Existing at the intersection of military history, literary criticism, social history and film studies, The Irish Myth of the Second World War challenges the dominant conception of Ireland's actions during the Second World War. While other European neutrals fostered myths of unity and solidarity during the Second World War, Eire constructed a mixed narrative of pride at neutrality combined with an eagerness to claim an Irish contribution to Allied victory. An estimated 70,000 people from Eire joined the British armed forces during the Second World War; their presence allowed the de Valera government to claim that that Irish neutrality had been beneficial to the Allies. Thus the Irish war myth depicts Eire as simultaneously within and outside the war, maintaining neutrality while assisting the Allies to victory. Instead, Bernard Kelly argues that this is a false construction. This book demonstrates how the Irish conception of the war has largely assimilated the main aspects of the British war myth, which has been transmitted into Ireland through British films, television and publications, while also adding specifically Irish dimensions to it. He argues that once the Northern Ireland conflict moved towards a political solution, Irish participation in the Second World War was inevitably held up as an example of British-Irish and North-South cooperation, and in the process the veteran's story of the war has been almost completely adopted by the Irish public. This is an important contribution to the history of the Second World War.
This is an important contribution to the history of the Second World War.
... heightened the material significance of some works of art: in Northern Ireland the shortage of paper forced William Conor to sketch on the reverse of Red Cross advertising material, whilst Gerard Dillon framed some of his paintings ...
Reconciliation is not the only catalyst for changing myths in Ireland; there is also the part the Republic played in the Second World War to consider. The Irish role in defeating Germany in 1914–18 is perhaps seen as more morally ...
Behind the Green Curtain goes beyond any previous book in examining the myth of Irish wartime neutrality.
13. Ibid., pp. 22–4. F. Wright, 'Two Lands on One Soil' – Ulster Politics Before Home Rule (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996), p. 510. G. Martin, 'The Origins of Partition', in M. Anderson and E. Bort (eds), The Irish Border: History ...
Koonz, C. (2003), The Nazi Conscience, Cambridge MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Labarthe, A. (1945), 'Enough!' in J. G. Weightman (ed. and trans.), French Writing on English Soil, 19–21, London: Sylvan ...
... Martin, The First World War, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994 Gillies, Midge, Marie Lloyd, Gollancz, 1999 Grant, Reginald, SOS Stand To!, D. Appleton, New York, 1918 Gray, Edwyn, The UBoat War, Leo Cooper, 1994 Greene, Graham, A ...
Atrocity Images and the Contested Memory of the Second World War in the Balkans Jovan Byford ... The Lost Cause of the Confederacy and American Civil War Memory, David J. Anderson (2020) The Irish Myth of the Second World War, ...
This book juxtaposes canonical and non-canonical novels that complicate long-held assumptions about four definitive events in modern Irish history: the Great Famine, the Irish Revolution, the Second World War and the Northern Irish Troubles ...
In “The Military Horror Film: Speculations on a Hybrid Genre.” Steffen Hantke identifies the basic plot structure of a cluster of early twenty-first century pictures, their style, and their thematic aims.” Hantke first locates the ...