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This article considers how nations are imagined and characterised in relation to the national roles allocated to women, with particular reference to the early Irish state. It examines two related dichotomies, that between 'civic' and 'ethnic' nationalisms, and the concept of the nation itself as 'Janus-faced', simultaneously looking ahead to the future and back to the past. It has been suggested that women bore the burden of the nation's 'backward look' towards a putative traditional rural past and an organic community, while men appropriated the nation's present and future. This thesis is examined with reference to Ireland and the representation of women in visual imagery and travel writing.'All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. Despite nationalism's ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalisation of gender dgference' (McClintock 1993: 61). This article considers how nations are imagined and characterised in relation to the national roles allocated to women, with particular reference to the early Irish state, following independence in 1922. The article examines two related dichotomies, that between 'civic' and 'ethnic' nationalisms, and the concept of the nation itself as 'Janus-faced', simultaneously looking ahead to the future and back to the past. It considers how women's national role as a mother-figure effectively cuts across the first dichotomy, and how it is figured in the second. It has been suggested that women have borne the burden of the nation's 'backward look' towards a putative traditional rural past and an organic community, while men appropriated the nation's present and future. This thesis is examined with reference to Ireland and the representation of women in visual imagery and travel writing. The first two sections discuss ethnic and civic nationalisms in relation to the nation's 'Janus-face'. The following two consider how women's national role was depicted, and defined, in Ireland. Civic and ethnic nationalisms and gender

In the post-Commune period, visual representations of bourgeois leisure on the Seine exemplified an historical forgetfulness that Renan believed was inherent to nationbuilding. This article explores the relationship between riverine leisure as depicted in Impressionist painting and the construction of national and cultural identities in the early Third Republic. Idealised views of pleasure-boating on the Seine, symbolic heart of the capital, celebrated the affluent middle classes on whom the new Republic depended and located them in an iconic national riverscape. Such painting was also perceived to embody the modern Republican values of secularism and science, and it was consequently invoked in support of the developing Republican nation.

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