Modern Irish Autobiography Self, Nation and Society [Hardcover]

Modern Irish Autobiography provides the first comprehensive critical analysis of the Irish autobiographical tradition from the early nineteenth century to the present day. This pioneering collection offers readers a stimulating and provocative introduction to the principal themes, modes and narrative strategies of Irish autobiographers.Notes on Contributors Introduction: Autobiography and the Irish Cultural Moment; L.Harte 'With a Heroic Life and a Governing Mind': Irish Nationalist Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century; S.Ryder Creating the Self, Recreating the Nation: The Politics of Irish Literary Autobiography from Moore to Behan; B.Schrank 'Life Purified and Reprojected': Autobiography and the Modern Irish Novel; E.Patten Pilgrimage to the Self: Autobiographies by Twentieth-Century Irish Women; T.S.Napier 'Loss, Return, and Restitution': Autobiography and Irish Diasporic Subjectivity; L.Harte Breaking the Silence: Emigration, Gender and the making of Irish Cultural Memory; B.Gray Twentieth-Century Gaelic Autobiography: from lieux de m?moire to Narratives of Self-Invention; M.Nic Eoin 'Drawing the Line and making the Tot': Aspects of Irish Protestant Life Writing; B.Sloan Fighting without Guns?: Political Autobiography in Contemporary Northern Ireland; S.Hopkins 'Voice Itself': The Loss and Recovery of Boyhood in Irish Memoir; D.Sampson Memoirs of an Autobiographer; G.O'Brien Bibliography Index

'Each of these writers explores the possibility that autobiography in Ireland may in some sense also be the autobiography of Ireland. The result is a set of meditations which does justice to many different Irelands, at home and overseas, in Irish and English, of the past and of the present. Liam Harte has assembled a strong team which shows how the making of Irish people is always a work-in-progress' - Professor Declan Kiberd, Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, University College Dublin, Ireland

'The autobiographical genre has been accel³