Join us on 5th February 2.30-4.30pm for the next English Research Seminar, presented by guest speaker Stephen O’Neill (Trinity College Dublin). The talk will be livestreamed in Lady Hale 100 and on Teams. Please contact Prof Scott Thurston (s.thurston@salford.ac.uk) for the link to join online.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Partition of Ireland and the Festival of Britain<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Between the months of May and August 1951, the Festival of Britain took place across Britain and the north of Ireland. As a centennial celebration of the Great Exhibition, the Festival was placed within the long tradition of British national exhibitions, but it was a significant departure both in theme and in location. Since the Empire was fading, and \u2018Commonwealth\u2019 nations did not officially appear at the Festival in the manner of the Empire Exhibitions of 1924 and 1938, the Festival was intended solely for \u2018Britain\u2019 alone, and promoted a regionalist ethos in the construction of its narrative as a mass participation event. The Official Guide made this clear: \u2018The autobiography of a nation is presented for the first time at the Festival of Britain and millions of the British people will be the authors of it… It will be the work not of one city but of the whole nation\u2019. This was because it was also not solely held in London like its predecessors, but dispersed in various locations such as Glasgow, Cardiff, Canterbury, and even Belfast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coming at the high tide of \u2018Ulster\u2019 regionalism in the north of Ireland, and shortly after the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948, the full-throated participation of the unionist government in the Festival exposed the political tensions that had defined the culture of Ireland since the beginning of partition. This paper will read the Irish literature and art of the Festival in light of these pressures, and particularly alongside the beginnings of cultural promotion in CEMA and a renewed campaign for Irish unity on the behalf of the \u2018southern\u2019 Irish government. The contrast of the \u2018Ulster\u2019 contributions to the Festival of Britain with their British counterparts exposed the incongruity of unionism with the union, but the Festival also set a lasting template for the writing and interpretation of culture in Ireland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stephen O\u2019Neill<\/strong> is a Teaching Fellow in British and Irish Literature at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. Previously he worked at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the University of Notre Dame. He has written and published widely on the culture of Ireland, with a particular focus on partition, postcolonialism, and legacies of violence in contemporary literature, art, and commemoration. His book Irish Culture and Partition, 1920-1955 is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Join us on 5th February 2.30-4.30pm for the next English Research Seminar, presented by guest speaker Stephen O’Neill (Trinity College Dublin). The talk will be livestreamed in Lady Hale 100 and on Teams. Please contact Prof Scott Thurston (s.thurston@salford.ac.uk) for the link to join online.\u00a0 The Partition of Ireland and the Festival of Britain Between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":242,"featured_media":3085,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[16],"class_list":["post-3083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-events","tag-salford-english-research-seminar"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n