Abstract
The chapter establishes the intersection of disability and class through an analysis of two autobiographies of vision impairment and the history of blind workers in Ireland. The chapter also traces the persistence of infectious trachoma and its association with famine, poverty, and colonial warfare, discovering in Sean O’Casey’s 1939 childhood memoir an interrogation of the political dimensions of his vision impairment. Fifty years later, Joe Bollard’s 1998 autobiography describes his struggle against what he defines as an underclass mentality of submission, as well as the discrimination that proved a more formidable impediment than blindness. Both works highlight problems of labor and the often harmful impact of institutions that were originally established for altruistic ends.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Barasch, Mosche. 2001. Blindness: The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought. London and New York: Routledge.
Boldt, Julius. 1904. Trachoma. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Bollard, Joe. 1997. Out of Sight. Dublin: Wolfhound.
Bolt, David. 2016. The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-Reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Campbell, Lady Francis. 1921. “Schools and Other Agencies for Assisting the Blind in Great Britain and Ireland,” Outlook for the Blind 15 (1): 50–58.
Cleary, Joe. 2007. Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland. Dublin: Field Day.
Fordham, John. 2002. James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class. Cardiff: Cardiff University Press.
Gilligan, Robbie. 2009. “The ‘Public Child’ and the Reluctant State?” Éire Ireland 44 (1–2): 265–90.
Holmes, Martha Stoddard and Tod Chambers. 2005. “Thinking through Pain.” Literature and Medicine 24 (1): 127–41.
Kenneally, Michael. 1988. Portraying the Self: Sean O’Casey and the Art of Autobiography. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble.
Kenny, Des. 2013. My Sense of Blind. Dublin: Estuary Books.
Kleege, Georgina. 1999. Sight Unseen. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lavery, Francis. 1930. “Trachoma in Ireland.” The Lancet 22: 1163–65.
Linet, Maren. 2013. “Blindness and Intimacy in Early Twentieth Century Literature.” Mosaic 46 (3): 27–42.
Lloyd, David. 2003. “Rethinking National Marxism: James Connolly and ‘Celtic Communism’.” Interventions 5 (3): 345–370.
Lyons, Pat. 1999. A Place in the Sun: A Brief History of the National League of the Blind of Ireland. Dublin: Aquavarra Research.
McKee, Eamon. 1986. “Church-State Relations and the Development of Irish Health Policy: The Mother-and-Child Scheme, 1944–53.” Irish Historical Studies 25 (98): 159–94.
Morris, David B. 1991. The Culture of Pain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Murray, Christopher. 2004. Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Murray, Patrick. 2015. “My Life.” Clonberne 2015.
National Council for the Blind Ireland. 2008. The NCBI Archive Project: Biographies. http://www.ncbi.ie/services/services-for-individuals/library/archive-project-reports.
O’Casey, Sean. 1939. I Knock at the Door: Swift Glances Back at Things That Made Me. New York: Macmillan.
——. 1975. The Letters of Sean O’Casey 1910–41. Vol. 1. Edited by David Krause. New York: Macmillan.
O’Donnell, Mary Louise. 2014. Ireland’s Harp: The Shaping of Irish Identity C. 1770–1880. Dublin: University College Dublin Press.
Phillips, Gordon. 2004. The Blind in British Society: Charity, State, and Community, c. 1780–1930. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Pierse, Michael. 2011. Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin After O’Casey. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Reiss, Matthias. 2015. Blind Workers Against Charity: The National League of the Blind in Great Britain and Ireland 1893–1970. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave.
Rodas, Julia Miele. 2009. “On Blindness.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 3 (2): 116–17.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Silverman, Marilyn. 2006. An Irish Working Class: Explorations in Political Economy and Hegemony, 1800–1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Somerville-Large, L. B. 1944. “Dublin’s Eye Hospitals.” The Irish Journal of Medical Science6: 485–97.
——. 1964. “Dublin’s Eye Hospitals in the 19th Century.” Dublin Historical Record 20 (1): 19–28.
Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz.
Tunney, Cathal. 2014. A Sense of the Past: A Social History of Blindness in Northern Ireland. Belfast: RNIB.
——. 2016. Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Grubgeld, E. (2020). Disability and Class: Blindness and Labor in Post-independence Ireland. In: Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37246-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37246-0_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-37245-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-37246-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)