This thesis will begin and end outside the publication of The Nation newspaper. The narrative begins by establishing the uncertain ground upon which Young Ireland’s contemporaries were operating in their attempts to talk about Ireland in a way that could be understood. Precisely who was supposed to be doing the understanding will be explored at some length, as the sometimes ambiguous character (or, indeed, nationality) of the audience is deconstructed in order to reveal an inherent unease at the heart of attempts to take Ireland (and Irishness) seriously. The concern with who or what might'constitute a national reading public and how it might be created was, following John Cornelius O’Callaghan, a major concern of Young Ireland. The solution posited by Young Ireland was founded upon an historical understanding of Irish nationality. This history was necessarily implicated in discourses around race and the various subject positions this involved. These issues will be explored by reading Young Ireland alongside their contemporaries and exploring their solutions to complex questions of what Irish identity and politics might and should look like. Moving on from this we will see how the protagonists of Young Ireland themselves worked through the difficulties of articulating a hybrid subject position with regard to Ireland and the British Empire. This will lead to a more sustained engagement with the interconnected questions of the role that race and history play in the construction of an Irish national identity. Finally I will deal with how the internal tensions within the thought of Young Ireland are expressed in the work of John Mitchel, suggesting that these tensions are symptomatic of a conflictual attitude towards modernity and the temporal schemata associated with it.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:728193 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Molloy, Edward Ross |
| Publisher | Queen's University Belfast |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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