This subject explores events and ideas in Ireland from the Home Rule era to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, stressing themes and rhetoric as much as narrative. Topics covered include the Fenian tradition (separatist ideology, republican rhetoric, emigre nationalism); the idea of Home Rule (Isaac Butt, federalism, Protestants and nationality); the land issue; the Home Rule crisis of the 1880s; the polarization of Ulster Unionism and Catholic nationalism from that era; cultural revivalism and the debates over ‘Irishness’ from the 1890s; the development of radical political options such as Sinn Fein, suffragism and co-operativism in the early 1900s; the pre-war crisis over Ulster and Home Rule; the 1916 Rising, the transformation of nationalist politics, and the rearrangement of Anglo-Irish relations.

A detailed knowledge of Irish history will not necessarily be assumed, but a lecture series in the previous Michaelmas Term will cover the ground in a general way. This is intended to allow those studying the Further Subject to concentrate on some less conventional aspects of the period, such as the place of religion in Irish social life, the rhetoric of historical justification in Irish nationalism, the development of radical feminism and its interaction with nationalist politics, the language revival, journalistic controversies, the evolution of an Ulster identity, and the place of creative literature in creating nationalist imagery. W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, Douglas Hyde and George Moore are as central as Charles Stewart Parnell, Edward Carson, Constance Markiewicz and Eamon de Valera. Thus the set texts and suggested additional sources include pamphlets, newspapers, memoirs, polemic, poetry, and fiction as well as more conventional sources.