Description
Book SynopsisThis interdisciplinary collection investigates the forms that authority assumed in nineteenth-century Ireland, the relations they bore to international redefinitions of authority, and Irish contributions to the reshaping of authority in the modern age. At a time when age-old sources of social, political, spiritual and cultural authority were eroded in the Western world, Ireland witnessed both the restoration of older forms of authority and the rise of figures who defined new models of authority in a democratic age. Using new comparative perspectives as well as archival resources in a wide range of fields, the essays gathered here show how new authorities were embodied in emerging types of politicians, clerics and professionals, and in material extensions of their power in visual, oral and print cultures. These analyses often eerily echo twenty-first-century debates about populism, suspicion of scholarly and intellectual expertise, and the role of new technologies and forms of association in contesting and recreating authority. Several contributions highlight the role of emotion in the way authority was deployed by figures ranging from Daniel O’Connell to W.B. Yeats, foreshadowing the perceived rise of emotional politics in our own age. This volume demonstrates that many contested forms of authority that now look ‘traditional’ emerged from nineteenth-century crises and developments, as did the challenges that undermine authority.
CONTRIBUTORS: Marguerite Corporaal, Patrick Geoghegan, Patrick Maume, Michelle McCann, Caroline M. McGee, James H. Murphy, Shane Nagle, Niamh NicGhabhann, Richard Parfitt, Colleen M. Thomas, Tom Walker
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Raphaël Ingelbien and Susan GalavanThe Making of Political Icons
1. The O’Connellite Persuasion
Patrick Geoghegan 2. William Johnston, Populism and Authority in Ulster Protestant Politics
Richard ParfittAuthority and Local Governance
3. Undermined Authority: John Reynolds and Dublin Corporation
James H. Murphy 4. Property, Privilege and Politics: A History of the Coroner in Pre-Famine Ireland (1801–1846)
Michelle McCann The Authority of History
5. A Comparative Perspective: The Problem of Monarchical Authority in National Historiography in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Germany
Shane Nagle 6. Sermons and the Performance of Historiographical Authority in the Construction of the Roman Catholic Built Landscape, 1880–1890
Niamh NicGhabhann Assertions and Subversions of Catholic Power
7. Power, Patronage, and the Production of Catholic Material Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Caroline M. McGee 8. Michael McCarthy’s Campaigns against Clerical Authority
Patrick Maume Aesthetic Authority
9. Invoking the Authority of the Middle Ages in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The ‘Irish Crosses’ of Earley & Powells
Colleen M. Thomas10. W.B. Yeats, Scholastic Aestheticism and Cultural Authority in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Tom Walker 11. Local-Colour Writers: Figures of Authority?
Marguérite Corporaal
