World War I in Irish Art and Literature: Lost Voices, 1915-1939

Focusing on Ireland’s literary and artistic response to World War I, this book explores works from a range of perspectives that intervened in Irish political and cultural discourse. Works such as Patrick MacGill’s novel The Amateur Army (1915), John Lavery’s Daylight Raid from my Studio (1917) and Margaret Barrington’s My Cousin Justin (1939) show how the war was fully examined by Irish authors--but was disregarded with the beginning of World War II. Diverse voices challenged prevailing notions of Irish national identity, from the bourgeois cosmopolitanism of Tom Kettle to the working-class internationalism of Patrick MacGill to Pamela Hinkson’s cynicism about imperial patriarchy.

Karen Hannel is the founding chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and the creator of the first Bachelor of Arts degree in Veteran Studies at Saint Leo University in St. Leo, Florida.