Irish Culture and Wartime Europe, 1938-48
Dorothea Depner & Guy Woodward, editors
The decade between 1938 and 1948 was a time of immense upheaval across Europe which deeply affected Irish writers and artists. Many of them had travelled extensively across the Continent and some returned there even in the face of war. At the same time, a number of their English counterparts took refuge from unfolding events in Ireland. Taking these intersecting journeys as a starting point, the essays in this collection explore afresh the cultural history of this decade and the continuing impact of the events around and during the Second World War on Irish literature and culture. They represent, as R.F. Foster writes in the Foreword, ‘a suggestive exploration into an imaginative territory which has been too long left uncharted.’
Dorothea Depner & Guy Woodward, editors
The decade between 1938 and 1948 was a time of immense upheaval across Europe which deeply affected Irish writers and artists. Many of them had travelled extensively across the Continent and some returned there even in the face of war. At the same time, a number of their English counterparts took refuge from unfolding events in Ireland. Taking these intersecting journeys as a starting point, the essays in this collection explore afresh the cultural history of this decade and the continuing impact of the events around and during the Second World War on Irish literature and culture. They represent, as R.F. Foster writes in the Foreword, ‘a suggestive exploration into an imaginative territory which has been too long left uncharted.’
The
essays address writers including Samuel Beckett, John Betjeman, Graham
Greene, T.H. White, Stephen Gilbert, Denis Johnston, Patrick Kavanagh,
Louis MacNeice, Kate O’Brien, Francis Stuart and Evelyn Waugh, as well
as the painter Nevill Johnson. During this turbulent decade, their
engagements with home and abroad, self and other, complicate established
narratives of Irish neutrality and isolation and shed new light on the
intricate cultural and historical interconnections between Ireland and
Europe.
Contributors: Simon Workman (Carlow College), Kathryn White (UU), Conor Linnie (TCD), Guy Woodward (TCD), Anne Thompson (TCD), Alex Runchman (TCD), Eve Patten (TCD), Ute Anna Mittermaier (U Applied Sciences Technikum Vienna), Dorothea Depner (TCD), Tom Walker (TCD), Maurice Walsh (Kingston U), Julie Bates (International U Sarajevo), Gerald Dawe (TCD).
Dorothea Depner was awarded a doctorate by Trinity College Dublin in 2013. She co-edited and introduced a selection of wartime diary notes, letters and unpublished chapters for an omnibus edition of Christabel Bielenberg’s memoirs, The Past is Myself and The Road Ahead (2011). Guy Woodward was awarded a doctorate by Trinity College Dublin in 2012. He has lectured at universities in Dublin and Mexico. His book Culture, Northern Ireland and the Second World War was published by OUP in 2015.
Hardback. 208pp; colour ills.
March 27th 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84682-562-0
Retail Price: €55.00
http://www.fourcourtspress.ie/books/2015/irish-culture-and-wartime-europe-193848/
