The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland

by Professor R F Foster (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.40

  R.F. Foster's The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland examines how key events in Irish history have been recast and retold to serve a multiplicity of purposes. In this provocative and extremely funny book Roy Foster demolishes the cliches that surround Ireland's past, examining how key moments have been turned into myths - and, more recently, airbrushed and repackaged for Hollywood and popular culture. Whether discussing the 'misery tourism' of Famine theme parks, ideas of mystical Celticism, the contested 'Irishness' of Yeats or the sentimentalized childhoods of Angela's Ashes and Gerry Adams's memoir, The Irish Story brilliantly separates the tall tales from the truth. 'Brilliantly scathing ... combative, incisive and immensely enjoyable' Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times 'Inspirational ... challenging, illuminating and witty' Antonia Fraser, Irish Times Books of the Year 'Very funny ... the Irish story has rarely received so lively and unbiased an unfolding' Patricia Craig, Independent 'A complex and supremely intelligent revision of Irish identity' Colm Toibin, Independent Books of the Year 'Blazingly good ... lucid and elegant' John Lloyd, Financial Times R. F. Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. His books include Modern Ireland: 1600-1972, Luck and the Irish and W. B. Yeats: A Life.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.25

  Ireland is, after all, a familial country; Irish history and Irish inter-communal relations, often seem to me to take on the character of a family quarrel. And we all know how families get through their days of festival and holiday: by not talking about certain subjects . Roy Foster's books on Ireland have always generated vigorous discussion, but in The Irish Story he breaks fresh ground even by his own standards. Here he argues that, over the centuries, Irish history itself has been turned into a story . He examines how and why the key moments of Ireland's past - the 1798 Rising, the Famine, the Literary Revival, Easter 1916, the shifts and dislocations of the 1960s - have been worked into narratives, drawing on Ireland's powerful oral culture, on elements of myth, folklore, ghost stories and romance. The result of this constant reinterpretation is a Story of Ireland , complete, as any story is, with plot, drama, suspense and revelation. And, of course, its own fascinating cast of storytellers, from Sullivan and Standish O'Grady to Butler and Lyons, from Yeats and Bowen to Frank McCourt and Gerry Adams. Endlessly varied, surprising and funny, The Irish Story examines the use of biography and memoir as national history, and explores through linked essays the stories that people tell each other in Ireland and why they tell them. Foster also shows the danger of myth-making: the idea of history-as-entertainment. His book is a rallying cry for anyone anxious that Ireland is becoming an historical theme park.