O'Neill launches book on Irish culture and partition at Notre Dame Dublin
Irish Culture and Partition, 1920-1955 by Stephen O'Neill, current Teaching Fellow in British and Irish Literature at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and former National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, was launched at O'Connell House on April 22 in an event co-sponsored by Notre Dame Dublin and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.
Guest speaker Tom Walker, associate professor in Irish Writing, Trinity College Dublin, formally launched the book to packed house of academics, artists, writers, friends, and family.
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.