A major new book on a subject central to Britain's identity: the great surge of immigrants from around the world who arrived after the Second World War

Lovers and Strangers

History

Wills, Clair

Europe

Penguin

This is an innovative and accessible study of contemporary Northern Irish poetry in the light of current debates about post-modernism, poetry and politics, and the figure of woman in Irish political discourse. Close readings of the work of Tom Paulin, Medbh McGuckian, and Paul Muldoon focus on the "improper" elements of the poetry: the refusal of a sense of home, the disruption of "traditional" poetic form, and the sexual narratives related.

Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

Oxford University Press

This is an innovative and accessible study of contemporary Northern Irish poetry in the light of current debates about postmodernism, poetry and politics, and the figure of woman in Irish political discourse. Close readings of the work of Tom Paulin, Medbh McGuckian, and Paul Muldoon focus on the "improper" elements of the poetry: the refusal of a sense of home, the disruption of "traditional" poetic form, and the sexual narratives told.

Clarendon Press

Missing Persons: or, My Grandmother's Secrets

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War

Belknap Press

That Neutral Island

Faber&Faber

When the world descended into war in 1939, few European countries remained neutral; but of those that did, none provoked more controversy than Ireland.
Despite Winston Churchill's best efforts to the contrary, the Irish premier Eamon de Valera stuck determinedly to Ireland's right to remain outside a conflict in which it had no enemies. Accusations of betrayal and hypocrisy poisoned the media; legends of Nazi spies roaming the country depicted Ireland as a haven for Hitler's friends. Where previous histories of Ireland in the war years have focused on high politics, That Neutral Island mines deeper layers of experience. Sean O'Faolain, Kate O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O'Brien and Louis MacNeice are a handful of writers whose stories, letters, and diaries illuminate this small country as it suffered rationing, censorship, the threat of invasion, and a strange detachment from the war.
Clair Wills brings to life the atmosphere of a country forced largely to do without modern technology. She describes the work of those who recovered the bodies of British sailors and airmen from the sea. She unearths the motivations of thousands who left to join the British forces. And she shows how ordinary people struggled to make sense of the Nazi threat through the lens of antagonism to Britain, the former colonial power. She acutely targets the sleight-of-hand that hovers around the Irish definition of "neutrality."

Business & Money

Economics

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

On Easter Monday 1916, while much of Dublin holidayed at the seaside and placed bets at the horse races, a disciplined group of Irish Volunteers seized the city’s General Post Office in what would become the defining act of rebellion against British rule―and the most significant single event in modern Irish history. By week’s end, the rebels had surrendered, and the siege had left the once magnificent GPO an empty shell―and turned it into the most famous and deeply symbolic building in all of Ireland.
This book unravels the events in and around the GPO during the Easter Rising of 1916. Drawing on participant and eyewitness accounts, diaries, and newspaper reports, Clair Wills recreates the harrowing moments that transformed the GPO from an emblem of nineteenth-century British power and civil government, to an embattled barricade, and finally to a national symbol. What was it like to be trapped in the building? To watch, and listen to, the destruction of the city? Was the act meant as a bloody sacrifice or a military coup d’état? Exploring these questions as they were experienced and understood then and later, her book reveals the twists and turns that the myth of the GPO has undergone in the last century, as it has stood for sacrifice and treachery, national unity and divisive violence, the future and the past.

Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO (Profiles in History)

Harvard University Press

Clair Wills's The Best Are Leaving is an important and wide-ranging study of post-war Irish emigrant culture. Wills analyses representations of emigrants from Ireland and of Irish immigrants in Britain across a range of discourses, including official documents, sociological texts, clerical literature, journalism, drama, literary fiction, and popular literature and film. This book, written by a leading critic of Irish literature and culture, examines public opinion about post-war emigration from Ireland and about the immigrant community in Britain by discussing topics such as the loss of the finest people from rural Ireland and the destruction of traditional communities; the anxieties of women emigrants and their desire for the benefits of modern consumer society; the stereotype of the drunken Irishman; the charming and authentic country Irish in the city; and the ambiguous meanings of Irish Catholicism in England, which was viewed as both a threatening and civilising force. Wills explores this theme of emigration through writers as diverse as M. J. Molloy, John B. Keane, Tom Murphy, and Edna O'Brien.

The Best Are Leaving: Emigration and Post-War Irish Culture

Cambridge University Press

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Books by Wills, Clair