Forgetful Remembrance examines the paradoxes of what actually happens when communities persistently endeavour to forget inconvenient events. The question of how a society attempts to obscure problematic historical episodes is addressed through a detailed case study grounded in the north-eastern counties of the Irish province of Ulster, where loyalist and unionist Protestants—and in particular Presbyterians—repeatedly tried to repress over two centuries discomfiting recollections of participation, alongside Catholics, in a republican rebellion in 1798. By exploring a rich variety of sources, Beiner makes it possible to closely follow the dynamics of social forgetting. His particular focus on vernacular historiography, rarely noted in official histories, reveals the tensions between professed oblivion in public and more subtle rituals of remembrance that facilitated muted traditions of forgetful remembrance, which were masked by a local culture of reticence and silencing. Throughout Forgetful Remembrance, comparative references demonstrate the wider relevance of the study of social forgetting in Northern Ireland to numerous other cases where troublesome memories have been concealed behind a veil of supposed oblivion.

Volume IV: The Irish Book in English 1800-1891 details the story of the book in Ireland during the nineteenth century, when Ireland was integrated into the United Kingdom. The chapters in this volume explore book production and distribution and the differing of ways in which publishing existed in Dublin, Belfast, and the provinces.

This book examines periodical production in the context of post-revolutionary Ireland, employing the unique lens of genre theory in detailed comparisons between Irish, English, Welsh, and Scottish magazines.

Every significant Irish writer, from Swift to Heaney, and including Ferguson, Yeats, Kavanagh, Hewitt, and many more, has been intimately involved in Irish literary magazines, as contributor, reviewer or editor. These magazines provided successive generations of writers and artists with their village square, club and debating society rolled into one, and help us to chart the significance of the multifarious literary inter-relationships, and of the writers' interaction with their own times. This is the first comprehensive guide to almost three hundred years of Irish literary magazines - an important, but neglected resource for those interested in a number of areas of Irish Studies, including literature, and literary, social, cultural and economic history. In two parts, it firstly summarises the use which has been made of this material to date, and then outlines the history of these magazines, their development, personalities, and major themes and formats. There follows a descriptive bibliographical listing of well over two hundred Irish literary magazines giving the basic bibliographical details, summaries of each title, its contents and importance. There are also a number of distribution maps and chronological charts. No serious study of any Irish writer is complete without an examination of this vital context to their life and work.

The Irish Presbyterian Mind considers how one protestant community responded to the challenges posed to traditional understandings of Christian faith between 1830 and 1930. Andrew R. Holmes examines the attitudes of the leaders of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland to biblical criticism, modern historical method, evolutionary science, and liberal forms of protestant theology. He explores how they reacted to developments in other Christian traditions, including the so-called 'Romeward' trend in the established Churches of England and Ireland and the 'Romanisation' of Catholicism. Was their response distinctively Presbyterian and Irish? How was it shaped by Presbyterian values, intellectual first principles, international denominational networks, identity politics, the expansion of higher education, and relations with other Christian denominations? The story begins in the 1830s when evangelicalism came to dominate mainstream Presbyterianism, the largest protestant denomination in present-day Northern Ireland. It ends in the 1920s with the exoneration of J. E. Davey, a professor in the Presbyterian College, Belfast, who was tried for heresy on accusations of being a 'modernist'. Within this timeframe, Holmes describes the formation and maintenance of a religiously-conservative intellectual community. At the heart of the interpretation is the interplay between the Reformed theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith and a commitment to common evangelical principles and religious experience that drew protestants together from various denominations. The definition of conservative within the Presbyterian Church in Ireland moved between these two poles and could take on different forms depending on time, geography, social class, and whether the individual was a minister or a member of the laity.