This paper aims at analysing the liminal and thus ambiguous position of both Ireland and the Irish within the British Empire through Mary O’Donnell’s short story “Empire”, published in an eponymous collection in 2018. My approach is critically informed by the theoretical perspective of liminal studies, which have characterised the short story as the liminal genre par excellence, and are thus especially suitable to address the complexities of postcolonial identities. This paper focuses on the different thematic and narrative techniques the story employs to represent different Irish experiences, while negotiating conflicting identities and spaces at a time of political upheaval and social unrest – in the years surrounding the Great War and the Easter Rising – thus providing a contemporary perspective that invites reflection and re-consideration of the official Irish national memory.
On TV, real democratic debates can only take place when various points of views are confronted, in a context in which pluralism exists. The docudrama genre is particularly fitting to tackle subjects which are neglected by conventional documentaries. Thanks to fiction, film directors can write and re-write the story of specific events whilst basing the narrative on actual facts. This hybrid type of programme became popular on British screens in the 1990s, especially thanks to the pioneering work of Granada TV. This paper aims at assessing the impact these programmes had on the evolution of the conflict in Northern Ireland, as they paved the way for the reopening of judiciary cases and for the release of men who had been wrongfully imprisoned. This essay examines the commitment of Granada TV as an independent company, particularly in its use of docudramas as a specific genre. Granada’s bold approach to the conflict in Northern Ireland will be illustrated through the study of two docudramas, “Who Bombed Birmingham?” (1990) and “Bloody Sunday” (2002).
The 1970s were a paradoxical decade for the Scottish National Party: one which gave the party its first general election seats, and therefore its first parliamentary group, as well as (in October 1974) its best general election results until 2015; but also one which ended with its collapse – though the SNP did not return to its pre-1970 state. What lay behind the SNP's rise in the first half of the 1970s and its retreat in the late 1970s? Why was the spectacular march of Scottish nationalism so short-lived? The main aim of this article is to attempt to draw a comprehensive list of answers that have been given to these questions, and thereby provide the reader with a historiographical and analytical account of the rise and fall of the SNP in the 1970s.
During a BBC programme devoted to her career, Joan Littlewood described her experiment in committed drama with her company, the Theatre Workshop. Very popular in the 20s and 30s in the United-States, but also in Russia and in Germany, the formula consisted in extracting information from the press, to which the company would bring a fictional treatment that would put a highly political and critical outlook on the issue at stake. Joan Littlewood compared this type of performance to the journalistic version of a “happening”. She would see the staging of information as an invitation to resist the trivialization of topical issues due to journalism and its highly repetitive treatment of news and current events. Though the original themes were primarily social, the scope of investigation of committed drama widened very quickly to cover political issues.More recently, the war in Iraq brought about the rebirth of the epic theatre genre, on both sided of the Atlantic, with performances that challenged governmental policies. Verbatim plays such as Guantanamo (2004) and Called to Account (2007) were staged in both institutional and less conventional venues, from theatres to campuses, as part of a larger project to set up itinerant performances designed to provide dissenting perspectives on international issues. The purpose of this paper will be to try and examine committed drama from aesthetic and political angles and see how far, at critical periods in the British history, it tried to familiarize audiences with divergent viewpoints on topical issues.
This paper aims at studying how national identity was put into words and music by Gilbert in Sullivan in Utopia Limited (1893). Whereas the libretto reads like a mild Horatian satire of British institutions – in particular the system of corporate law, music sounds like the classical sublime eulogy of a conquering nation – commercially, politically and militarily. Under the guise of a witty criticism relying on absurd, topsy-turvy situations and characters, Utopia Limited partakes of a vast national enterprise, building up and asserting the national identity of an imperialist kingdom.
A comparison with the Nordeste region of Brazil suggests that the Irish, despite their poverty and recurring food shortages, were in good health prior to the Great Famine. But the exceptional length of the Famine weakened their immunitary defenses and they became vulnerable to numerous infections. Yet medical knowledge at the time was not only insufficient to correctly identify the causes of death, it actually increased mortality, notably by grouping people in fever hospitals where contagion was rife.