The Irish Story Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland

by Foster, R. F.

• ISBN13: 9780195168877
• ISBN10: 0195168879
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-01-08
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In this opinionated, entertaining book Roy Foster examines how the Irish have written, understood, used, and misused their history over the past century. He provides an unsparing view of the way Irish history is manipulated for political ends and how Irish misfortunes are sentimentalized and packaged. Foster offers incisive readings of writers from Standish O'Grady to Trollope and Bowen and bitingly critiques the memoirs of Gerry Adams and Frank McCourt. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Roy Foster is Professor of History and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. He is the author of W. B. Yeats: The Apprentice Mage and Modern Ireland, and is the editor of The Oxford History of Ireland.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction	xi
The Story of Ireland	1	(22)
Theme-parks and Histories	23	(14)
'Colliding Cultures': Leland Lyons and the Reinterpretation of Irish History	37	(21)
Yeats at War: Poetic Strategies and Political Reconstruction	58	(22)
'When the Newspapers Have Forgotten Me': Yeats, Obituarists and Irishness	80	(15)
The Normal and the National: Yeats and the Boundaries of Irish Writing	95	(18)
Square-built Power and Fiery Shorthand: Yeats, Carleton and the Irish Nineteenth Century	113	(14)
Stopping the Hunt: Trollope and the Memory of Ireland	127	(21)
Prints on the Scene: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of Childhood	148	(16)
Selling Irish Childhoods: Frank McCourt and Gerry Adams	164	(23)
The Salamander and the Slap: Hubert Butler and His Century	187	(24)
Remembering 1798	211	(24)
Notes	235	(32)
Index	267