Children, Childhood and Irish Society, 1500 to the Present By MariaLuddy, James M.Smith (eds.) Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014 ISBN: 978‐1‐84682‐525‐5, 448 pp, €58.50 (hb)

Reviewed by: Children, Childhood and Irish Society: 1500 to the Present ed. by Maria Luddy, James M. Smith Sarah-Anne Buckley Children, Childhood and Irish Society: 1500 to the Present. Edited by Maria Luddy and James M. Smith. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts Press, 2014. 441pp. Cloth €65. This is an eagerly awaited and valuable addition to the scholarship on children and childhood in Ireland from 1500. Containing twenty-one chapters and five sections (“The Child and History”; “Charity, Welfare and Child Care”; “Shaping Childhood Cultures”; “Literary Imaginings”; “Cultural Representations”) as well as a robust introduction from the editors, this interdisciplinary volume represents the most substantive collection of essays on the topic to date. The collection examines changing attitudes toward children, being informed partly by children’s studies and recent scandals in Ireland which resulted in renewed focus on children as subjects. While seven of the chapters [End Page 185] were previously published in the 2009 Eire-Ireland special edition “Children, Childhood and Irish Society,” the additional fourteen make for fascinating reading, and in its entirety it is a significant resource for both students and scholars. Much of the volume is concerned with literary and cultural representations of childhood, as opposed to the history of childhood. However, chapters by Mary O’Dowd, Mary Daly, and Gillian McIntosh add to this burgeoning field. In her examination of early modern Ireland and the child, O’Dowd demonstrates that the institutional framework to care for poor and abandoned children associated with the nineteenth century was in place from the early decades of the eighteenth century. This represents the only chapter dealing with the early modern period. Moving into the modern period, McIntosh highlights the importance of the 1903 Employment of Children Act—and points to a further gulf in the historiography, the history of “street” children and the history of children and work. Similarly, Daly’s examination of the role of parents in their children’s education raises further questions about the attitude of parents and the state to the education of children after the Second World War. In the second section, Crossman’s stimulating article on children under the Irish poor law is of particular note, as is Eoin O’Sullivan’s chapter on the development of child welfare services in the 1970s. The early years of the NSPCC are dealt with by Maria Luddy, who highlights the importance of the society in raising the issue of cruelty to children in the public mindset, while Robbie Gilligan addresses the experience of the “public” versus the “private” child. In section 3, chapters by Ríona Nic Congáil, Ciaran O’Neill, Claire Lynch, Máirín Nic Eoin, and Barry Sloan delve into the importance of the Irish Fireside Club, the schoolboy novel, childhood reading, Irish language autobiographical writing, and boyhood. In the “Literary Imaginings” section there is a fascinating mix of topics, from Jonathan Swift’s fictional childhoods, to the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde; from the work of Kate O’Brien to that of Patricia Lynch; from ideas about Irish girlhood in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne to Mary Robinson’s notions about the Irish literary childhood. In the final section, Margot Backus provides a comparison of representations of poor children in the mainstream nationalist press, with Ruth Barton examining cinema and the Irish child. Harry Hendrick ends the volume with a significant chapter on age as a category of analysis in the history of childhood. Drawing on Joan Scott’s seminal thesis on gender, Hendrick explores the problems in researching and writing the history of young people, putting forward the concept that age may hold the key to this dilemma if theorized rigorously and applied with a political and generational consciousness. It is a highlight of the volume and lays down the gauntlet for scholars of Irish childhood in the coming years. [End Page 186] In the introduction, the editors state their aim is “to refocus the debate to include representations of childhood and to engage with children’s experiences” (17). They are particularly conscious of moving away from past institutional histories and memoirs of poverty to examine “other childhoods.” The inclusion of different literary and cultural representations of childhood is certainly...

It is less than a decade since the Irish government published the McAleese Report, which accepted the state’s role in facilitating abuse in Catholic Church-run Magdalen Laundries. At the time the then Taoiseach Enda Kenny tearfully apologizing for the state’s involvement, alongside promising redress for survivors. Although much has been achieved since that time, one aspect that has not been resolved is how we remember and memorialize that past. Of the 10 Magdalen Laundries that operated in postindependence Ireland, seven have been demolished or substantially redeveloped and three are currently in various degrees of dereliction. This article considers the potential for extant Magdalen Laundries to become sites of conscience. It will explore this potential through the lens of temporality, materiality, and spatiality and will ultimately argue for the need to explore scalar power relations if Magdalen Laundries are to truly reflect past injustices as well as become meaningful places in the contemporary.

Magic(al) realism has for long attracted critical attention as one of the more theoretically elusive concepts which has been termed magic, magical, and magic(al), interpreted as a narrative genre, mode, or strategy, and analyzed alongside similar terms and neighbouring genres. While it briefly summarizes the troubling terminology associated with magic(al) realism, this paper focuses on the cultural significance of-magic(al) realism for postcolonial writing, and delves into its role as a strategy of resistance in the representation of culture and history, its destabilizing project, and the possible pitfalls in its employment.

This chapter engages with the transformative period of Celtic Tiger (1994–2007) which paved way for a national conversation on the topics of race, identity, and ethnicity that shapes Contemporary Ireland and frames the question of ‘What does it mean to be Irish’. The question of what it means to be Irish is traced back to the implementation of Direct Provision (2001), the 2004 Referendum, and the re-emergence of the political movement the Black Lives Matter movement (2020). The influx of migration during the Celtic Tiger period meant that Irish identity became fluid and multi-ethnic thus challenging the default identity of Irishness. The evolving nature of Irish identity exposes the need to move away from viewing Irishness under the microscopic lens of whiteness and move towards the need to understand the lived realities of those with a hybrid identity whose presence contributes to Ireland being viewed as a multicultural and diverse nation. There is a strong presence of Afro-Irish culture in contemporary Ireland. Their presence calls for a need to engage in the topic of citizenship, nationality, and race to create a more comprehensive understanding of what the future of Ireland ought to look like. In my presentation, I will highlight the lived realities of the Afro-Irish community and the series of challenges that they face such as racism and resistance to being viewed as Irish. By exploring these lived realities, the chapter will reinforce the need to understand how Contemporary Ireland is at a cultural crossroads and a more positive representation of multi-ethnic cultures, heritages, and hybrid identities reflect this new Ireland.

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In this essay, I analyze how literary imagination can be used as a tool for theoretically exploring the notions of vulnerability, and human/nonhuman relationships in the framework of feminist ecocriticism. In particular, I examine how a precise literary genre, namely, magical realism, can function as a diffracting lens to make the hybridizations and the overlapping of human, nonhuman, and gendered bodies, visible through narrative strategies that facilitate our affective response. Building my theoretical discourse mostly on feminist animal studies, material ecocriticism, and posthumanism, I consider the work of the Italian writer Anna Maria Ortese (1914- 1998) and her creaturely poetics of otherness, as exemplified in particular by her novel The Iguana.

Critique Has Its Uses Lee Konstantinou (bio) Is Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) fake news? I haven’t been able to stop asking myself this question since the election of Donald Trump in November. Whitehead’s novel is, after all, constructed around an historical falsehood. As a kid, the author reports, he thought that the Underground Railroad was a literal subway slaves used to escape to the North. Many children who learn about the Railroad make the same mistake (as did Porsha Stewart in an episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta). Taking his former confusion as a point of departure, Whitehead literalizes the metaphor. His protagonist Cora escapes from slavery in Georgia on an underground steam-powered locomotive. Fleeing the slave-catcher Ridgeway, she traverses a variety of states, each of which skews from the historical record in more or less dramatic ways. “Every state is different,” one character in the novel suggests. “Each one a state of possibility.” Historically informed readers will note that Whitehead’s novel incorporates anachronistic references to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Nazism, as well as twenty-first-century modes of oppression (such as stop and frisk and mass incarceration) into his vision of the 1850s. My opening question is, of course, ridiculous. After all, everyone knows (or at least all literary critics know) that we don’t turn to fiction for a strictly factual report about the world. Philosophers and narrative theorists have long cautioned against asking whether fictional utterances are true or false. These are exactly the wrong questions to ask; the truth of fiction—whether in the mode of realism, magic realism, or science fiction—is in no case reducible to the truth status of its individual sentences. Meanwhile, almost everyone knows (and not just literary critics, this time) what fake news is. For the Macedonian teenagers in Veles who disseminated it, its purpose was to make them money. For those of us who consume it, fake news reinforces our political biases; it promises comfort, titillation, shock, delight. It helps us feel as if we’re reading the news—we are, after all, starved for real news—without having to confront the unwanted narratives of official media. The difference couldn’t be any clearer. On the one hand, Whitehead offers a fantastic world whose distance from our own is carefully staged as fiction, and which is meant to be interpreted as different from the historical record. On the other hand, disseminators of fake news offer an alternative world of ersatz facts designed to go viral on Facebook, which is meant to be mistaken, even if only briefly, for truth. And yet this distinction doesn’t wholly satisfy me. As a novel about slavery, The Underground Railroad arguably has a special place in US literature and culture. In the absence of more significant memorials or reparations, the neo-slave narrative has for decades been a major political staging ground upon which we have reenacted and reconsidered the history and consequences of our nation’s founding sin. And for a long time, Whitehead has resisted stepping onto this staging ground. His previous novels have addressed race, as many critics have noted, more obliquely. Indeed, I would venture an even stronger claim. Whitehead didn’t only avoid writing about slavery; his early fiction sought to resist the literary equivalent of what in the realm of criticism has come to be called the historicist-contextualist paradigm. As Mitchum Huehls argues, Whitehead has long approached race in a way that resists “representational forms of meaning-making.” That is, the novelist has rejected the view that how we represent race determines (or is, in an uncomplicated way, equivalent to) how race is lived. I read the author’s The Intuitionist (1999) as a satire of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). In her slim but influential book, Morrison argues that the American literary canon must be reread in light of what she terms a disavowed “Africanist presence.” Drawing on a powerful tradition of African American literary criticism, Morrison transforms the paint factory scene of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) into a critical credo. Playing in the Dark is...

The Oscar-winning Disney film Encanto (2021) was hailed for its authentic representation of Colombian culture, but it also sparked a discussion on film’s ability to capture aspects of a culture and even change the global image of a country. This essay does not attempt to evaluate the merit of Encanto as a conveyor of Colombian culture, but investigates the representation of the narrative mode, magic realism, as it is translated from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude into Disney animation to be presented to a global audience. Based on the current notion of the feminine in modern animated Disney films, we explore how it may function paratextually to guide interpretation of the feminine connection with magic. Viewers of a Disney film in 2021 may have responded differently according to their cultural background and knowledge of languages, and in this case, their familiarity with Disney productions and/or with García Márquez’s literary universe. We examine how Norwegian reviewers received the film, particularly with regard to Disney conventions, such as magical elements, and the representation of female characters.

This research investigates feminist themes in English-language literature created by Pakistani women authors, analyzing their roles in South Asian feminist discussions within postcolonial and socio-cultural frameworks. Using a secondary qualitative analysis, it explores common themes including female identity, resistance against patriarchy, intersectionality, and diasporic experiences in the writings of authors such as Bapsi Sidhwa, Kamila Shamsie, Qaisra Shahraz, Uzma Aslam Khan, and Moni Mohsin. Employing Elaine Showalter’s three-phase model (feminine, feminist, female) along with feminist theories postcolonial, intersectional, liberal, and radical the study recognizes narrative techniques such as nonlinear storytelling, magical realism, and satire that enhance women's voices. This study provides a comparative thematic analysis that highlights common patterns of agency and resistance by filling gaps in previous research, which frequently concentrated on individual authors. It highlights the authors' function in confronting gender conventions and enhancing international feminist stories, while recognizing constraints due to its dependence on secondary sources and omission of non-English literature Keywords: Cultural Representation, Empowerment, Gender Identity, Postcolonial Feminism, Resistance and Agency. Introduction

One of the aims of this symposium is to demonstrate how the jury system has managed to adapt and survive in a range of very different legal and political environments. In one respect, the survival of the jury in a country that has long been riddled with political upheaval, violence, and division may be viewed as a powerful symbol of the triumph of an institution that has endured throughout the years as a living testament to the adaptability of the common law tradition with which the jury system is often associated. Not only did the jury survive the political troubles in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland, but it also has survived the constitutional changes of the twentieth century that brought about the partition of the island into two separate legal jurisdictions, the Republic of Ireland, an independent state comprising twenty-six out of the thirty-two counties on the island, and Northern Ireland, remaining part of the United Kingdom and comprising the other six counties. Although jury trial was imposed under the English common law in Ireland, this mode of trial was enshrined for criminal cases in the Irish Constitution of 1937 and remains an important constitutional right. North of the border, jury trial has survived thirty years of recent troubles, and, although it has been suspended for cases connected with the troubles, all the protagonists in the present “peace process” expect it to be restored once the troubles have abated. At another level, however, jury trial may be viewed as a dying remnant from the past, more deeply in decline perhaps even than in England and Wales, with only the force of tradition saving it from complete extinction. Jury trials have almost entirely disappeared in civil cases both north and south of the border. In the Republic of Ireland, civil juries are retained only for libel, slander,

ABSTRACTThis article examines literature by Asian writers living in Australia. I focus on contemporary Asian Australian writing and how it has been marketed and reviewed. My aim is to present two major issues working against both its reception by Australian and international readers and the ways of thinking about representations of ‘Asia’ in general. The first issue relates to the publishing industry's tendency to box Asian Australian literature under the rubric of ‘migrant’ and ‘ethnic’ writing. The second issue concerns stereotypes perpetuated about Asian people and culture in both populist media representations and some of the historical literature. Despite a writer's connections to and/or reflections about specific places in Asia or elsewhere in their writing, Asian Australian literature does not necessarily have to be confined to territory, migration or the ethnicity of the writer in its marketing. The stories contained within this literature can travel across geographic distances and be universal. Universal stories tend to transcend race, class, gender and geographic boundaries, convey a complex of meanings and possess deeper truths that resonate with the general community. This article shows how Asian Australian literature can bring restrictive representations of Asian people and culture into critical play. It suggests that contemporary Asian Australian writing or Asian-themed literature is complex and changing, reflecting the transformations taking place in Asia itself, in the relationship between Australia and Asia, and the ongoing engagements between Asian writers in Australia with Asia.

This special issue on Theorizing LatinX explores the cultural and political representations of the LatinX category and its widespread dissemination. The forum’s range of interlocutors—Russell Contreras, María DeGuzmán, Patricia Engel, R. Galvan, Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, Claudia Milian, Richard T. Rodríguez, and Antonio Viego—differently approach and account for the exteriority, variability, and visibility of the X. There is no consensus or general theory on this critical contemporary matter, but the contributors’ in-depth reflections and inquiries provide a provocative intellectual background for this term through conceptual exploration, fiction, the American headline, art, and the literary imagination.

Fostering creativity due to adversity or poverty or by breaking rules of stoic propriety, the resiliency and spirit of Latino writers, journalists, and editors bring pride and significance to their heritage. Since European colonization of what would become the United States began in 1542, Latinos have documented both their experiences and the experiences of others. Latino Writers and Journalists profiles 151 Latino Americans, such as Ruben Martinez, Laura Esquivel, and Isabel Allende. This exciting volume profiles the valor and tenacity of the Latino experience - from daily life to fighting prejudice and small-mindedness, teaching children pride in La Raza, and the need for assimilation. Filled with emotion and intelligence, the stories of Latino writers and journalists speak of courage and a love of life as they claim their rightful place in literature and journalism. Entries in this biographical volume focus on poets, playwrights, screenwriters, children's book authors, journalists, editors, publishers, and others who have worked to advance the role of Latinos in this field. Whether an individual was born in the United States or emigrated from such countries as Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, or Spain, each Latino profiled has made significant contributions to the fields of writing and journalism in the United States. Additional features include a bibliography that provides listings of anthologies, biographies, critical studies, and literary movements pertaining to Latino writers and journalists. One subject index allows the reader to search by such subjects as Chicano movement and magical realism. Other indexes organize subjects by their year of birth and by their ethnicity. This entertaining volume is enhanced throughout by numerous black-and-white photographs of the Latino writers and journalists presented.

This thesis begins with a re-reading of selected texts by Caribbean writers, specifically, Joan Anim-Addo, Olive Senior and Merle Collins and in so doing argues that literary fiction can and does function as a ‘creolised archive’. I argue that a historic marginalisation, which has barred Caribbean scholars from entering ‘formal’ archival spaces, has created an alternative discourse. Consequently, Caribbean writers have chosen the imagined landscapes of literature, a new archival space for the Caribbean, within which to document and preserve Caribbean cultural traditions. If as I suggest, fiction allows for the safeguarding of traditions, how then should we read Caribbean literature? The combination of a physical and a virtual archive questions the literary and linguistic interface that such a mingling entails in a preservation of Caribbean culture. I argue for an appreciation of orality as performance, primary and technologised, as well as the reading of texts as ‘creolised archive’. Drawing on interlinked theoretical works including that of Kamau Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant and Antoinette Burton, I attempt to establish the performativity of the ‘creolised archive’ in twentieth and twenty-first century Caribbean literature, defined as oral in this research. I suggest that the ‘creolised archive’ has a plurality of sources/resources enabling the preservation of aspects of Creole culture. I begin by exploring the literary representation and imagining of black female subjectivity to highlight a reading of the black female body as archive. The selected short stories provide a starting point from which the history and construction of the Creole voice is explored to determine the representation and preservation of Caribbean Creoles archived within the literary text. In considering the World Wide Web as archive, I examine how the World Wide Web might most effectively serve as an interactive archive for Caribbean oral literature. Additionally, I interrogate how the Web might be seen and experienced as a literary interface – a creolised archive – enabling Caribbean Creole languages and literature to be represented.

The land question from the mid-Victorian period to around 1903 looms large in Irish historiography. This is hardly surprising given the fact that, while it was immensely important in its own right, it could not be disentangled from the wider political developments of the time that saw the land and national questions merge. However, with the exception of recent work by Professor David Seth Jones, the land question in post-independence Ireland has been largely overlooked. There seems, in fact, to be a general assumption among political, social and economic historians that there was no land question after 1922, that the land act of the following year defused all potential for future agrarian unrest by completing the transfer of ownership from landlords to tenants.