Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: postcolonial literature in a changing historical frame
- 2 Postcolonial fictions of slavery
- 3 Postcolonialism and travel writing
- 4 Missionary writing and postcolonialism
- 5 Postcolonial auto/biography
- 6 Orality and the genres of African postcolonial writing
- 7 Canadian literatures and the postcolonial
- 8 Postcolonialism and Caribbean literature
- 9 Postcolonialism and Arab literature
- 10 Postcolonialism and postcolonial writing in Latin America
- 11 Postcolonial writing in South Africa
- 12 Postcolonial literature in Southeast Asia
- 13 Postcolonial South Asian poetry
- 14 Postcolonial writing in India
- 15 Postcolonial writing in Australia and New Zealand
- 16 Indigenous writing in Canada, Australia and New Zealand
- 17 Postcolonial writing in Ireland
- 18 Postcolonial writing in Britain
- 19 Postcolonial writing in France
- 20 Postcolonial writing in Germany
- References
17 - Postcolonial writing in Ireland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012
By
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: postcolonial literature in a changing historical frame
- 2 Postcolonial fictions of slavery
- 3 Postcolonialism and travel writing
- 4 Missionary writing and postcolonialism
- 5 Postcolonial auto/biography
- 6 Orality and the genres of African postcolonial writing
- 7 Canadian literatures and the postcolonial
- 8 Postcolonialism and Caribbean literature
- 9 Postcolonialism and Arab literature
- 10 Postcolonialism and postcolonial writing in Latin America
- 11 Postcolonial writing in South Africa
- 12 Postcolonial literature in Southeast Asia
- 13 Postcolonial South Asian poetry
- 14 Postcolonial writing in India
- 15 Postcolonial writing in Australia and New Zealand
- 16 Indigenous writing in Canada, Australia and New Zealand
- 17 Postcolonial writing in Ireland
- 18 Postcolonial writing in Britain
- 19 Postcolonial writing in France
- 20 Postcolonial writing in Germany
- References
Summary
Was Ireland a colony? If by colonization we mean the conquest of one society by another more powerful society on its way to acquiring a vast empire, the settlement of the conquered territory by way of population transfers from the conquering one, the systematic denigration of the culture of the earlier inhabitants, the dismantling of their social institutions and the imposition of new institutions designed to consolidate the recently arrived settler community’s power over the ‘natives’ while keeping that settler community in its turn dependent on the ‘motherland’, then Ireland may be considered one of the earliest and most thoroughly colonized regions of the British Empire. The initial process of colonization began under the Tudors in the 1550s with the plantation of the Irish midlands, continued with Munster plantation in the 1580s, was extended to the north with the Ulster plantation in the 1590s and early 1600s, and was completed by the Cromwellian conquest and land confiscations in the 1640s. In this process, the Gaelic clan system and the Hiberno-Norman (or Old English) dynasties were almost entirely shattered and the spiritual and cultural institutions of the old Irish order – namely, the Catholic abbeys and monasteries and the secular Gaelic Bardic septs – were also dismantled and replaced by the English-language and Protestant culture of the new elites. The earlier economic system based on pastoral herding was also eliminated as Ireland was integrated into the mercantile capitalist order that the European empires were already expanding into a world system stretching across the Americas and Asia.
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature , pp. 539 - 570Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012
References
. Aisling Ghéar: Na Stíobhartaigh agus an tAos Léinn 1603–1788, Baile átha Cliath: An Clócohmar, 1996.
. Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766: A Fatal Attachment, Dublin: Four Courts, 2000.
(ed.). James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writings, Oxford University Press, 2000.
, , and (eds.). 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003.
. All That Fall, in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, vol. 3, New York: Grove Press, 2006.
. Object Lessons, London: Vintage, 1996.
(ed.). Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938–1994, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994.
, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–2002, London: HarperCollins, 2004.
, Poets and Politics: Reaction and Continuity in Irish Poetry, 1585–1625, Cork University Press, 1998.
. Making Ireland British 1580–1650, Oxford University Press, 2001.
, Circe’s Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Ireland, Cork University Press, 2001.
. What’s This About the Gaelic League?, Dublin: Gaelic League, 1942.
. The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000.
. A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never Entirely Subdued (1612), Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969.
. Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1890–1990, Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1985.
. (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vols. 1–3, Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991.
Strange Country: Modernity and Irish Writing since 1790, Oxford University Press, 1997.
. Irish Literary Portraits, London: Macmillan & Co., 1935.
. Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture, Oxford University Press, 2002.
. Broken English/Breaking English: A Study in Contemporary Poetries in English, London: Associated University Presses, 2003.
Michael ó Cléirigh, Chief of the Four Masters and His Associates, Dublin: Talbot Press, 1936.
. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
(ed.). Ireland and the British Empire, Oxford University Press, 2004.
. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.
. The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House, Syracuse University Press, 1998.
. The Consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1860–1870, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987.
. The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism, Dublin: Four Courts, 1997.
. The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1750–1850, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006.
. Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies on Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth-Century, Cork University Press, 1996.
. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Imagination of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, Cork University Press, 1996.
. ‘Defining Irish nationalist anti-imperialism: Thomas Davis and John Mitchel’, éire-Ireland, 42.1–2 (Spring/Summer 2007).Google Scholar
. O’Connell: The Life of Daniel O’Connell, 1775–1847, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991.
. Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893–1910, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008.
, ‘The Gaelic League’, Gaelic Journal/Irishleabhar na Gaedhilge, 4 (November 1893), p.Google Scholar
Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, The Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement, Cork University Press, 2003.
Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History, 1789–1939, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
(ed.). Elizabethan Ireland: A Selection of Writings by Elizabethan Writers on Ireland, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983.
. ‘“Passion and cunning”: an essay on the politics of W. B. Yeats’, in and (eds.), In Excited Reverie, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965.Google Scholar
. King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O’Connell (1938), Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1980.
. The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921, Pennsylvania University Press, 1994.
. The Gaelic Mind and the Collapse of the Gaelic World, Cork University Press, 1990.
. Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London: Verso, 1991.
Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530–1750, Cork University Press, 2006.
, A View of the Present State of Ireland, cited in (ed.), Elizabethan Ireland: A Selection of Writings by Elizabethan Writers on Ireland (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983), p..
. Bardic Nationlism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, Princeton University Press, 1997.
. Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED, Princeton University Press, 1994.
Accessibility standard: Unknown
Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown
and may be updated in the future.
- 1
- Cited by