Early Popular Visual Culture

SPECIAL ISSUE

Popular Visual Culture in Ireland

Edited by Justin Carville
Volume 5, Issue 3, November 2007

Writing in the Irish visual arts journal Circa, the literary and
cultural theorist Luke Gibbons remarked that "the absence of a visual
tradition in Ireland, equal in stature to its powerful literary
counterpart, has meant that the dominant images of Ireland have, for the
most part, emanated from outside the country, or have been produced at
home with an eye on the foreign (or tourist) market". Gibbons'
statement, written in response to a photo-journalistic survey of Ireland
during the 1980s, demonstrates the significance of Ireland's colonial
legacy in its visual representation, its subsequent influence on an
emergent visual culture for the foreign gaze of the tourist and,
increasingly throughout the twentieth century, the Irish Diaspora.

The articles in this special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture
engage with many of the questions raised by the current interest in
visual culture within the field of Irish studies, finding the questions
at stake around colonial and postcolonial identity, modernism and
modernity played out not in the canon of Irish art, but in the visual
displays, mass spectacles, popular tourist travelogues and commemorative
ephemera of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

EDITORIAL

Popular Visual Culture in Ireland
Justin Carville

ARTICLES

Reconstructing "Nature" as a Picturesque Theme Park: The Colonial Case
of Ireland
Eamonn Slater

The Magic Lantern in Provincial Ireland, 1896-1906
Niamh McCole

Mr Lawrence's Great Photographic Bazaar: Photography, History and the
Imperial Streetscape
Justin Carville

Modernity and Consumption in Nineteenth-century Ireland: The Araby
Bazaar and 1890s Popular Visual Culture
Stephanie Rains

"A Monotonous Hell": Space, Violence and the City in the 1930s Films of
Liam O'Flaherty
Paula Gilligan

Supernational Catholicity: Dublin and the 1932 Eucharistic Congress
Gary A. Boyd