The poetics of race in 1890s Ireland: an ethnography of the Aran Islands

By the end of the nineteenth century the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland had become sites of both cultural and scientific attention. Ashley examines how an ethnographical. survey of the islands, based on the scient ific claims of craniometry and anthropometry, engaged with and was influenc ed by the romantic traditions of writing about Aran. He suggests ways in wh ich the work of the ethnographers, Haddon and Browns, should be seen as a d evelopment of the poetics of the islands, and placed alongside the literary work of Samuel Ferguson or J. M. Synge, rather than in opposition to them.