The limits of ‘Irish Studies’: historicism, culturalism, paternalism

From toxic industries to green extractivism: rural environmental struggles, multinational corporations and Ireland’s postcolonial ecological regime

“…If environmental sociology and critical geography in Ireland have perhaps been reluctant to engage in the endurances of colonialism in Ireland over the past few decades for any number of reasons, the study of literature and culture has covered the topic extensively. Likely familiar to readers of Irish Studies Review, this persistence may be due to the discipline's entanglements with Irish Studies and thus its sharing of key (and ongoing) debates and discourses with history, which has been dominated by revisionism since the 1990s, leading to many prominent literary critics to forcefully maintain the postcolonial framework against this encroaching historical recasting (see Connolly 2004). David Lloyd (1993), for example, and other contemporaries in the early-1990s such as Declan Kiberd (1996), Shakir Mustafa (1996), Luke Gibbons (1996), and those associated with the Field Day Theatre Company (see Eagleton, Jameson, and Said, 1990) agitated variously against the hegemonic "top-down elite histories" (Cleary 2022) of revisionist historiography, which sought to negate and depoliticise the "colonial" framework in favour of empiricism and so-called historical objectivity.…”

Sociology in Ireland: Legacies and Challenges

“…A cluster of mostly nationalist and mostly Northern Irish scholars applied the themes and concepts of critics of colonialism such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said to bear on disputes within Irish historiography (Howe 2000: 121). However, from a sociological perspective there are inevitable problems with using literary criticism as a proxy for social or political history or to explain what kinds of society once existed and how they changed over time (see Connolly 2004).…”

Single women in story and society

“…Irish women writers are challenging stereotypes and misconceptions of womanhood, troubling gender relations and crucially separating 'woman' from 'nation'. 23 An analysis of Irish (women's) writing about single women would go some way to shorten the distance between Irish sociology and Irish Studies, a journey that has been initiated by Irish Women's Studies feminist scholars.24 Perhaps placing 'solo women' central to imaginative writing or as narrators of their own lives may first have to be rehearsed on stage like the aforementioned 'Singlehood'? More people are choosing to be ever single in Ireland, postponing marriage, dissolving marriages, and choosing to be un/never/married.…”