Singing Ideas: Performance, Politics and Oral Poetry

By Triona Ni Shiochain

Book Overview

Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, M ire Bhu N Laeire (Yellow Mary O'Leary; 1774-1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song. As an oral arts practitioner, M ire Bhu composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation, thus re-imagining the history of ideas in society.

• Format: Library Binding
• Language: English
• ISBN: 178533767X
• ISBN13: 9781785337673
• Release Date: December 2017
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.1"