Varieties of Irishness

Historical Revisionism, Irish Style

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8100673
AutoresNancy J Curtin (0000-0003-0845-4878, autor de correspondencia)
Año1996
Volumen35
Número2
Páginas195-219
Fecha de publicación1996-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of British Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1086/386104
OpenAlexW2014845819
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas51

In an 1989 article in Irish Historical Studies , Brendan Bradshaw challenged the current practice of Irish history by arguing that an “ideology of professionalism” associated with the modern historiographical tradition established a half century ago, and now entrenched in the academy, “served to inhibit rather than to enhance the understanding of the Irish historical experience.” Inspired by the cautionary injunctions of Herbert Butterfield about teleological history, T. W. Moody, D. B. Quinn, and R. Dudley Edwards launched this revisionist enterprise in the 1930s, transforming Irish historiography which until then was subordinating historical truth to the cause of the nation. Their mission was to cleanse the historical record of its mythological clutter, to engage in what Moody called “the mental war of liberation from servitude to the myth” of Irish nationalist history, by applying scientific methods to the evidence, separating fact from destructive and divisive fictions. Events in the 1960s and 1970s reinforced this sense that the Irish people needed liberation from nationalist mythology, a mythology held responsible for the eruption of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and which offered legitimation to the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the nightmare of history from which professional historians could rouse the Irish people. Nationalist heroes and movements came under even more aggressive, critical scrutiny. But much of this was of the character of specific studies. The revisionists seemed to have succeeded in tearing down the edifice of nationalist history, but they had offered little in the way of a general, synthetic history to replace it

Archaeology · Art · Historiography · Ideology · Irish · Literature · Mythology · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Classics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy