Eric G. E. Zuelow
Cloth $39.95s
| 978-0-8156-3225-2
| 2009
Drawing on an extensive array of previously untapped or
underused sources, Eric G. E. Zuelow examines how a small group
of tourism advocates, inspired by tourist development movements
in countries such as France and Spain, worked tirelessly to convince
their Irish compatriots that tourism was the secret to Ireland’s
success.
Description
From the dark shadow of civil war to the pastel-painted tourist
towns of today, Making Ireland Irish provides a sweeping account
of the evolution of the Irish tourist industry over the twentieth
century. Drawing on an extensive array of previously untapped or
underused sources, Eric G. E. Zuelow examines how a small group
of tourism advocates, inspired by tourist development movements
in countries such as France and Spain, worked tirelessly to convince
their Irish compatriots that tourism was the secret to Ireland’s
success. Over time, tourism went from being a national joke to a
national interest. Men and women from across Irish society joined
in, eager to help shape their country and culture for visitors’ eyes.
The result was Ireland as it is depicted today, a land of blue skies,
smiling faces, pastel towns, natural beauty, ancient history, and
timeless traditions.
With lucid prose and vivid detail, Zuelow explains how careful
planning transformed Irish towns and villages from grey and unattractive
to bright and inviting, sanitized Irish history to avoid
offending Ireland’s largest tourist market, the English, and supplanted
traditional rural fairs revolving around muddy animals and
featuring sexually suggestive ceremonies with new family-friendly
festivals and events filling the tourist calendar today. By challenging
existing notions that the Irish tourist product is either timeless or
the consequence of colonialism, Zuelow demonstrates that the
development of tourist imagery and Irish national identity was not
the result of a handful of elites or a postcolonial legacy, but rather
the product of an extended discussion that ultimately involved a
broad cross-section of society, both inside and outside Ireland.
Tourism, he argues, played a vital role in "making Ireland Irish."
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Author
Eric G. E. Zuelow is assistant professor of modern European
history at the University of New England. He is coeditor of
Nationalism in a Global Era: The Persistence of Nations.
6 x 9, 328 pages, 10 black-and-white illustrations, notes, bibliography, index
|
Syracuse University Press
