Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Critical Reception and Canonicity
- 2 Raising a Radical: Orr, Ballycarry and '98: James Orr (1770–98)
- 3 The Construction of the Bard of Ballycarry: James Orr (1798–1804)
- 4 Bard in Residence: James Orr (1804–16)
- 5 Rude Scotch Rhymer? Scottish Enlightenment Influences on James Orr
- 6 Men of Independent Mind: Ulster Scots Poets and the Scottish Tradition
- 7 The Rebel Experience
- 8 The Robert Burns of Ulster?
- 9 Enlightened Romantic
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - Raising a Radical: Orr, Ballycarry and '98: James Orr (1770–98)
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Critical Reception and Canonicity
- 2 Raising a Radical: Orr, Ballycarry and '98: James Orr (1770–98)
- 3 The Construction of the Bard of Ballycarry: James Orr (1798–1804)
- 4 Bard in Residence: James Orr (1804–16)
- 5 Rude Scotch Rhymer? Scottish Enlightenment Influences on James Orr
- 6 Men of Independent Mind: Ulster Scots Poets and the Scottish Tradition
- 7 The Rebel Experience
- 8 The Robert Burns of Ulster?
- 9 Enlightened Romantic
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
James Orr's career invites us to interpret him as a Romantic figure who during his life played a series of iconic Irish roles including rebel poet, fugitive patriot, emigrant, returning exile and revered bard. As a radical writer and activist he developed close links to Henry Joy McCracken and James Hope, northern leaders of the United Irish movement; in support of their attempt to establish a more independent, democratic Ireland he led a troop of men from Ballycarry, his own County Antrim village, to the Battle of Antrim during the Rebellion of 1798. Orr's best-known work until relatively recently was the much anthologized ‘The Irishman’, which was first published at the time of the invasion scare during the Napoleonic conflict and which celebrates the national character in idealized terms. While he identified strongly with his native land and with her distresses, however, Orr's personal heritage was Scottish. His ancestors, and those of the vast majority of his community, had migrated to Ulster from Scotland in the seventeenth century. Undoubtedly it was the liminality of the culture he inhabited which provided the cradling for his radical mindset and propelled him into the series of Romantic roles he executed during one of the most unstable and significant periods in Ireland's long, difficult history.
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- Information
- James Orr, Poet and Irish Radical , pp. 25 - 42Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014