective determines how one’s life will be.
A succession of English monarchs had used the planting of Protestant English and Scottish people on lands seized from Irish Catholics as a way of increasing loyalty to the British Crown. This is an example of how the British treated the people of Ireland unfairly. In 1912 the British parliament gave home rule to Ireland. Home rule is when a country who is ruled by another country is given the ability to govern itself. However, some people in Ireland's Northern counties did not want home rule.
There is particular consideration given to the political climate in this story. It is incorporated with social and ethnic concerns that are prevalent. The story also addresses prejudice and the theme of ethnic stereotyping through his character development. O'Connor does not present a work that is riddled with Irish slurs or ethnic approximations. Instead, he attempts to provide an account that is both informative and accurate.
INTRODUCTION The history of Ireland "that most distressful nation" is full of drama and tragedy, but one of the most interesting stories is about what happened to the Irish during the mid-nineteenth century and how millions of Irish came to live in America (Purcell 31). Although the high point of the story was the years of the devastating potato famine from 1845 to 1848, historians have pointed out that immigrating from Ireland was becoming more popular before the famine and continued until the turn of the twentieth century. In the one hundred years between the first recording of immigrants in
Irish American Magazine, Aug.-Sept. 2009. Web. The Web. The Web. 06 May 2014.
Within the work, Heaney anthropomorphizes both countries. He compares the geological features of Ireland to the ‘tracked and stretchmarked body’ of a woman, whose most intimate identity - here symbolised by the ‘ferny bed’ and ‘bogland’ is invaded by the phallic ‘battering ram’ of an ‘imperially Male’ invader.
Gray, Peter. Famine, Land, and Politics: British Government and Irish Society. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999.
A collection of short stories published in 1907, Dubliners, by James Joyce, revolves around the everyday lives of ordinary citizens in Dublin, Ireland (Freidrich 166). According to Joyce himself, his intention was to "write a chapter of the moral history of [his] country and [he] chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to [b]e the centre of paralysis" (Friedrich 166). True to his goal, each of the fifteen stories are tales of disappointment, darkness, captivity, frustration, and flaw. The book is divided into four sections: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life (Levin 159). The structure of the book shows that gradually, citizens become trapped in Dublin society (Stone 140). The stories portray Joyce's feeling that Dublin is the epitome of paralysis and all of the citizens are victims (Levin 159). Although each story from Dubliners is a unique and separate depiction, they all have similarities with each other. In addition, because the first three stories -- The Sisters, An Encounter, and Araby parallel each other in many ways, they can be seen as a set in and of themselves. The purpose of this essay is to explore one particular similarity in order to prove that the childhood stories can be seen as specific section of Dubliners. By examining the characters of Father Flynn in The Sisters, Father Butler in An Encounter, and Mangan's sister in Araby, I will demonstrate that the idea of being held captive by religion is felt by the protagonist of each story. In this paper, I argue that because religion played such a significant role in the lives of the middle class, it was something that many citizens felt was suffocating and from which it was impossible to get away. Each of the three childhood stories uses religion to keep the protagonist captive. In The Sisters, Father Flynn plays an important role in making the narrator feel like a prisoner. Mr. Cotter's comment that "… a young lad [should] run about and play with young lads of his own age…" suggests that the narrator has spent a great deal of time with the priest. Even in death, the boy can not free himself from the presence of Father Flynn (Stone 169) as is illustrated in the following passage: "But the grey face still followed me. It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something.
During the time of England’s dominance of Ireland, the citizens of Ireland desperately sought to be free of England’s rule. Because of Ireland’s longing, the Home Rule Movement (HRM) came into existence. In Irish and English history, Home Rule is defined as a political slogan adopted by Irish nationalist in the 19th century to describe their objective of self-government for Ireland (“Home Rule”). The Home Rule Movement started in 1870 and ended in 1922. Isaac Butt and Charles Parnell led the movement (Home Rule). Because the Irish were insistence in obtaining their freedom, the Home Rule movement caused the following events to occur: The Easter Uprising, an increase in attendance of the Irish Republic Treaty (IRA), the founding of the Sinn Fein, and the Irish Free State. During the HRM, three Home Rule bills were produced and promptly rejected. Ultimately, the fourth Home Rule Bill ended in victory in 1922 (“Home Rule”).
...nguage and art to interpret a better of understanding of Ireland’s symbols. The fourth section of the essay focused on the ethnicity/racial, weather, terrain, and military elements of the country. The last section gave insight to a few of the culture’s contributions to the world.
...wn to 4,000 acres. The undertakers, mostly landowners from England and Wales, were bound by gain, to plant ninety families that would constitute the full gambit of the English ‘social pyramid’. They also undertook not to lease to Native Irish. Success fell far short of ambitions. The grants proved too enormous for on undertaker to supervise and much of the New English planters never materialised. As a consequence, and the willingness of the Irish tenancy to pay higher rents, most of the displaced native Irish returned to the land. This had the unforeseen modernising effect of placing the Gaelic Irish into the newly created English social structure. As a result of the vast military activity all over the island, huge areas of impenetrable terrain was opened up. This had the knock on effect of improving travel, communications and trade over the majority of the island.
... of stories Dubliners, James Joyce leads the reader to the conclusion that the Catholic Church took the role of a governing body, and that modernist movement was inhibited by the outdated ideas of the Catholic Church. The story “The Boarding House” provides the reader with excellent examples of a priest who overextended his role in society, and it has been shown that such an occurrence has negative effects of the society as a whole. The Catholic church as a burdensome entity is very well shown in Joyce’s’ the “The sisters”. The story also provides us with a good explanation of the social connotations of religion within the modernist movement. In the stories of Dubliners the legal system is replaced by the institute of religion, and it is the presence and social context of the Catholic Church which prevents the Irish community from advancement.
McCann et al. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1994, 95-109).
Tovey, H and Share, P. (2002). Sociology of Ireland. 2nd ed. Dublin: Gill & Macmillen.