Irish Childhoods

Irish Childhoods PDF

Author: Pádraic Whyte

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2011-05-25

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 144383095X

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While much has been written about Irish culture’s apparent obsession with the past and with representing childhood, few critics have explored in detail the position of children’s fiction within such discourses. This book serves to redress these imbalances, illuminating both the manner in which children’s texts engage with complex cultural discourses in contemporary Ireland and the significant contribution that children’s novels and films can make to broader debates concerning Irish identity at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Through close analysis of specific books and films published or produced since 1990, Irish Childhoods offers an insight into contrasting approaches to the representation of Irish history and childhood in recent children’s fiction. Each chapter interrogates the unique manner in which an author or filmmaker engages with twentieth century Irish history from a contemporary perspective, and reveals that constructions of childhood in Irish children’s fiction are often used to explore aspects of Ireland’s past and present.

Irish Children's Literature and Culture

Irish Children's Literature and Culture PDF

Author: Keith O'Sullivan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-03-17

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 113682510X

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What constitutes a ‘national literature’ is rarely straightforward, and it is especially complex when discussing writing for young people in an Irish context. Until recently, there was only a slight body of work that could be classified as ‘Irish children’s literature’ (whatever the parameters) in comparison with Ireland’s contribution to adult literature in the twentieth century. This volume looks critically at Irish writing for children from the 1980s to the present, examining the work of many writers and illustrators and engaging with all the major forms and genres. Topics include the gothic, the speculative, picturebooks, poetry, post-colonial discourse, identity and ethnicity, and globalization. Modern Irish children’s literature is also contextualized in relation to Irish mythology and earlier writings, thereby demonstrating the complexity of this fascinating area. The contributors, who are leading experts in their fields, examine a range of texts in relation to contemporary literary and cultural theory, and also in relation to writing for adults, thereby inviting a consideration of how well writing for a young audience can compare with writing for an adult one. This groundbreaking work is essential reading for all interested in Irish literature, childhood, and children’s literature.

Growing Pains

Growing Pains PDF

Author: Anne Mac Lellan

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9780716531609

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Despite the immense interest sparked by recent child abuse and orphan vaccination trials, the history of childhood illness in Ireland has remained largely hidden. Spanning two centuries, Growing Pains is the first history of Ireland's unique social, cultural, and political responses to safeguarding childhood health and treating physically, psychologically, and socially vulnerable children. The book also investigates medical management in the home, hospitals, reformatories, industrial schools, and workhouses - places where treatments ranged from the unorthodox to the experimental. Growing Pains provides an account of infectious and non-infectious diseases, such as rickets, smallpox, tuberculosis, Spanish flu, epilepsy, and opthalmia, and it explores community and institutional responses to these illnesses across the centuries, as well as describing the medical pioneers who fought for better treatment and condition for Ireland's children.

Growing Up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Growing Up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland PDF

Author: Mary Hatfield

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2019-10

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0198843429

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Why do we send children to school? Who should take responsibility for children's health and education? Should girls and boys be educated separately or together? These questions provoke much contemporary debate, but also have a longer, often-overlooked history. Mary Hatfield explores these questions and more in this comprehensive cultural history of childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland. Many modern ideas about Irish childhood have their roots in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, when an emerging middle-class took a disproportionate role in shaping the definition of a 'good' childhood, with childhood seen as a fluid concept with a variety of meanings and responsibilities dependent on class, gender, and religious identity. This study deconstructs several key changes in medical care, educational provision, and ideals of parental care. It takes an innovative holistic approach to the middle-class child's social world, by synthesising a broad base of documentary, visual, and material sources, including clothes, books, medical treatises, religious tracts, photographs, illustrations, and autobiographies. It offers invaluable new insights into Irish boarding schools, the material culture of childhood, and the experience of boys and girls in education.

The Speckled People

The Speckled People PDF

Author: Hugo Hamilton

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-10-04

Total Pages: 94

ISBN-13: 1408171201

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Adapted for the stage from the best-selling memoir, The Speckled People tells a profoundly moving story of a young boy trapped in a language war. Set in 1950s Ireland, this is a gripping, poignant, and at times very funny family drama of homesickness, control and identity. As a young boy, Hugo Hamilton struggles with what it means to be speckled, "half and half... Irish on top and German below." An idealistic Irish father enforces his cultural crusade by forbidding his son to speak English while his German mother tries to rescue him with her warm-hearted humour and uplifting industry. The boy must free himself from his father and from bullies on the street who persecute him with taunts of Nazism. Above all he must free himself from history and from the terrible secrets of his mother and father before he can find a place where he belongs. Surrounded by fear, guilt, and frequently comic cultural entanglements, Hugo tries to understand the differences between Irish history and German history and to turn the strange logic of what he is told into truth. It is a journey that ends in liberation but not before the long-buried secrets at the back of the parents' wardrobe have been laid bare.

A 1950s Irish Childhood

A 1950s Irish Childhood PDF

Author: Ruth Illingworth

Publisher: The History Press

Published: 2018-08-08

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 0750986735

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1950s Ireland was the age of De Valera and John Charles McQuaid. It was the age before television, Vatican II, and home central heating. A time when motor cars and public telephones had wind-up handles, when boys wore short trousers and girls wore ribbons, when nuns wore white bonnets and priests wore black hats in church. To the young people of today, the 1950s seem like another age. But for those who played, learned and worked at this time, this era feels like just yesterday. This delightful collection of memories will appeal to all who grew up in 1950s Ireland and will jog memories about all aspects of life as it was.

Precarious childhood in post-independence Ireland

Precarious childhood in post-independence Ireland PDF

Author: Moira Maguire

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2013-07-19

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 1847797598

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This fascinating study reveals the desperate plight of the poor, illegitimate, and abused children in an Irish society that claimed to cherish and hold them sacred, but in fact marginalized and ignored them. It examines closely the history of childhood in post-independence Ireland, and breaks new ground in examining the role of the state in caring for its most vulnerable citizens. Maguire gives voice to those children who formed a significant proportion of the Irish population, but have been ignored in the historical record. More importantly, she uses their experiences as lenses through which to re-evaluate Catholic influence in post-independence Irish society. An essential and timely work, this book offers a different interpretation of the relationships between the Catholic Church, the political establishment, and Irish people; important for those interested in the history of family and childhood as well as twentieth-century Irish social history.

Children of the Rising

Children of the Rising PDF

Author: Joe Duffy

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Published: 2015-10-08

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1473617049

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Children of the Rising is the first ever account of the young lives violently lost during the week of the 1916 Rising: long-forgotten and never commemorated, until now. Boys, girls, rich, poor, Catholic, Protestant - no child was guaranteed immunity from the bullet and bomb that week, in a place where teeming tenement life existed side by side with immense wealth. Drawing on extensive original research, along with interviews with relatives, Joe Duffy creates a compelling picture of these forty lives, along with one of the cut and thrust of city life between the two canals a century ago. This gripping story of Dublin and its people in 1916 will add immeasurably to our understanding of the Easter Rising. Above all, it honours the forgotten lives, largely buried in unmarked graves, of those young people who once called Dublin their home.

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