Rethinking the Irish in the American South

Essays by Kathryn Stelmach Artuso William Ferris Bryan Albin Giemza David Gleeson Patrick Griffin Geraldine Higgins Emily Kader Conor O'Callaghan Kieran Quinlan and Christopher SmithStudies of the Irish presence in America have tended to look to the main corridors of emigration and hence outside the American South. Yet the Irish constituted a significant minority in the region. Indeed the Irish fascination expresses itself in Southern context in powerful but disparate registers: music literature and often a sense of shared heritage. Rethinking the Irish in the American South aims to create a readable thorough introduction to the subject establishing new ground for areas of inquiry.These essays offer a revisionist critique of the Irish in the South calling into question widely held understandings of how Irish culture was transmitted. The discussion ranges from Appalachian ballads to Gone With the Wind to the Irish rock band U2 to Atlantic-spanning literary friendships. Rather than seeing the Irish presence as natural or something completed in the past these essays posit a shifting evolving and unstable influence. Taken collectively they offer a new framework for interpreting the Irish in the region. The implications extend to the interpretation of migration patterns to the understanding of Irish diaspora and the assimilation of immigrants and their ideas.