Farmers, agriculture and politics in the Irish Free State area, 1919-1936

Given the economic and social importance of agriculture in the early years of the Irish Free State, it is surprising that the development of organisations representing farmers has not received the attention it deserves from historians. While the issues of government agricultural policy and the land question have been extensively studied in the historiography, the autonomous response by farmers to agricultural policies and the detailed study of the farmers’ organisations has simply been ignored in spite of the existence of a range of relevant primary sources. Farmers’ organisations have only received cursory treatment in these studies; they have been presented as passive spectators, responding in a Pavlovian manner to outside events. The existing historiography has only studied farmers’ organisations during periods when they impinged on national politics, epecially during the War of Independence and the Economic War. Therefore chronological gaps exist which has led to much misinterpretation of farmers’ activities. This thesis will redress this imbalance by studying the formation and continuous development of farmers’ organisations within the twenty-six county area and the reaction of farmers to changing government agricultural policies, over the period 1919 to 1936. The period under review entailed many attempts by farmers to form representative organisations and encompassed differing policy regimes. The thesis will open in 1919, when the first national organisation representing farmers, the Irish Farmers’ Union, was formed. In 1922, the union established the Farmers’ Party. By the mid- 1920’s, a number of protectionist agricultural associations had been formed. While the Farmers’ Party was eventually absorbed by Cumann na nGaedheal, local associations of independent farmers occupied the resultant vacuum and contested the 1932 election. These organisations formed the nucleus of a new national organisation; the National Farmers’ and Ratepayers’ League. The agricultural crisis caused by both the Great Depression and the Economic War facilitated the expansion of the league. The league formed a political party, the Centre Party, to contest the 1933 election. While the Centre Party was absorbed by the newly-formed Fine Gael, activists from the former farmer organisations led the campaign against the payment of annuities and rates. Many of them continued this campaign after 1934, when the Fine Gael leadership opposed the violent resistance to the collection of annuities. New farmer organisations were formed to co-ordinate this campaign which continued until 1936, the closing point of the thesis.

Azione destabilizzante e impegno politico. Le figure femminili tra il giallo e il nero Italiani dal 1980 a oggi

My thesis analyses female figures in Italian crime fiction since 1980, from narratological, sociological and gender-studies perspectives. It considers the narrative structure of the giallo and the noir, taking into account the difficulties, particularly in Italy, of establishing what noir fiction is and if/how it is possible to frame it in a specific narrative scheme. This discourse connects to the extraordinary success of Italian giallo and noir fiction over the past fifteen-twenty years. In this scenario, I examine the place of female writers in relation to this phenomenon, especially since the 1980s: in terms of the level of visibility/acceptance of their work, in a narrative space traditionally considered as a male territory, and with regard to their writings, which introduce different narrative perspectives. Specifically, I consider selected texts by leading female Italian writers, in which female elements (writers/characters) become destabilizing factor both on the narrative level, by undermining the schemes of ‘formulaic’ fiction, and on the political one, through their implicit potential (as women) for disrupting the rigid models inherited from processes of social conditioning and from political structures. In terms of gender identities, such texts offer scope to question conventional social constructions of the subject: by empowering the female narrative voice and by embodying it in characters (investigators/killers) traditionally personified by male figures. These texts offer themselves as a critical space where, potentially, readers can rethink static gendered relationships and stereotypical symbolical categories.