Irish Media and Popular Culture

This book maps a new cultural history that explores the media and popular culture of late-twentieth century Ireland and asks: How are modernity, popular culture and the media related in Ireland in ways that disjunctively connect to dominant forms of Anglo-American culture? How can we engage in the interpretation of symbolic forms across a range of contemporary, mediated and popular cultural activities? Does an analysis of the forms and activities within this mediascape offer any significant revision of existing narratives of Ireland's cultural development? Its four-part structure focuses on chapter-length case studies of selected print, electronic, performative and cinematic media, examining how popular forms and processes within the media have acted as sites where particular social and cultural conformities were defined and maintained at different stages in the contemporary history of Ireland. It demonstrates how the unstable nature of media and popular cultural forms also acted as harbingers of dissent and expressions of difference at particular moments and locations. Based on an innovative combination of audio-visual and print archive research, textual analysis, up to date secondary critical sources and selected new interview material, this study is illustrated with stills and relevant statistics to provide the reader with a stimulating critical study of Ireland's changing mediascape.