Overview

Painting History: The Murals of Northern Ireland, 1908–2024 is the first book-length study of the oldest and most enduring tradition of political wall art. Tony Crowley shows how muralism became an important medium for the unionist and loyalist community in its political domination of public space before and after Partition. The text also demonstrates that nationalists and republicans painted few murals before the start of the 1981 Hunger Strike, during which they painted wall art across republican areas of Northern Ireland as a way of publicizing their cause. In the context of a divided society, by the mid 1980s murals had become an established genre for the expression of political demands and aspirations. In Painting History, Tony Crowley provides a detailed analysis of the complex tradition of muralism in the context of the history that produced it, with particular attention given to the cultural politics of this remarkable form. The book also raises and discusses a series of theoretical questions about murals and muralism that transcend Northern Ireland: issues of propriety and legality, form and content, authority and censorship. The work ends with a consideration of the future of the murals in a still polarized but changing region.

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Tony Crowley is professor of English at the University of Leeds. His monographs include Language in History: Theories and Texts (1996), The Politics of Discourse (2003), Wars of Words: the Politics of Language in Ireland 1537–2004 (2005), Scouse: A Social and Cultural History (2012) among others. His archive of some 22,000 images of murals, graffiti, and street in Northern Ireland (1979–2024) is available in the Claremont Colleges Digital Library.

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