Ireland, Design and Visual Culture

This is the first comprehensive collection of essays on Irish design and visual culture which draws from interdisciplinary fields to address design history as an emergent field in Irish Studies. This volume explores the contribution of the visual and cultural analyses to an understanding of Irish historiography and adds to the broader contextualisation of Irish modernity within an international context. Ireland Design and Visual Culture is an edited collection of interdisciplinary essays on the subject of design and visual culture in Ireland from 1922 to the early 1990s. The essays, written from different disciplinary and academic perspectives, explore the tensions inherent in the visualisation of the newly emergent State from the 1920s. The book explores the shaping of Irish modernity within such visual discourses as architecture, advertising, currency, illustration, industrial design, print ephemera, public spectacle and theatre design, within an international context and suggests that Irish society was more open to European and American visual and cultural influence than has previously been considered.