If land has historically been the central and sacred factor in Irish life, culture, and history, then eviction has constituted its profane nemesis, both in fact and in imagination. Technically a legal action taken by property owners to eject tenants, eviction was long associated with conquest, dispossession, extermination, and exile in the minds of most Irish. Inspiring myriad poems, ballads, paintings, and verse, the brutality and injustice of eviction from the land also dominated much antilandlord and nationalist political narratives, ideology, and rhetoric from the eighteenth into the twentieth century.

In The Depiction Eviction in Ireland, 1845–1910, L. Perry Curtis Jr. sets out to rescue and reilluminate the critical role of eviction, both as a socioeconomic fact and as a central symbolic motif in Irish social, political, and cultural history. Two developments in sociohistorical scholarship seem to motivate Curtis's project. First, the “revisionist” thrust in Irish economic history—based on the painstaking examination of records and accurate statistics—indicates that in postfamine Ireland the number of evictions was relatively low, rents not particularly high, and landlords generally not rapacious. Second, the so-called cultural turn in social history has stimulated many scholars to look beyond economic and other structural “facts” as the primary determinant forces in history and seriously consider the “power of myth, memory and emotion” in orientating the action of individuals and collectivities (2). Without contradicting the statistical findings of revisionist Irish historians such as Barbara Solow, Cormac O'Gráda, and William Vaughan, Curtis argues that despite the reality of low eviction rates after the famine, the memory and fear of dispossession, as well as its central place in nationalist narratives and discourse, remained rooted in the Irish imagination and belief systems. By exploring how eviction was depicted in art, journalism, and political rhetoric, Curtis aims to explain its enduring power in Ireland, particularly its important “role in advancing both the cause of land reform and Home rule” (2).

Though Curtis seems inspired by the interpretive method of cultural social history, the approach he takes to understanding the impact of eviction in Irish social and political development, and its wide portrayal in diverse cultural forms, is fairly standard to historical explanation. After reviewing nineteenth-century land laws and customs before 1879, Curtis examines land eviction and its depiction in major consecutive periods of the nineteenth century: the famine, the interlude between the famine and the land war, and the three land wars. These chapters are divided between historical contextualization of evictions, often focusing on regions and estates where significant evictions occurred and the depiction of evictions in art, verse, fiction, music, and newspaper accounts. Interspersed throughout these chapters, Curtis discusses resistive action to eviction, both legal and nonlegal, as well as methods the Irish state and police deployed to enforce tenant-farmer ejections. In addition, one chapter is dedicated to “Resistance,” and another to the “Battering Ram,” because opposition to eviction and the processes of enforcement were widely portrayed through artistic forms and in journalistic venues; in fact, according to Curtis, evictions became “major media events in the Dublin and London press after 1879” (319). Finally, throughout these chapters Curtis discusses how both the occurrence of eviction and its portrayal was politically exploited, especially by successive nationalist groups and movements to promote the cause of Home Rule and separation from Britain, as well as by the Catholic Church to enhance its authority. In other words, despite the great decline in actual evictions after the famine, the memory and symbolic representation of conquest and clearances during the famine were kept front and center in the “political consciousness and unconsciousness of the Irish populace” (318).

Curtis's historiography of eviction in Ireland and his interpretation of its sociopolitical impact are accompanied by eighty-six illustrations, including numerous full-page and color reproductions of paintings, political cartoons, and photographs. While many of these will be familiar to readers and appear in small doses in other volumes, this large collection of illustrations devoted to eviction (under one roof, so to speak) will certainly delight social, political, and cultural historians of Ireland. Without detracting from Curtis's text, the beautifully reproduced illustrations alone make the book worth purchasing.

Despite the adept historical account of rural eviction in Ireland and competent analysis of its depiction in a multiplicity of cultural forms, Curtis's argument that eviction remained an enduring foundation of Irish social and political culture would have been stronger had he engaged in semiotic and discursive analyses of eviction. For example, how did the representation of eviction fit into the larger discourses of Irish nationalists, Catholic clergy, and advocates of tenant-farmers; how did eviction, in its many connotations, relate to the significant symbolic meanings of land, rent, domination, oppression, and extermination; how did the representation and understanding of eviction, in relation to these other symbolic elements, change over time with discursive and political struggle? Engaging in discourse analysis and focusing on eviction as a primary nodal point in the configuration of Irish cultural systems over time could have provided the explanatory bridge between Curtis's standard historical account and what he admits several times is his “subjective” interpretation of what eviction must have meant to the Irish over the long durée of the nineteenth century.