The Hidden Ireland

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland (1924), a study of the Irish-language literature in the eighteenth century, was intended to address what its author saw as a serious gap in Irish historiography to that point: the exclusion of sources originally in the Irish language from the understanding of the country’s history. He effectively invented a “concept”, that of an Ireland to which the majority of the population belonged but which had nonetheless been excluded from its “official” Anglophone history. The course will investigate the relationship between Irish- and English-speaking society in eighteenth-century Ireland as expressed in both literary and non-literary texts; we will also discover that Corkery’s original polemic continues to have surprising relevance today.