Abstract
Phrases like ‘Irish travel writing’ or ‘Irish tourism’ mostly evoke travel to or in Ireland. A renowned touristic destination since the eighteenth century, Ireland is typically seen a country that welcomes, rather than produces, travellers. Their writings about the country have now been extensively mapped through various studies. Ireland, to be sure, is also famed for those who have left and are still leaving its shores, but mostly in so far as their experiences can be discussed in terms of emigration and exile. As the financial collapse of the Celtic Tiger in 2008 gave a new impetus to age-old emigration out of Ireland, the attention that has been devoted to the Irish diaspora is unlikely to dry up. In an Irish context, the words ‘Ryanair generation’ are most commonly used to refer to a new type of Irish emigrants who fly back to their home country as often as possible, rather than to tourists who use cheap airfares to go on foreign holidays. The latter, however, are also an important constituency within Ireland; one aim of this book is to show that they have been travelling out of the country for longer and in greater numbers than is often recognized in a culture where emigration occupies a central place in the national consciousness, and where tourism is usually discussed as a national industry that attracts foreign customers. To speak of ‘Irish travel’ or ‘Irish tourism’ as referring to leisure trips out of (and back to) Ireland, as this study will do, is largely to go against the grain.
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Notes
- 1.
See e.g. Martin Ryle, Journeys in Ireland. Literary Travellers, Rural Landscapes, Cultural Relations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), Glenn Hooper, Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760–1860: Culture, History, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), William H. Williams, Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), Benjamin Colbert, ed., Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), K. J. James, Tourism, Land and Landscape in Ireland (London: Routledge, 2014).
- 2.
See e.g. G. K. Peatling, ‘Recent Literature on the Irish Diaspora’, Studies in Travel Writing 6 (2002), pp. 108–126, Enda Delaney, Kevin Kenny and Donald Mcraild, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, Irish Economic and Social History 33 (2006), pp. 35–58, Malcolm Campbell, Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), Brian Walker, ‘“The Lost Tribes of Ireland”: Diversity, Identity and Loss among the Irish Diaspora’, Irish Studies Review 15.3 (2007), pp. 267–82, Piaras Mac Éinri and Tina O’Toole, ‘Editors’ Introduction: New Approaches to Irish Migration’, Éire-Ireland 47.1–2 (2012), pp. 5–18.
- 3.
Mintel International Group, Holidays: the Irish Abroad (London: Mintel Group International, 2007), p. 1.
- 4.
Mintel International Group, Holidays: the Irish Abroad, p. 38.
- 5.
Desmond A. Gillmor, ‘Irish Holidays Abroad: the Growth and Destinations of Chartered Inclusive Tours’, Irish Geography 6.5 (1973), p. 619.
- 6.
John Heuston, ‘Kilkee: the Origins and Development of a West Coast Resort’, in Tourism in Ireland. A Critical Analysis, ed. Barbara O’Connor and Michael Cronin (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), pp. 13, 16.
- 7.
Michael Cronin and Barbara O’Connor, ‘From Gombeen to Gubeen: Tourism, Identity and Class in Ireland, 1949–1999’, in Writing in the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics, 1949–99, ed. Ray Ryan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
- 8.
See e.g. Ellen Furlough, ‘Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970s’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 40.2 (1998), pp. 247–86, and, for England, J. A. R. Pimlott’s classic The Englishman’s Holiday (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), pp. 214–15.
- 9.
Freeman’s Journal, 2 March 1914.
- 10.
Irish Independent, 2 August 1912. My emphasis.
- 11.
Irish Independent, 31 July 1908.
- 12.
Irish Independent, 17 July 1908. My emphasis.
- 13.
Michel Peillon, ‘The Irish on Holidays: Practice and Symbolism’, in Tourism in Ireland: a Critical Analysis, ed. Barbara O’Connor and Michael Cronin (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), pp. 266, 270.
- 14.
See e.g. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) and Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- 15.
James Buzard, The Beaten Track. European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 6.
- 16.
Michael Cronin, ‘Minding Ourselves: a New Face for Irish Studies’, Field Day Review 4 (2008), p. 185.
- 17.
Buzard, The Beaten Track.
- 18.
Senia Pašeta, Before the Revolution. Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland’s Catholic Elite, 1879–1912 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), p. 1.
- 19.
Stephanie Rains, Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin, 1850–1916 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), John Strachan and Claire Nally, Advertising, Literature and Print Culture in Ireland, 1891–1922 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 20.
See Buzard, The Beaten Track, and Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
- 21.
See James H. Murphy, ‘Canonicity: the Literature of Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, New Hibernia Review 7.2 (2003), pp. 45–54.
- 22.
Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
- 23.
See e.g. Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism. A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004), Leon Litvack, ‘The Subcontinent as Spectator Sport: the Photographs of Hariot Lady Dufferin, Vicereine of India’, History of Photography 30.4 (2006), pp. 348–58, Clare McCotter, ‘Woman Traveller/Colonial Tourist: Deconstructing the Great Divide in Beatrice Grimshaw’s Travel Writing’, Irish Studies Review 15.4 (2007), pp. 481–506, Éadaoin Agnew, ‘Relocating Domesticity: Letters from India by Lady Hariot Dufferin’, in Travel Writing, Form, and Empire. The Poetics and Politics of Mobility, ed. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (London: Routledge, 2008), Alison Gilles and Sealy Gilles, ‘An Irishwoman in China’, Studies in Travel Writing 12.3 (2008), pp. 241–63, Heidi Hansson, ‘The Gentleman’s North: Lord Dufferin and the Beginnings of Arctic Tourism’, Studies in Travel Writing 13.1 (2009), pp. 61–73.
- 24.
See Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Marie-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
- 25.
See Barbara O’Connor, and Michael Cronin, Tourism in Ireland: a Critical Analysis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), Sturgeon Thompson, ‘“Not only Beef, but Beauty…” Tourism, Dependency and the Postcolonial Irish State, 1925–30’, in Irish Tourism: Image, Culture, and Identity, ed. Michael Cronin and Barbara O’Connor (Bristol: Channel View, 2003), pp. 263–81, Irene Furlong, Irish Tourism 1880–1980 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), Eric Zuelow, Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity Since the Irish Civil War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009).
- 26.
See Ryle, Journeys in Ireland, William H. Williams, Creating Irish Tourism: the First Century, 1750–1850 (London: Anthem Press, 2010), Colbert, Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland.
- 27.
Éadaoin Agnew, ‘Travel Writing’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book: the Irish Book in English, 1800–1891, ed. James H. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 389–98.
- 28.
See e.g. Joachim Fischer, ‘Nineteenth-Century Irish Travellers to Germany and their Tales’, in Das Schwierige 19. Jahrhundert. Germanistische Tagung zum 65. Geburtstag von Eda Sagarra im August 1998, ed. J. Barkhoff, G. Carr and R. Paulin (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000) pp. 536–46, Anne E. O’Brien, ‘Some Irish Memories: Visiting the Vatican in the Early 19th Century’, Decies 59 (2003), pp. 151–59, Donatella Abbate Badin, ‘Lady Morgan’s Italy: Travel Book or Political Tract?’, in Back to the Present: Forward to the Past. Irish Writing and History since 1798, vol. 2, ed. Patricia Lynch, Joachim Fischer and Brian Coates (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 333–43.
- 29.
Thomas Davis, ‘Foreign Travel’, The Nation, 17 August 1844.
- 30.
Bernard Share, ed., Far Green Fields: Fifteen Hundred Years of Irish Travel Writing (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1992), A. A. Kelly, ed., Wandering Women. Two Centuries of Travel out of Ireland (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1995).
- 31.
Digital resources for historical Irish newspapers and periodicals include the Irish Newspaper Archive, the Irish Times archive, JSTOR’s Ireland collection, and British Periodicals Online.
- 32.
Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 70.
- 33.
The main source in this respect will be Buzard’s The Beaten Track, which is still the most comprehensive study of Anglo-Saxon travel writing about the European continent in the nineteenth century. It will be complemented by other studies as more specific contexts require.
- 34.
See the chapter on the Grand Tour in Stephen Conway’s Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Similarities, Connections, Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 189–213.
- 35.
See Patrick Vincent, ‘A United Irishman in the Alps: William James MacNevin’s A Ramble Through Swisserland,’ in Ireland and Romanticism: Publics, Nations and Scenes of Cultural Production, ed. Jim Kelly (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 94–108, and Abbate Badin, ‘Lady Morgan’s Italy: Travel Book or Political Tract?’
- 36.
See Mark D. Larabee, ‘Baedekers as Casualty: Great War Nationalism and the Fate of Travel Writing’, Journal of the History of Ideas 71.3 (2010), pp. 457–80.
- 37.
Buzard, The Beaten Track, pp. 8, 176, 181.
- 38.
See e.g. William H. Williams, Creating Irish Tourism, Zuelow, Making Ireland Irish.
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Ingelbien, R. (2016). Introduction. In: Irish Cultures of Travel. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56784-0_1
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