What Is An Irish Cottage

The Passenger: Ireland

The best new writing, photography, art, and reportage from and about Ireland—in the series that's "like a literary vacation" ( Publishers Weekly). Ireland is a land full of charm and conflict, a country that in just a few decades has gone from being a poor, semi-theocratic society to a thriving economy free from the influence of the Catholic Church. With the 1998 peace agreements, the conflict between nationalists and unionists seemed, if not resolved, at least dormant. But Brexit—with the ambiguous position it leaves Northern Ireland in—caused old tensions to resurface, with ramifications in politics, society, culture, and sport. Meanwhile, south of the border, epochal transformation has seen a deeply patriarchal, conservative society give space to diversity, the only country in the world to enshrine gay marriage in law through a referendum. And there's a whole other Ireland abroad, an Irish diaspora that looks to the old country with newfound pride but doesn't forget the ugliness it fled from. Memory and identity intertwine with the transformations—from globalization to climate change—that are remodeling the Irish landscape, from the coastal communities under threat of disappearing along with the Irish language fishermen use to talk about the sea, inland the peat bogs, until recently important sources of energy and jobs, are being abandoned. Pieces in this collection include: The mass is ended by Catherine Dunne and Caelainn Hogan · The Way Back by Colum McCann · A Trip to Westeros by Mark O'Connell · Plus: life on the margins of two unions and right in the middle of Brexit, making war on each other for thirty years while playing on the same national rugby team, emigrating to the great enemy or transforming the country one referendum at a time, digging peat bogs and building cottages, talking of the sea in Gaelic, and much more . . . "These books are so rich and engrossing that it is rewarding to read them even when one is stuck at home." — The Times Literary Supplement

Irish Cottages

Memory Ireland

In the second volume of a series that will ultimately include four, the authors consider Irish diasporic memory and memory practices. While the Irish diaspora has become the subject of a wide range of scholarship, there has been little work focused on its relationship to memory. The first half of the volume asks how diasporic memory functions in different places and times, and what forms it takes on. As an island nation with a history of emigration, Ireland has developed a rich diasporic cultural memory, one that draws on multiple traditions and historiographies of both "home" and "away." Native traditions are not imported wholesale, but instead develop their own curious hybridity, reflecting the nature of emigrant memory that absorbs new ways of thinking about home. How do immigrants remember their homeland? How do descendants of immigrants "remember" a land they rarely visit? How does diasporic memory pass through families, and how is it represented in cultural forms such as literature, festivals, and souvenirs? In its second half, this volume shifts its attention to the concept of "memory practices," ways of cultural remembering that result from and are shaped by particular cultural forms. Many of these cultural forms embody memory materially through language, music, and photography and, because of their distinctive expressions of culture, give rise to distinctive memory practices. Gathering the leading voices in Irish studies, this volume opens new pathways into the body of Irish cultural memory, demonstrating time and again the ways in which memory is supported by the negotiations of individuals within wider cultural contexts. Contributors include: Aidan Arrowsmith, Hasia Diner, Joep Leerssen, Paul Muldoon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill