October is Irish Studies month at #LUP120, and here’s a sneak preview of three titles appearing in Spring 2020.

The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899-2016 by Alison Garden explores the literary and cultural legacy of one of Ireland’s most enigmatic and controversial figures. Casement can be found in the most curious of places: from the imperial horrors of Heart of Darkness to the gay club culture of 1980s London in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library; from George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan to a love affair between spies in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day; from the post-Easter Rising elegies of Eva Gore-Booth and Alice Milligan to the beguiling, opaque poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Garden’s book is an important contribution to Irish and Empire studies, late Victorian, modernist and contemporary literary studies and queer history.

Southern Irish Loyalism, 1912-1949, edited by Brian Hughes and Conor Morrissey, investigates the lived experiences of those who shared a political and social preference for Ireland to remain under the Act of Union, but who lived in the in the 26 counties that would become the Irish Free State in 1922. It covers a range of topics and experiences, including the Third Home Rule crisis in 1912, the revolutionary period, partition, independence and Irish participation in the British armed and colonial service up to the declaration of the Republic in 1949.

Middle-Class Life in Victorian Belfast by Alice Johnson is a fascinating addition to our Reappraisals in Irish History series. Nineteenth-century Belfast, known as ‘Linenopolis’, was the only industrial city in Ireland, a city that was neither fully Irish nor fully British. Using extensive primary material including personal correspondence, memoirs, diaries and newspapers, Alice Johnson paints a vivid portrait of Belfast society, exploring both the public and inner lives of the Victorian bourgeois families who shaped the city’s identity.

Find out more about our Irish Studies books on the LUP website, and visit our Twitter Moment for more of October’s #LUP120 content.

Follow us for more updates and sign up to our mailing list.
#LUP120 | Sign up | @livunipress | Instagram