Ireland's Working-Class Literature: Neglected Themes, Amphibian Academics, and the Challenges Ahead

Abstract

Irish working-class history, culture, and literature are attracting increasing academic interest. With the publication of A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (2017), Declan Kiberd could write that its focus on ‘an astonishing range of writing – from work-songs and political rhymes to poetry and government reports, from novels and plays to biographies by or about working people’, would ‘set many of the terms of cultural debate in the decade to come’. This essay asks a number of timely questions in that regard: What is the likely shape of that future debate, in terms of class and culture in Ireland, and what are the lacunae that will guide research and publishing priorities for those who engage with it in academia and the arts? What has been achieved in terms of the recent scholarly inquiry into working-class writing and what are that inquiry's blindspots and limitations? The international contexts, historical breadth, categorical limitations, and institutional and societal challenges are all surveyed in this necessarily short sketch of some of the major issues.

Everyday Streets

“…The contested nature of Belfast over the last 60 years has been well explored by historians and anthropologists, but the need for a more detailed oral history of Belfast's neighbourhoods has been highlighted by Purdue (2020), O'Connell (2018) and Pierse (2020). The planning and spatial transformations aligned with this social context have been investigated by Sterrett et al (2012), Ellis et al (2015) and Gaffikin et al (2016), among others.…”

An Exploration of the Precision Path of Integrating Artificial Intelligence Technology into Japanese Literature Education

“…Literature is a record of human activities in a certain period of history, and appreciation of literature means thinking about human society and human nature itself [6][7]. The concept of education for international understanding should be integrated throughout the teaching process of Japanese literature classes so that we can appreciate literary works more objectively without losing our national subjectivity and putting aside our national prejudices, and experience the original situation of human beings in the world of life more realistically [8][9][10]. Thus, we can obtain a rational aesthetic sentiment and better achieve the goal of the syllabus to open up students' horizons, cultivate students' sentiments, and cultivate good qualities and temperament [11].…”