Utopianism in Eighteenth-Century Ireland Ni Chuanachain Deirdre
The utopian propensity, the impulse to a better world, is found throughout human culture. However, its expression is necessarily historically and culturally variable. Utopianism in Ireland has an…
Specifikacia Utopianism in Eighteenth-Century Ireland Ni Chuanachain Deirdre
The utopian propensity, the impulse to a better world, is found throughout human culture. However, its expression is necessarily historically and culturally variable. Utopianism in Ireland has an extensive and varied pre-history to be found in travellers' tales, the oral tradition of the Celtic Otherworld and in the early vision poems which reached apotheosis in the political aisling of the eighteenth century. Moreover, in the political realm, the vision of a nation, lost or not yet won, resonates in speeches, songs, manifestos. The emergent utopianism of the eighteenth century is predicated on both memory and reflections of the past as well as on visions for the future. These memories and reflections have been imagined and re-imagined in many different cultural forms, both in texts and in social practice. They move from dialogue to satire, from aisling to polemic, from visions of a