The Death of an Irishman: A Speculative Biography

Moran, J (2024) The Death of an Irishman: A Speculative Biography. History Workshop Journal, 98. ISSN 1363-3554

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Abstract

This article focuses on the death of my grandfather in 1965. Drawing on the genre of speculative biography, I use the accretive detail more usually deployed in fiction to flesh out his largely undocumented life. Such details reveal stubbornly singular lives, which refuse to volunteer themselves in aid of facilely persuasive narratives of progress or decline. They show lives like my grandfather’s illuminating the story of emigration, race, religion, housing, work and public health in postwar Britain. But they also show that such lives have an infinite granularity that evades attempts to generalize and categorize.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	2103 Historical Studies
Subjects:	C Auxiliary Sciences of History > CT Biography D History General and Old World > D History (General)
Divisions:	Humanities and Social Science
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Date of acceptance:	8 August 2024
Date of first compliant Open Access:	11 September 2024
Date Deposited:	11 Sep 2024 10:00
Last Modified:	11 Sep 2024 10:00
DOI or ID number:	10.1093/hwj/dbae019
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/24115

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