Berghahn Books Logo

berghahn New York · Oxford

Home -> Title




Contents

Chapter 1. Singing Ideas: An Alternative History of Thought

  • (Un)doing History: The Authority of Literacy and the Performativity of Thought
  • Oral Trouble and Women’s Voices: Searching for Intellectual
  • Traditions Beyond the Written Word
  • Singing Politics and Power in Society: Some Comparative Examples
  • Seizing Agency: Women of Song
  • Beyond the Limits of Textuality: Performing the Past and Performing Thought

Chapter 2. ‘Where Everything Trembles in the Balance’: Song as a Liminal Ludic Space

  • The Theory of Liminality
  • Performing Liminality: Poetry as a Symbolic Marker for Liminality in the Irish Tradition
  • A Journey to the Sacred and Back: The Liminality of the Aisling (Vision)
  • Song and Oral Poetic Performance as Ritual
  • Separating from the Profane: Ekstasis and Song
  • Moments of Potentiality: The Antistructure of Melody and Verse in the Irish Tradition
  • The Ritual Powers of (Song) Poetry: Satire, Insult and Fearlessness
  • The Potentiality of the Play-Sphere: The Challenging Discourse of Song
  • The Singer of Ideas as ‘Seer of Communitas’: The Liminality of Song and the Generation of Ideas

Chapter 3. Singing Parrhesia: Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire, Song Performance and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

  • Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire: Nineteenth-Century Song Poet
  • Irish-Language Song-Making: Poetry as Performance and the Aesthetics of Orality
  • Multiformity and Oral Formulaic Techniques
  • Local Agrarian Agitation and the Creation of the Poetic Radical
  • Crisis and Charisma: The Song Poet as Prophet and Truth-Teller
  • Identity and the Aesthetics of Orality: New Ideas and the Narrative of Belonging
  • Framing the Revolution: Performing Antistructure and the Vision of the Revolution through Song
  • From Generation to Generation to Regeneration: The Legacy of Ideas through Song

Conclusion: Singing Ideas in Society: Experience, Song and ‘Passing Through’

Appendix of Songs and Lore

Bibliography
Index

Singing Ideas

Performance, Politics and Oral Poetry

Tríona Ní Shíocháin

214 pages, 11 figures, bibliog., index

ISBN  978-1-78533-767-3 Hb Published (December 2017)

eISBN 978-1-78533-768-0 eBook