Book Launch: Irish Culture and Partition, 1920-1955
A book launch hosted by Notre Dame Dublin and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies for Stephen O'Neill's Irish Culture and Partition, 1920-1955, with guest speaker Tom Walker, associate professor in Irish Writing, Trinity College Dublin.
Irish Culture and Partition, 1920–1955 is the first study of the impact of partition on the culture of Ireland. Examining the island’s literature, art, history and visual culture, it argues that the establishment and maintenance of partition had a deep impact on the ways that Irish culture was produced and interpreted. Drawing upon archives from both partition states, as well as the private papers of several authors, it resituates debates around Irish culture and politics within the polemics of state formation, including work from Evie Hone, St John Ervine, Michael McLaverty, William Conor, Flann O’Brien, Agnes Romilly White, Benedict Kiely, Dorothy Macardle and many others. It also places literature and culture within the context of literary congresses, art exhibitions, state festivals and World’s Fairs. In considering partition not as a past event but a process which continues in the present, this study recovers the networks of influence and production as well as the debates around partition that propelled Irish culture in these years. Placing the production of culture and the invention of tradition by the two Irish partition states in conversation with each other for the first time, Irish Culture and Partition, 1920–1955 argues for a reconsideration of the language, imagery and chronology of the island’s division.
Stephen O’Neill is a Teaching Fellow in British and Irish Literature at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. Previously he worked at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the University of Notre Dame. He has written and published widely on the culture of Ireland, with a particular focus on partition, postcolonialism, and legacies of violence in contemporary literature, art, and commemoration. His book Irish Culture and Partition, 1920-1955 is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.
Tom Walker is Associate Professor in Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin. His publications on various aspects of Irish literature and modern poetry include Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time (Oxford University Press, 2015). He has also co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), Derek Mahon: A Retrospective (Liverpool University Press, 2024), and a 2019 special issue of Modernist Cultures on ‘Collaborative Poetics’.