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Vivid Faces

The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923

Professor R F Foster

$29.99

Paperback

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English
Penguin
29 July 2015
This book offers a searing cultural history of the remarkable generation who transformed Ireland, from R. F. Foster. It was the winner of the times Literary Supplement Books of the Year and Observer Books of the year 2014.

Vivid Faces surveys the lives and beliefs of the people who made the Irish Revolution: linked together by youth, radicalism, subversive activities, enthusiasm and love. Determined to reconstruct the world and defining themselves against their parents, they were in several senses a revolutionary generation.  The Ireland that eventually emerged bore little relation to the brave new world they had conjured up in student societies, agit-prop theatre groups, vegetarian restaurants, feminist collectives, volunteer militias, Irish-language summer schools, and radical newspaper offices. Roy Foster's book investigates that world, and the extraordinary people who occupied it. Looking back from old age, one of the most magnetic members of the revolutionary generation reflected that 'the phoenix of our youth has fluttered to earth a miserable old hen', but he also wondered 'how many people nowadays get so much fun as we did'. 

Working from a rich trawl of contemporary diaries, letters and reflections, Vivid Faces re-creates the argumentative, exciting, subversive and original lives of people who made a revolution, as well as the disillusionment in which it ended.

By:  
Imprint:   Penguin
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 196mm,  Width: 128mm,  Spine: 30mm
Weight:   360g
ISBN:   9780241954249
ISBN 10:   024195424X
Pages:   496
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

R. F. Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. His books include Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, Paddy and Mr Punch, The Irish Story, W. B. Yeats (two volumes) and Luck and the Irish.

Reviews for Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923

Powerful and absorbing ... [Foster] draws on decades of engagement with cultural history to bring an original, lively and learned analysis to a fascinating generation ... Much of his account is riveting and skilfully woven together, with the analysis enlivened by Foster's customary sparkling prose ... gives us a deep and textured awareness of that enclosed, self-referencing, hectic world where the thinkers lived, worked, reflected and dreamed -- Diarmaid Ferriter Irish Times Written with a stern sense of authority, but simultaneously leaving room for suggestion, interpretation, debate and nuance, Vivid Faces is an immensely important analysis of Irish history that will be used again and again as a reference point for generations to come -- J P O'Malley Sunday Independent Living Roy Foster paints a splendid group portrait of the men and women whose aspirations, and fantasies, led to the Easter Rising of 1916. -- John Banville Observer


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