Recovering children’s reading: “Queer Treasures” of the Children’s Collection in Cork Public Library, 1922–1939

Mooney, Mairéad

Recovering children’s reading: “Queer Treasures” of the Children’s Collection in Cork Public Library, 1922–1939

dc.contributor.advisor	O Gallchoir, Cliona	en
dc.contributor.advisor	Fitzgerald, John	en
dc.contributor.author	Mooney, Mairéad
dc.date.accessioned	2019-10-01T10:59:05Z
dc.date.available	2023-05-22
dc.date.issued	2019
dc.date.submitted	2019
dc.description.abstract	This thesis is concerned with advancing our knowledge of Irish children’s reading in the first two decades of the independence era. It establishes that the type of reading material in circulation by the public library of the Irish Free State’s second-largest city was substantially in conflict with the nation-building ideology of Irish-Ireland. I demonstrate this disparity by comparing the Cork Public Library’s accession records, which document the titles acquired for its children’s collection, with other source material that illustrates the pervasive public discourse which held that British culture was incompatible with — indeed, harmful to — Irish Catholic standards. Children were presented as particularly susceptible to the messages encoded in their reading matter. Hence, text was both potentially a useful communicator of the values which the new state wished to cultivate in its young citizens and a source of contamination in a nation striving to de-anglicise itself. Other societies which have recently experienced major socio-political transformations have often leveraged children’s literature as a medium through which to socialise children into the new value system adopted by such societies. However, in Ireland, the conditions necessary to facilitate a thriving indigenous English-language publishing industry were limited. Therefore, the children’s collection in Cork Public Library continued to be dominated by British publications, a situation little changed from the colonial period. Nonetheless, a small body of English-language books produced by Irish writers and Irish publishing houses did emerge. This study analyses the children’s titles in circulation by the library during the time-frame, as well as providing a close textual analysis of three under-researched texts by Irish authors. It also indicates the ambivalent position in which libraries found themselves in this period, as repositories of stock out of step with the de-anglicisation momentum.	en
dc.description.status	Not peer reviewed	en
dc.description.version	Accepted Version
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf	en
dc.identifier.citation	Mooney, M. 2019. Recovering children’s reading: “Queer Treasures” of the Children’s Collection in Cork Public Library, 1922–1939. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.	en
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/10468/8654
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.publisher	University College Cork	en
dc.relation.uri	https://cora.ucc.ie/items/4a79a7f8-c430-4896-bd69-0c5340964d8c
dc.rights	© 2019, Mairéad Mooney.	en
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/	en
dc.subject	Cork Public Library	en
dc.subject	Irish Free State	en
dc.subject	Post-independence	en
dc.subject	Reading	en
dc.subject	James Wilkinson	en
dc.subject	De-anglicisation	en
dc.subject	Marie Conrayville	en
dc.subject	James O'Mahoney	en
dc.subject	T. C. Bridges	en
dc.subject	M. Ó Leannain	en
dc.subject	M. H. Gaffney	en
dc.subject	Children's Books Ireland	en
dc.subject	Citizenship	en
dc.subject	Publishing in Ireland	en
dc.subject	Cork	en
dc.subject	Libraries	en
dc.subject	Children's literature	en
dc.subject	Nation building	en
dc.subject	Accession records	en
dc.subject	Library books	en
dc.title	Recovering children’s reading: “Queer Treasures” of the Children’s Collection in Cork Public Library, 1922–1939	en
dc.type	Doctoral thesis	en
dc.type.qualificationlevel	Doctoral	en
dc.type.qualificationname	PhD	en