Description
Book SynopsisThis interdisciplinary collection focuses on the history of the future and in particular how Irish people in the nineteenth century thought about their future, in many different ways and contexts. It spans the long nineteenth century from
c. 1800 to
c. 1914 and includes both people living on the island of Ireland and the Irish abroad, women and men, the religious and the secular, the governing and the governed. It explores – both individually and collectively – the various hopes, dreams, fears and visions of the future that permeated through nineteenth-century Ireland and Irish life. The collection also analyses how the Irish future was conceptualized and understood in different cultural contexts, how visions of the future shifted in relation to the present and the past, and how the future was instrumentalized for political, religious or other social agendas. It attempts to go beyond the usual political or religious discourses on what the future might hold for Irish people and consider a broader spectrum of witnesses from a mixture of historical and literary sources.
CONTRIBUTORS: Patrick Bethel, Richard J. Butler, Pauline Collombier-Lakeman, Sophie Cooper, Catherine Healy, Peter Hession, Raphaël Ingelbien, Jim Kelly, Fiona Lyons, Aoife O'Leary McNeice, Patrick Maume, Christopher P. Morash, Loughlin J. Sweeney.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Dreams of the Future in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Richard J. Butler
Section 1: The Future and The Past
1. Dreaming the Future while Arguing the Past: Temperaments and Temporalities in Irish WritingJim Kelly
2. ‘Shrovetide will be a Merry Time in Ireland Yet’: Fenian Visions of Ireland’s Future
Patrick Bethel3. Imagining Alternative Political Futures for Ireland in the 1880s: the Example of Home Rule FictionPauline Collombier-Lakeman
Section 2: Dreams and Diasporas
4. Visions of Respectability: Charlotte Grace O’Brien and the Politics of Emigrant PhilanthropyCatherine Healy5. ‘The Language of the Conqueror in the Mouth of the Conquered is the Language of the Slave’: Visions for Ireland and for her Language as Depicted in Nineteenth-Century Irish American Print Media Fiona Lyons6. ‘The Future Destiny of these Countries’: The Young Ireland Generation and Nationalist Futures in Australia and Canada, 1848–1871Christopher P. Morash7. ‘To Cultivate a Spirit of Individual Independence and Self-Respect’: Melbourne Visions of an Irish Future in the 1880s Sophie Cooper8. Imagining Irish Futures in East Asia: Narratives of Encounter and Return among Professional Diasporas in China,
c. 1860–1900 Loughlin J. Sweeney
Section 3: Religious Futures
9. Visions of the Future in Humanitarian Responses to the Great Irish FamineAoife O’Leary McNeice10. After Lammenais and
L’Avenir: The Liberal Catholicism of Walter Sweetman and the Catholic Modernism of William Gibson, Second Lord Ashbourne Patrick Maume
Section 4: From Here to Modernity
11. Transatlantic Exchange, Urban Development, and Heterogeneous Engineering in the West of Ireland: Belmullet’s Unbuilt Railways, c. 1820–1920 Richard J. Butler12. Imagining the Railway Revolution in Pre-Famine Ireland: Technology, Governance, and the Drummond Commission, 1832–39Peter Hession13. P.J. Smyth’s Nationalist Dreams of a Free-Trading Ireland and Direct Sea Links with the European ContinentRaphaël Ingelbien
