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Landscapes of Desire: Parks, Colonialism, and Identity in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland

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Abstract

Ireland’s Victorian and Edwardian public parks were landscapes in which normative models of class, gender, and colonial identities were constructed. This paper will explore how the materiality of these landscapes—their drinking fountains, railings, bandstands, and benches—facilitated forms of social practice that underpinned an ideology of improvement, creating regulated spaces of display and consumption in which the natural world and the urban populace could be objectified, domesticated and their moral worth evaluated. Yet, parks have always been sites of transgression so that from their earliest years, vandalism and other forms of subversive behavior created alternative narratives of identity.

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Acknowledgments

The Heritage Council kindly provided funding for this project; I owe a particular debt of thanks to Andrew Tierney, who worked as my research assistant. I am grateful to El Casella, Kathleen James Chakraborty, Laura McAtackney, Laura Scharding, and Dell Upton for suggesting relevant references. An early version of this paper was presented as a research seminar at the Department of Archaeology, University of Manchester, and I would like to thank the participants for useful observations and discussion.

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  1. School of Archaeology, Newman Building, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

    Joanna Brück

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Brück, J. Landscapes of Desire: Parks, Colonialism, and Identity in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland. Int J Histor Archaeol 17, 196–223 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-012-0209-7

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