Journeys in Ireland: Literary Travellers, Rural Landscapes, Cultural Relations

by Martin Ryle

Overview

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 1980s. 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 Tóibín. The materials reviewed and discussed here, including many books which are now difficult to find, offer illuminating and sometimes entertaining 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 will interest all those concerned with the literature and history of those relations, and will be an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers and students concerned with travel writing and tourism with and beyond these islands.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781859282007
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/19/1999
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

'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

From the Publisher

Offers a reasoned critical account of a range of travel writing about rural Ireland. Focus is on work by English travellers, from the "scenic tourists" of the post-Romantic period to Eric Newby in the 1980s. Also discusses accounts by American and English anthropologists, as well as writing by Irish authors including J. M. Synge and Sean O'Faolain. Materials discussed offer illuminating and sometimes entertaining evidence on the development of tourism. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

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