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The Islandman - The Hidden Life of Tomás O'Crohan

English · Paperback / Softback

Description

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This book concerns Tomás O'Crohan of the Blasket Islands and offers a radical reinterpretation of this iconic Irish figure and his place in Gaelic literature. It examines the politics of Irish culture that turned O'Crohan into «The Islandman» and harnessed his texts to the national political project, presenting him as an instinctual, natural hero and a naïve, almost unwilling writer, and his texts as artefacts of unselfconscious, unmediated linguistic and ethnographic authenticity. The author demonstrates that such misleading claims, never properly scrutinised before this study, have been to the detriment of the author's literary reputation and that they have obscured the deeply personal and highly idiosyncratic purpose and nature of his writing.
At the core of the book is a recognition that what O'Crohan wrote was not primarily a history, nor an ethnography, but an autobiography. The book demonstrates that the conventional reading of the texts, which privileges O'Crohan's fisherman identity, has hidden from view the writer protagonist inscribed in the texts, subordinating his identity as a writer to his identity as a peasant. The author shows O'Crohan to have been a literary pioneer who negotiated the journey from oral tradition into literature as well as a modern, self-aware man of letters engaging deliberately and artistically with questions of mortality.

List of contents

Contents: Wild Things and Western Men: Impressions of the People, Culture and Language of the Blaskets - Oral Tradition and Literacy on the Blasket Islands - The Gaeltacht and Revival - Cultural Production and Translation in the Blaskets - The Personal Voice of Tomás O'Crohan - Tomás O'Crohan and Autobiography - Echoes of Voices Still.

Product details

Authors Irene Lucchitti
Publisher Peter Lang
 
Languages English
Product format Paperback / Softback
Released 30.04.2016
 
EAN 9783039118373
ISBN 978-3-0-3911837-3
No. of pages 236
Dimensions 150 mm x 12 mm x 225 mm
Weight 340 g
Series Reimagining Ireland
Reimagining Ireland
Subject Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies

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