This volume offers a reasoned critical account of a wide range of travel writing about rural Ireland. The focus is on work by English travellers who visited Ireland for pleasure, from the "scenic tourists" of the post-romantic period to Eric Newby in the 1980's. Ryle also discusses accounts by American and English anthropologists, as well as writing by Irish authors including J.M. Synge, George Moore, Sean O'Faolain and Colm Toibin. The materials reviewed and discussed here, including many books which are now difficult to find, offer evidence about the development of tourism. Ryle also shows how the discourses and practices of pleasurable travel have intersected with and been marked by the dimensions of power and proprietorship, hegemony, and resistance, which have characterised Anglo-Irish and Hiberno-English cultural relations over the last two centuries. Journeys in Ireland should interest all those concerned with the literature and history of those relations, and will be a useful resource for scholars, teachers and students concerned with travel writing and tourism with and beyond these islands.
This volume offers a reasoned critical account of a wide range of travel writing about rural Ireland. The focus is on work by English travellers who visited Ireland for pleasure, from the "scenic tourists" of the post-romantic period to Eric Newby in the 1980's. Ryle also discusses accounts by American and English anthropologists, as well as writing by Irish authors including J.M. Synge, George Moore, Sean O'Faolain and Colm Toibin. The materials reviewed and discussed here, including many books which are now difficult to find, offer evidence about the development of tourism. Ryle also shows how the discourses and practices of pleasurable travel have intersected with and been marked by the dimensions of power and proprietorship, hegemony, and resistance, which have characterised Anglo-Irish and Hiberno-English cultural relations over the last two centuries. Journeys in Ireland should interest all those concerned with the literature and history of those relations, and will be a useful resource for scholars, teachers and students concerned with travel writing and tourism with and beyond these islands.
Contents: Acknowledgements; List of maps; Prospects and perspectives; Knowledge, amusement and unprofitable tours; Ethnographers, travellers and ’decline’ in the West; Into the West; ’There is no country in England’; Peddling the national landscape; ’A house behind a wall’; Border crossings; An idyll?; Bibliography; Index.
Martin Ryle, University of Sussex, UK
'Ryle’s book is a wide-ranging review of the literature of English and some Irish travellers and tourists in Ireland. It is...always interesting, and demonstrates a keen sense of the literature on representation of Irish place and identity.'Ecumene
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