Adolescence in Modern Irish History Innocence and Experience

This edited collection, the first publication to address the topic of adolescence in Irish history, consists of nine chapters which examine the experience of Irish young adults from the 'affective revolution' of the early nineteenth century to the emergence of the teenager in the 1960s. Based on new archival research and drawing on an extensive international literature, established and emerging scholars explore the social and economic, political and literary contexts in which adolescence emerged as a period of life and ask whether there was such a thing as a distinctively Irish adolescence.

Dr Catherine Cox is Lecturer at the School of History, University College Dublin, Ireland, and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland. She is the author of Negotiating Insanity in the Southeast of Ireland (2012) and co-editor of two collections: Cultures of Care in Irish Medical History, 1750-1970 (2010) (with Maria Luddy), and Migration, Health, and Ethnicity in the Modern World (2013) (with Hilary Marland).

Susannah Riordan is Lecturer in Modern Irish History at the School of History and Archives, University College Dublin, Ireland, an Associated Staff member of the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, and the Secretary of the Irish Historical Society. Her main research interests lie in the fields of Irish and British social, religious and intellectual history and in the history of sexuality. She has published on these topics in Irish Historical Studies, Irish Economic and Social History, and The Irish Review. She is currently concluding a long-term project on the social and medical history of venereal disease in independent Ireland.

1. Robert Hyndman's toe: romanticism, schoolboy politics and the affective revolution in late Georgian Belfast; Jonathan Wright
2. 'A sudden and complete revolution in the female': female adolescence and the medical profession in post-Famine Ireland; Ann Daly
3. The 'wild Irish girl' in selected novels of L. T. Meade; Sandra McAvoy
4. 'The most dangerous, reckless, passionate … period of their lives': the Irish borstal offender, 1906–1921; Conor Reidy
5. An Irish nationalist adolescence: Na Fianna Éireann, 1909–23; Marnie Hay
6. 'Storm and stress': Richard Devane, adolescent psychology and the politics of protective legislation 1922–35; Susannah Riordan
7. 'How will we kill the evening?': 'degeneracy' and 'second generation' male adolescence in independent Ireland; Bryce Evans
8. A powerful antidote? Catholic youth clubs in the sixties; Carole Holohan
9. The emergence of an Irish adolescence: 1920s to 1970s; Mary E. Daly