That Neutral Island


Book Description

Where previous histories of Ireland in the war years have focused on high politics, That Neutral Island mines deeper layers of experience. Stories, letters, and diaries illuminate this small country as it suffered rationing, censorship, the threat of invasion, and a strange detachment from the war.




Emergency Writing


Book Description

Taking seriously Ireland’s euphemism for World War II, “the Emergency,” Anna Teekell’s Emergency Writing asks both what happens to literature written during a state of emergency and what it means for writing to be a response to an emergency. Anchored in close textual analysis of works by Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, Louis MacNeice, Denis Devlin, and Patrick Kavanagh, and supported by archival material and historical research, Emergency Writing shows how Irish late modernism was a response to the sociopolitical conditions of a newly independent Irish Free State and to a fully emerged modernism in literature and art. What emerges in Irish writing in the wake of Independence, of the Gaelic Revival, of Yeats and of Joyce, is a body of work that invokes modernism as a set of discursive practices with which to counter the Free State’s political pieties. Emergency Writing provides a new approach to literary modernism and to the literature of conflict, considering the ethical dilemma of performing neutrality—emotionally, politically, and rhetorically—in a world at war.




Irish Literature of the Second World War


Book Description

Irish Literature of the Second World War: The Stylistics of Neutrality considers the impact of the wartime languages of propaganda, censorship, and espionage on the work of major Irish-born writers, in order to close a literary-historical gap in the way that the Second World War has been read. Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Louis MacNeice, and Flann O'Brien came to artistic maturity during the war years, but their war-related work has often been read as either literature of the British Home Front (Bowen's novel The Heat of the Day and MacNeice's collection, Springboard) or absurdist work without a wartime context (Beckett's Watt and O'Brien's The Third Policeman). Countering a long-held cultural mandate that the experience of World War II was "alien" to neutral Ireland and its literature, recent scholarship on Irish wartime neutrality has paved the way for crucial rereadings of Irish wartime literature. This dissertation demonstrates that major works by these canonical Irish writers are also major literary works of the Second World War. I suggest that is because these Irish texts do take on the vexed question of war, and more particularly of the ways war calls into question language's ability to function as a neutral conduit, that they constitute an important body of work. Characterized by stylistic contortions that challenge readability, the Irish literature of World War II challenges conventional definitions and geographies of the literature of war.




Ireland and the Second World War


Book Description

Though Ireland was officially neutral and the exact numbers are controversial, tens of thousands of Irish volunteered to join the British forces in World War II. In an Irish-born book originating in the oral history Volunteers Project at U. College Cork, ten essays provide insights on their contributions, the Anglo-Irish security liaison, domestic policies in Ireland north and south, post-war consequences of Irish involvement in the Allied cause (e.g. the permanent migration of Irish war industry workers to Britain), and historians' assessment of Ireland's wartime status. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Ireland During the Second World War


Book Description

The claustrophobic years of the Second World War were a crucial watershed for neutral Ireland and the Irish. Neutrality was the key to Irish Prime Minister de Valera's foreign and domestic policy. Enforced economic hardship and isolation were seen by many as a blessing in disguise, hastening the new states coming of age. Many long lasting developments, such as the creation of a Central Bank signaled the beginning of the end of economic dependence on Britain. Neutrality ensured Britain, and more specifically Churchill, viewed Ireland with suspicion and barely concealed anger. Threats and inducements were used to persuade Ireland to allow the reoccupation of the Treaty Ports. Fear of IRA activity lead to increasingly draconian legislation. German spies were rumored to be forging links with an increasingly well-armed and militant IRA. Increased tension between Northern Ireland and the bombings of Belfast and Dublin raised questions about the viability of Ireland Neutrality.




Fighting the People's War


Book Description

Jonathan Fennell captures for the first time the true wartime experience of the ordinary soldiers from across the empire who made up the British and Commonwealth armies. He analyses why the great battles were won and lost and how the men that fought went on to change the world.




A Long Long Way


Book Description

A powerful new novel about divided loyalties and the realities of war from “master storyteller” (Wall Street Journal) Sebastian Barry, author of Old God's Time In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely eighteen years old, leaves behind Dublin, his family, and the girl he plans to marry in order to enlist in the Allied forces and face the Germans on the Western Front. Once there, he encounters a horror of violence and gore he could not have imagined and sustains his spirit with only the words on the pages from home and the camaraderie of the mud-covered Irish boys who fight and die by his side. Dimly aware of the political tensions that have grown in Ireland in his absence, Willie returns on leave to find a world split and ravaged by forces closer to home. Despite the comfort he finds with his family, he knows he must rejoin his regiment and fight until the end. With grace and power, Sebastian Barry vividly renders Willie’s personal struggle as well as the overwhelming consequences of war.




Irish Literature and the First World War


Book Description

This book analyses poetry and prose written by combatant and non-combatant Irish writers during the First World War, and goes on to look at how the war was remembered in the two decades that followed. It concludes with a discussion of recent Irish literature about the conflict, focusing on the role of memory and the narrative of nationhood.




These Days


Book Description

WINNER OF THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION WINNER OF THE E. M. FORSTER AWARD AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4s BOOK AT BEDTIME Two sisters. Four nights. One City. April, 1941. Belfast has escaped the worst of the war - so far. Following the lives of sisters Emma and Audrey - one engaged to be married, the other in a secret relationship with another woman - as they try to survive the horrors of the Belfast Blitz, These Days is an unforgettable novel about lives lived under duress, about family, and about how we try to stay true to ourselves 'Brilliantly evokes wartime love and heartbreak.' Guardian 'Breathtakingly good. A novel of enormous heart; full of luminous passages of prose.' Observer 'Meticulously researched, perfectly imagined, full of compassion and emotional truth.' CLARE CHAMBERS




The Second World War and Irish Women


Book Description

Based on interviews with over thirty Irish women, this book covers their experiences during the Second World War years and how the war impacted on them in terms of their public and private roles. Themes such as class and income, employment, health, and housing are covered, arising from the women's recollections and international research into women and war. The women, from a variety of family and social backgrounds, mainly lived and worked in Belfast and Dublin between 1939 and 1945, but some of them went to Britain to take up war work. The women's own stories are compared with contemporary observations from a number of sources, including the Mass-Observation diary of Belfast woman, Moya Woodside. Other comparisons are made with newspaper commentaries and the files of government and other public bodies responsible for shaping social policy. The book shows that despite the many restrictions that the interviewees faced, in terms of access to education, employment opportunities, and to equal treatment in a number of spheres, most of them overcame the obstacles in their way, some of which were considerable. Although the research demonstrated that in economic, political, and social terms the war did not make any significant impact on Irish women, the evidence of the individuals who contributed their memories showed that it offered them opportunities to 'spread their wings', as one of the women described her activities. The book also compares the position of Irish women with their contemporaries in other western countries. While there has been a lot of research on the topic of women and war in other countries, no comparable work has yet been carried out here. Ã?Â?Ã?Â?