Children, Childhood and Irish Society, 1500 to the Present

Children, Childhood and Irish Society, 1500 to the Present
Author: Maria Luddy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Child development
ISBN: 9781846825255

"This collection examines how attitudes to children have changed in Ireland over the centuries, and addresses how concepts of childhood in Ireland changed over time."--Goodreads.com.

Irish Childhoods

Irish Childhoods
Author: Pádraic Whyte
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2011-05-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 144383095X

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
Author: Keith O'Sullivan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2011-03-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113682510X

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.

Children of the Rising

Children of the Rising
Author: Joe Duffy
Publisher: Hachette Ireland
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2015-10-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1473617049

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.

A 1950s Irish Childhood

A 1950s Irish Childhood
Author: Ruth Illingworth
Publisher: The History Press
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2018-08-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0750986735

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
Author: Moira Maguire
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2013-07-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1847797598

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.

The Politics and Poetics of Irish Children's Literature

The Politics and Poetics of Irish Children's Literature
Author: Nancy Watson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2009
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN:

Although the work of many contemporary Irish writers for children is often complex and sophisticated there is currently very little critical analysis to do it justice. The aim of this book is to redress that situation and to prove that the best writing for children is no less complex and well written than the best adult fiction and offers valuable material for theoreticians. With a detailed examination of selected texts by six Irish writers for children, the book explores the reciprocal relationship between the different time and place of the child reader and the complexity and multiplicity of the world of the adult writer. It suggests that putting the different forms of experience in dialogue with each other promotes a new understanding because it allows for other points of view and other ways of seeing. This book also suggests that the way in which these writers implement the potential of the child reader's different perspective refutes the idea of the 'impossible' relation between adult and child. The opening chapter explores the attempt to re-create childhood and adolescence in a range of Irish memoir and fiction.

Irish Children and Teenagers in a Changing World

Irish Children and Teenagers in a Changing World
Author: David Hardiman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2008-10-15
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN:

This book provides an engaging and informative insight into the experiences, dreams and hopes of children and teenagers in contemporary Ireland. O’Connor analyzes a unique data set: a random sample of 4,100 texts drawn from roughly 34,000 texts written by young people aged 10-12 years and 14-17 years, in response to a nationwide invitation to describe themselves and the Ireland they inhabit. The young people’s voices give the book a vivid reality, which is illuminated by the application of sociological concepts including global and local, individualization, and ways of ‘doing boy/girl.’ The study leads us towards a better understanding of contemporary social problems by locating these young people’s accounts within the broader context of cultural change where collective identities have become weaker; where the local is enmeshed with the global; where children anticipate a predictable future and teenagers focus on an extended present; where gender is no longer salient but yet in many ways remains a submerged framework mapping their life styles, life choices and relationships. Written in an accessible style, the book presents a picture that is sometimes challenging, sometimes reassuring but always informative. Containing extensive quotations, it will be of interest not only to students and lecturers in sociology, education, child and youth studies, Irish studies and psychology but to thoughtful parents and teachers at first and second level, and especially those whose students took part in the Write Hear, Write Now project.

The Speckled People

The Speckled People
Author: Hugo Hamilton
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 94
Release: 2011-10-04
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1408171201

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.