Irish culture and wartime Europe, 1938–48

Dorothea Depner & Guy Woodward, editors

‘This collection is a timely and thoughtful reminder of the importance of the arts to understanding conflict and reassessing established memorial practices around official commemoration and national amnesia’, Dr Muireann Leech, Liverpool Postgraduate Journal of Irish Studies (February 2016).

‘This book is a most valuable contribution to wartime cultural Irish history. It gives readers the opportunity to reconsider a fertile decade for literature and make, as R.F. Foster puts it, “a suggestive exploration into an imaginative territory which has been too long left uncharted”’, Bertrand Cardin, Cercles: revue pluridisciplinaire du monde Anglophone (2016).

‘Depner and Woodward’s introduction emphasises that literature and art in particular have offered spaces for articulating what remains difficult to say directly about Ireland and Europe in conflict … this [is a] rich and diverse compendium … The contributions gathered give a comprehensive overview of the multifaceted allegiances in Ireland during the Second World War. The book highlights the fact that in war-torn mid-twentieth-century Europe, Irish “neutrality” is an extremely contingent construct; beyond its historical dimension, this collection raises important questions about how the identities of individual countries can band should be conceptualised within a larger European framework’, Katharina Walter, Irish Studies Review (2015).