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The environmental humanities are one of the most exciting and rapidly expanding areas of interdisciplinary study, and this collection of essays is a pioneering attempt to apply these approaches to the study of nineteenth-century Ireland. By bringing together historians, geographers and literary scholars, new insights are offered into familiar subjects and unfamiliar subjects are brought out into the light. Essays re-considering O'Connellism, Lord Palmerston and Isaac Butt rub shoulders with examinations of agricultural improvement, Dublin's animal geographies and Ireland's healing places. Literary writers like Emily Lawless and Seumas O'Sullivan are looked at anew, encouraging us to re-think Darwinian influences in Ireland and the history of the Irish literary revival, and transnational perspectives are brought to bear on Ireland's national park history and the dynamics of Irish natural history. Much modern Irish history is concerned with access to natural resources, whether this reflects the catastrophic effect of the Great Famine or the conflicts associated with agrarian politics, but historical and literary analyses are rarely framed explicitly in these terms. The collection responds to the 'material turn' in the humanities and contemporary concern about the environment by re-imagining Ireland's nineteenth century in fresh and original ways.
Acknowledgements 7
List of Figures 9
List of Tables 10
List of Contributors 11
Introduction 13
1. The Nature of Improvement in Ireland 28
2. Palmerston’s Conquest of Sligo 47
3. ‘A Voice for Ireland’: Isaac Butt, Environmental Justice, and the Dilemmas of the Irish Land Question 67
4. ‘In The Open Country’: Nature and the Environment during the ‘Monster’ Meeting Campaign of 1843 87
5. Therapeutic Environments in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Hybrid Spaces and Practices 108
6. On Why the UK’s First National Park Might Have Been in Ireland 130
7. Towards an Environmental History of Nineteenth-Century Dublin 151
8. Mainstream or Tributary? The Question of ‘Hibernian’ Fishes in William Thompson’s The Natural History of Ireland (1849–56) 171
9. The Ocean of Truth: Atlantic Imagery in Emily Lawless’s Major Lawrence, F.L.S. (1885) and Grania: The Story of an Island (1892) 195
10. Seumas O’Sullivan and Revivalist Nature Poetry 215
Index 235
Matthew Kelly is a Professor of Modern History at Northumbria University.
Contributors:
- Matthew Kelly
- Helen O’Connell
- David Brown
- Colin W. Reid
- Huston Gilmore
- Ronan Foley
- Juliana Adelman
- Mary Orr
- Patrick Maume
- Seán Hewitt
"A valuable and timely collection."
– Paul Warde, University of Cambridge
"The originality and the excellence of this book reside precisely in the diversity of the fields investigated by the contributors who, in their individual areas of research, show how nineteenth-century Irish history and literature can be reassessed and better understood when the issue of the environment becomes the central critical focus."
– Marie Mianowski, Estudios Irlandeses
"Overall, this coherent volume demonstrates how Irish environmental humanities continues to cultivate unique and complementary scholarship."
– Justin Dolan Stover, Irish Historical Studies
