‘Not all of them are Paddies’: Irish-Americans and the (Un-/Re-)Embracing of Irish Identity
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Peter Lenz
Abstract
Popular culture has conveyed a narrowed image of Irish-Americans in respect to their ethnic, cultural, and religious roots: they are generally depicted as descendents of the Celts, as Catholics, and as victims of the Anglo-Irish (Protestant) landlords' insatiable greed for land, or of the Great Famine. It is true that the Catholic Irish immigrants into America of the 19th and early 20th centuries, most of whom were unskilled labourers, were socially disadvantaged. The majority of Irish Catholics arriving in America in the second half of the 19th century were confronted by the Protestant Irish with the same kind of colonial condescension as they had been by many Protestant landlords in Ireland. However, before the Catholics' mass-arrival in the wake of the Great Famine tens of thousands of Scots-Irish Presbyterians had set sail for America – their “Canaan” across the Atlantic – as early as at the end of the 17th century. According to the latest U.S. Census, the great majority of today's American-Irish are Protestant. As mirrored in letters and literary texts, each population group looked critically at their Irishness – embracing, un-embracing or re-embracing it.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Distance Learning: How Literature Teaches Ethics
- Ästhetik der Faszination? Überlegungen und Beispiele
- Medusa's Gaze and the Aesthetics of Fascination
- Zur Frage der Präsenz ‘starker Frauen’ und der Dekonstruktion des Patriarchats in der Englischen Renaissancetragödie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von John Websters The Duchess of Malfi
- Beyond Beginning: Walter Scott's (Para)textualisation of Scottishness
- ‘Not all of them are Paddies’: Irish-Americans and the (Un-/Re-)Embracing of Irish Identity
- Christina Sanchez, Consociation and Dissociation: An Empirical Study of Word-family Integration in English and German
- Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, with additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English, ed. Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels & Irené Wotherspoon
- Philip Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology
- Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Nick Higham
- The Old English Boethius. An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine with a chapter on the Metres by Mark Griffith and contributions by Rohini Jayatilaka
- László Sándor Chardonnens, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 900–1100: Study and Texts
- Christoph Schubert, Raumkonstitution durch Sprache: Blickführung, Bildschemata und Kohäsion in Deskriptionssequenzen englischer Texte
- Udo J. Hebel, Einführung in die Amerikanistik/American Studies
- Civilizing America: Manners and Civility in American Literature and Culture, ed. Dietmar Schloss
- John Wrighton, Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry
- Nine Eleven: Ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001, ed. Ingo Irsigler & Christoph Jürgensen; 9/11 als kulturelle Zäsur: Repräsentationen des 11. September 2001 in kulturellen Diskursen, Literatur und visuellen Medien, ed. Sandra Poppe, Thorsten Schüller & Sascha Seiler
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