Contributes to a neglected topic in Irish literary and cultural history--the modes of protest and cultural forms available to the subaltern classes under landlordism. Using the economic writings of figures like John Stuart Mill and George Campbell and such literary works as Emily Lawless's 'Hurrish, ' Heather Laird shows that the so-called unwritten "agrarian code" of popular justice, though often depicted as anarchic and pathological, was pro-social as opposed to anti-social, emanating from an alternative moral code whose very existence undermined the legitimacy of the colonial civil law. The book explores this clash of legal systems and the resulting crisis in law administration.--From publisher's description.

From the Famine to political hunger strikes, from telling tales in the pub to Beckett's tortured utterances, the performance of Irish identity has always been deeply connected to the oral. Exploring how colonial modernity transformed the spaces that sustained Ireland's oral culture, this book explains why Irish culture has been both so creative and so resistant to modernization. David Lloyd brings together manifestations of oral culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing how the survival of orality was central both to resistance against colonial rule and to Ireland's modern definition as a postcolonial culture. Specific to Ireland as these histories are, they resonate with postcolonial cultures globally. This study is an important and provocative new interpretation of Irish national culture and how it came into being.

While Irish historical writing has long been in thrall to the perceived sectarian character of the legal system, this collection is the first to concentrate attention on the actual relationship that existed between the Irish population and the state under which they lived from the War of the Two Kings (1689-1691) to the Great Famine (1845-1849). Particular attention is paid to an understanding of the legal character of the state and the reach of the rule of law, with contributors addressing such themes as: how law was made and put into effect; how ordinary people experienced the law and social regulations; how Catholics related to the legal institutions of the Protestant confessional state; and how popular notions of legitimacy were developed. These themes contribute to a wider understanding of the nature of the state in the long eighteenth century and will therefore help to situate the study of Irish society into the mainstream of English and European social history.

The delineation and emergence of the Irish border radically reshaped political and social realities across the entire island of Ireland. For those who lived in close quarters with the border, partition was also an intimate and personal occurrence, profoundly implicated in everyday lives. Otherwise mundane activities such as shopping, visiting family, or travelling to church were often complicated by customs restrictions, security policies, and even questions of nationhood and identity. The border became an interface, not just of two jurisdictions, but also between the public, political space of state territory, and the private, familiar spaces of daily life. The effects of political disunity were combined and intertwined with a degree of unity of everyday social life that persisted and in some ways even flourished across, if not always within, the boundaries of both states. On the border, the state was visible to an uncommon degree - as uniformed agents, road blocks, and built environment - at precisely the same point as its limitations were uniquely exposed. For those whose worlds continued to transcend the border, the power and hegemony of either of those states, and the social structures they conditioned, could only ever be incomplete. As a consequence, border residents lived in circumstances that were burdened by inconvenience and imposition, but also endowed with certain choices. Influenced by microhistorical approaches, Unapproved Routes uses a series of discrete 'histories' - of the Irish Boundary Commission, the Foyle Fisheries dispute, cockfighting tournaments regularly held on the border, smuggling, and local conflicts over cross-border roads - to explore how the border was experienced and incorporated into people's lives; emerging, at times, as a powerfully revealing site of popular agency and action.

Intro -- Series Editor's Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part I Necessary and Unnecessary Anachronisms -- Chapter 1 Realism and the Institution of the Nineteenth-Century Novel -- Part II Forgetting and Remembrance -- Chapter 2 William Carleton's and Charles Kickham's Ethnographic Realism -- Chapter 3 George Eliot's Anachronistic Literacies -- Part III Untimely Improvement -- Chapter 4 Charles Dickens's Reactionary Reform -- Chapter 5 George Moore's Untimely Bildung -- Coda: Inhabiting Institutions -- Bibliography -- Index.

Reveals how fear of Irish agrarian violence fundamentally shaped British political culture during the pivotal period of 19th-century reform.

Athlone 1900–1923 is perhaps the most detailed analysis ever completed of an Irish provincial town during this defining period in the country's history. Using a wide variety of local, national and international sources, this meticulously researched study provides the reader with a comprehensive history of the evolution of Irish nationalism in Athlone, drawing together all of the events, personalities and political philosophies that influenced not only the course of local politics, but also the fate of the Irish nation itself.