Description
Book SynopsisClair Wills's The Best Are Leaving is an important and wide-ranging study of representations of Irish emigrant culture and of Irish immigrants in Britain in post-war Europe. It analyses stereotypes of the Irish across a range of discourses, including official documents; sociological texts; documentary fiction and memoir; and Irish realist fiction, drama, and film.
Trade Review'Sharp and illuminating … [Wills'] study is deeply impressive in the scope of its learning and the range of its sympathies.' Sunday Business Post
'A fine study of an absorbing subject.' Irish Mail on Sunday
'… Wills has written a thoughtful, open-minded and lucid book that shows that the 'great silence' which enveloped commentary on the Irish language in independent Ireland often characterized the emigrant experience too. One of the most moving and beautiful aspects of this compelling narrative is Wills's account of her own mother and of her attempts to negotiate for her family between two exacting cultures. She succeeded magnificently - and one outcome is this valuable and necessary book.' Breac
'[This] book … brings to the forefront an often overlooked era in twentieth-century Irish culture … [the author shows us] that this period of departure and radical social change deserves the same rigorous engagement that so frequently attends to global political concerns and earlier twentieth-century periods in Ireland … Wills' focus brings insight and originality born from top-notch research throughout the book.' Maria McGarrity, Irish Literary Supplement
Table of Contents1. The best are leaving: fitness, marriage, and the crisis of the national family; 2. Pink witch: women, modernity, and urbanisation; 3. British paddies: realism and the Irish immigrant; 4. The vanishing Irish: assimilation, ethnicisation, and literary caricature; 5. Clay is the flesh: looking at manual labour.
