Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690–1830 by Colleen Taylor (review)

This study delves into James Joyce’s literary universe through three underexplored perspectives: the aesthetics of absence, open endings, and masochism. The aesthetics of absence examines how themes of loss and lack, particularly in Dubliners, function as narrative forces that generate new meanings and emotional depth. Stories such as “Eveline” and “The Dead” illustrate how absence transcends mere deficiency, becoming a catalyst for reflection and interpretive engagement. This absence mirrors Dublin’s oppressive atmosphere while inviting readers to fill the gaps with imagination and emotion. The concept of open endings underscores Joyce’s structural innovation, leaving interpretive space for readers to actively engage with texts like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By focusing on the process rather than resolution, Joyce encourages readers to become co-creators of meaning, reflecting modernist literature’s emphasis on reader participation. Lastly, masochism, informed by Gilles Deleuze’s theories, is applied to Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Bloom’s self-sacrificial tendencies are analyzed within the socio-political constraints of colonial Ireland and its patriarchal structures. His experiences reveal how masochism operates as a psychological mechanism that transforms suffering into a source of resilience and insight. By integrating psychoanalytic frameworks such as Jacques Lacan’s concept of “lack” with sociological approaches, this study bridges textual analysis with historical contexts. It highlights how Joyce’s works transcend their Irish settings to address universal human struggles, including identity, desire, and power dynamics. Ultimately, this research reaffirms the multilayered appeal of Joyce’s literature, offering fresh insights into modernist narratives while emphasizing their enduring relevance in contemporary literary discourse.

<i>Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690–1830</i> by Colleen Taylor

Abstract During the nineteenth century in Ireland, agents of the colonial state like the police, along with the administrators that they served, forged an association between political motivations and Irish agrarian violence. They did so not only through the policing of Irish violence, but through the methods used by the colonial state to categorize, process, record, and archive it. Central to this endeavor was the category of “outrage.” Using this category, the Irish Constabulary created a record that impressed an association between Irish violence or criminality and political resistance. Because the British colonial state had control over the production of the archive, it also dictated the metanarratives present in this “archive of outrages” that gave form and function to the colonial state's fears that Irish violence represented a budding insurrection or a desire to fracture the Union. By perpetuating this logic in document and archival form, Dublin Castle (the seat of the British government's administration of Ireland) helped create the very demon that it sought to exorcise—that of Irish nationalist action and sentiment.

Abstract: Two of James Joyce's earliest essays identify a kind of artwork that would remain a model for his fiction: the world drama. Joyce's notion of the world drama built upon an aspect of Richard Wagner's theoretical writing that has been largely forgotten: the program for a revolutionary, nonnational artwork. Joyce reimagined this program within the conditions of colonial Ireland and an increasingly international print culture, conceiving of a work that is oriented toward the world at large and meant to articulate a revolutionary consciousness for its audience. Joyce's works of fiction can be understood, in these terms, as world dramas, which is one of the reasons for their influence. The history of the world drama reveals how the effort to create a revolutionary world-oriented artwork spanned international modernism, evolving as it passed from Wagner to Joyce and then later to artists such as Sergei Eisenstein and Mulk Raj Anand.

Abstract: Two of James Joyce's earliest essays identify a kind of artwork that would remain a model for his fiction: the world drama. Joyce's notion of the world drama built upon an aspect of Richard Wagner's theoretical writing that has been largely forgotten: the program for a revolutionary, nonnational artwork. Joyce reimagined this program within the conditions of colonial Ireland and an increasingly international print culture, conceiving of a work that is oriented toward the world at large and meant to articulate a revolutionary consciousness for its audience. Joyce's works of fiction can be understood, in these terms, as world dramas, which is one of the reasons for their influence. The history of the world drama reveals how the effort to create a revolutionary world-oriented artwork spanned international modernism, evolving as it passed from Wagner to Joyce and then later to artists such as Sergei Eisenstein and Mulk Raj Anand.

Abstract Marx’s writings on Ireland are widely known, but less appreciated is their centrality to the formation of his ecological thought. We show how Marx’s understanding of metabolic rift evolved in line with his writings on colonial Ireland, revealing a concept more holistic than the “classic” metabolic rift of the soil. We recover and extend this concept to the corporeal metabolic rift, showing how both are inherent in Marx’s various writings on Ireland. Whilst the rift of the soil concerns the extraction and consumption of organic soil constituents, the corporeal rift describes processes of depopulation, and their effects on demography and family formation. These “rifted” processes are interconnected such that depleted soil impacts on the health of those who consume food grown on those “rifted” soils. We argue that the presence of these rifts substantiates Ireland’s inability to sustain itself both economically and organically, which determined its persistent post‐Famine underdevelopment.

Studies over the last couple of decades of human zoonotic (animal reservoir initiated) epidemics reveal that vulnerability-factors for such epidemics include high population densities, human-induced changes in the biological makeup of ecological systems, and the distinct human interactions within these new ecosystems, intensive farming practices, malnutrition, and prior ill-health. The recent DNA evidence of Yersinia pestis, known to be responsible for the bubonic plague, forces a re-evaluation of basic assumptions of the Black Death that almost all historical narratives have made. A monomorphic pathogen, Y. pestis, has been remarkable in how little it has changed since the Black Death, and there is no evidence to show that the 14th-century plague was more virulent or contagious than modern outbreaks.Contemporary medieval documentation reveals a perception that the Gaelic-Irish were not suffering from the Black Death as much as the colonists. However, if the genetic disposition between the national groups was a significant factor, then why is there no noteworthy difference noted in subsequent epidemics? This paper uses vulnerability factors for a zoonotic epidemic to assess regional ecological risk in Gaelic and colonial Ireland. Since the ecological change of the period has been largely attributed to human activity, socio-economic and knowledge systems and institutions role in promoting certain activity that altered the landscape is an important part of this inquiry. Pollen evidence is used in conjunction with historic and archaeological data to note regional differences, and to document how they became especially apparent during the Bruce Invasion of 1315–1318. The evidence suggests that vulnerability to epidemic disease was greater in the south-east and midlands of Ireland than in northern parts of the island, and that this paved the way for contrasting responses to the Black Death.

This essay briefly compares James Joyce’s and Mo Yan’s epic novels, particularly Ulysses and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, and examines the way the Chinese writer’s works evoke the Irish author’s in writing style and theme. Despite the apparent distance in time and place between them, the two authors share the experience of living under social and political repression. Joyce’s Ireland, as a British colony, was stricken with ideological conflicts between colonialism, nationalism, and Catholicism, which were exacerbated by tragedies such as the Great Famine of the 1840s. Similarly, Mo Yan’s China has suffered revolutionary projects imposed by the Communist Party, leading to violent histories such as the Great Famine of the 1960s and the one-child policy. As writers of oppressed nations, Joyce and Mo Yan both address the subject of reincarnation in their epics written in the style of a cyclic narrative, employing magical realism to help the narrative delve deeper into reality. Such writing style, along with an evasive tone of the narrative, suggests the authors’ uncertain, ambivalent attitude toward their oppressive reality. As represented by their protagonists in conflict between individual and national rights and freedoms, Joyce and Mo Yan can be said to embrace the complex reality of colonial Ireland and socialist China, respectively. Resisting and simultaneously acknowledging the responsibility to their own nations suffering tragic histories, the Irish and the Chinese authors may well be recognized as postcolonial and postsocialist writers, respectively.

Eastward Enterprises: Colonial Ireland, Colonial India*

<i>Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett</i> by Nels Pearson

Sean D. Moore, Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution : Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010., xi+268pp.

Reviewed by: Rethinking Joyce's "Dubliners" eds. by Claire A. Culleton and Ellen Scheible Victor Luftig RETHINKING JOYCE'S "DUBLINERS", edited by Claire A. Culleton and Ellen Scheible. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 226 pp. $99.99. This collection demonstrates, at times wonderfully, that there is still much to be said about Dubliners—though I am not convinced that it represents a "rethinking" any more than would any other critical volume. Nor am I convinced that the collection meaningfully escapes the trap its editors bemoan or that Dubliners criticism needs the liberation for which they call. But it does hint at what more radical rethinking might look like. The premise for Rethinking Joyce's "Dubliners" is that an excessive focus on the trope of paralysis has effectively paralyzed criticism about the stories. That claim, however, seems sometimes to depend on a self-congratulatory stacking of the deck; and the proposed alternatives to paralysis do not always seem so different from the ostensibly rejected trope. That is most apparent in the first essay, by Claire A. Culleton, which argues that "insisting only on treating the paralysis in the stories discourages readers from seeing the incredible movement that was alive and moving about Dublin as Joyce wrote these stories" (11). That "only" seems to me suspect. As I have looked back at the readings that are supposed to illustrate an exclusive focus on paralysis, I find plenty else—for instance, references to Joyce's wish, amidst the same famous exchange in which he refers to "paralysis," to foster the "spiritual liberation" of Ireland (SL 88). Jack Dudley, one of the contributors who most closely follows Culleton's lead in challenging "'the simple paralysis reading'" (a phrase Dudley takes from Dominic Head1), builds his essay on the sound point that we have not taken "the idea of particularly 'spiritual liberation'" seriously enough. It is good that he does so, in relation to "Grace" here, but to say that the idea is "seldom considered" (173), as he also does, is something else again and is belied by my own review of some critical texts that invoke paralysis as a central theme of Dubliners. Does one really generate fresh insights by taking stories long associated with paralysis and associating them instead with fruitless, [End Page 437] foredoomed movement, as the editors recommend? To insist on the importance of the distinction requires Culleton to treat as absolute and literal—"It is different from not moving: one cannot move. In Dubliners, there is no loss of muscle function" (19)—what the "entrenched" criticism has treated mainly, outside of "The Sisters," as metaphor. Culleton's co-editor, Ellen Scheible, begins her excellent piece by making a more subtle distinction, characterizing paralysis in Dubliners as a condition in which "the struggle to identify … progressive movement … occurs inside the mental space of its characters and is impeded, consistently, by the trappings of the body" (94). Scheible needs no critical strawmen to set up her deft deployment of "The Dead" to get at the way that "postcolonial subjectivity must undergo a mirror stage where it recognizes the impossibility of unified nationhood implicit in its development and recognition of a nation" (108). The essays that follow Culleton's lead in positioning themselves mainly as rejecting or rethinking previous critics' ostensibly narrow commitment to the idea of paralysis seem to me a little hamstrung by that insistence. But other essays, beginning with Scheible's, turn fruitfully towards a different set of struggles. Indeed, the collection stages what I think is a really interesting critical debate about the status in Dubliners of colonial Ireland's women and the poor. It begins with Jim LeBlanc's extending Culleton's comment on "Eveline" to claim that the story depicts "the self-imposed rejection of the possibility of escape from Dublin" (55). Indeed, LeBlanc claims that, in Dubliners,"limits to personal freedom are usually self-imposed or intentionally unchallenged" (56); LeBlanc's assignment of an unappreciated Sartrean "existential freedom" to Joyce's characters results in a rather shockingly (at least I was shocked) neoliberal reading according to which Dubliners are actually free, and just unwilling, to overcome poverty, addiction, misogyny, and colonial oppression. But the collection effectively counters...

Kilmainham Gaol (1796–1924) became the de facto holding center for political prisoners in Ireland by the mid-nineteenth century. Officially closing in 1910, it reopened a number of times for “emergencies” before its final closure after the Irish Civil War (1922–23). After 1924 it lay abandoned until reopening as a heritage attraction in the early 1960s. It was taken into state protection in 1986. Using a range of graffiti assemblages predominantly dating from 1910 onwards this paper will explore the “imperial debris” of contested narratives of meaning, ownership, and identity that the prison walls continue to materialize.

Article xv of The Statutes of Kilkenny (1366) prohibits Irish minstrels from performing in English households in Ireland on the grounds that they have been known to act as spies. Although this particular article is rooted in the specific context of late colonial Ireland and English push towards apartheid, the figure of the minstrel-spy is not uncommon in earlier literature in Old French. The role of Johan de Rampaygne in the Anglo-Norman prose romance, Fouke le Fitz Waryn (1325–1340), is examined as an example. Passages from a number of Old French and Occitan texts enable the establishment of a performance repertoire of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Later sections of this study consider the ways in which scribes, inadvertently or by aspects of mise en texte and mise en page, could betray the authors whose texts they transmit, and in which performers, through voice, gesture, and use of props, could potentially manipulate both the work being performed and its audience.

Reviewed by: Virgil and Joyce: Nationalism and Imperalism in the "Aeneid" and "Ulysses," by Randall J. Pogorzelski R. J. Schork (bio) VIRGIL AND JOYCE: NATIONALISM AND IMPERALISM IN THE "AENEID" AND "ULYSSES," by Randall J. Pogorzelski. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. x + 178 pp. $65.00. The engine that powers this book is paradox. The author's choice of that critical approach and literary technique makes for dense reading (and sporadic semi-comprehension), with flashes of interpretative ingenuity. Two keynote citations illustrate this situation: the [End Page 710] first is "MacHugh's concerns in his present of late colonial Ireland [in "Aeolus"] condition his reading of Virgil and the politics of land following the triumviral confiscations. Such a reading encourages a reevaluation of the poem's response to the politics of land in triumviral Italy" (18). The second such statement is the following: the novel [Ulysses] both exposes the presence of the classical in the modernist and demonstrates the presence of the modernist in the classical. The resulting readings are not those of Virgil's contemporaries, nor are they readings we could attribute to Joyce. Rather, my readings of Virgil are those made possible through an analysis of Joyce reading Virgil. (40) I parse the first statement as Pogorzelski's design in chapter 1 to look over the shoulder of Joyce contemplating Virgil appropriating Joyce; then the author concludes that he has also detected Virgil appropriating Joyce contemplating Virgil.1 However you catch it, there is an active three-way conversation going on. It is well worth the effort to tune in. First, here are some biographical disclosures that may help orient the bearings of my comment. Pogorzelski is a young classicist who has a professional interest in Joyce's Ulysses; in the works of both ancient and modern authors, he dives deeply into up-to-date matters of political theory and national identity. I am an old classicist with an enthusiasm for Joyce. My take on both his "opera" and those of Virgil could crisply be called "'philological fundamentalism'" (14). I like to hang around polylingual notebook indices or negative epic similes. I personally have zero zest for inquiry into the struggle for Irish independence or the postcolonial dimensions of Ulysses, but I am willing to let others give it a try. Pogorzelski generously and accurately cites my work on Joycean allusions to the text of the Aeneid; I have learned a lot from his exposition of the contemporary bases for and literary forms of nationalism. His synopses are uniformly clearer and more concise that those of his guiding sources. At the same time, it should be obvious that, generally speaking, his James Joyce is not mine, though we would probably settle on a more or less compatible view of the Aeneid. The "Introduction" pivots around the ground-breaking scholarship of Benedict Anderson on the roots and contours of nationalism.2 Discussion of this matrix is followed by cogent reviews of the modern concept of ancient Roman political identity and the impact of Irish nationalism on Joyce's fiction. Pogorzelski wisely indicates that he does not burden his readings of the Aeneid or Ulysses with strict distinctions between allusion, intertextuality, and reception theory (13-16). This section includes a compact preview of the book's structure. Chapter 1 presents the evidence for a comparative reading of [End Page 711] Joyce's "Aeolus" and Virgil's Eclogue 1 as allegories of the politics of land in Ireland. The key click is Professor MacHugh's learned suggestion that Deus nobis haec otia fecit (Ec 1.6, U 7.1056) would be an apt title of the vignette that Stephen Dedalus alliteratively labels "A Pisgah Sight of Palestine" or "The Parable of the Plums" (U 7.1057-58). Here Pogorzelski suggests an extrapolation between Virgil's verses, Augustus's early land policy, and the British parliament's Wyndham Act of 1903 that approved loans so that Irish Land League proponents or strapped tenant-farmers could purchase the land they worked. This bivalent context imparts a political spin to both the Latin poem and to Joyce's Irish application of the Virgilian allusion. I do not, however, see enough supporting parallels to...

The story of the Fitzgerald dynasty is, in many ways, the story of colonial Ireland: for almost 800 years, this family – whose spectacular estate at Maynooth stood literally and symbolically at the edge of Dublin’s “Pale” – rose and fell with revolutions and reforms of their country. It is the Fitzgeralds’ central role in Irish history that Aspects of Irish Aristocratic Life: Essays on the Fitzgeralds and Carton House aims to capture. While the preface to ...

“Vistas of Simultaneity”:Northern Irish Elegies for Yugoslavia Margaret Greaves When asked in a PBS NewHour interview in 2000 if the “honor-bound, blood-stained, vengeance-driven” culture of Beowulf reminded him of Ireland, Seamus Heaney refused to take the bait. He replied diplomatically but unequivocally, “Well, no. Ireland . . . [is] in a different kind of cultural situation.” Instead, he suggested resonances between Beowulf and another fringe region of Europe, one often aligned with Ireland in the British and Anglo-Irish literary imaginations: the Balkans. Heaney compared the ethnic violence of the 1990s with the tribal allegiances of the Anglo-Saxon world; what does strike the contemporary reader of “Beowulf,” he said, is that sense of small ethnic groups living together with memories of wrongs on each side, with a border between them that may be breached. I mean, after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, after Bosnia and Kosovo and so on, the feuds between the Swedes and the Geats, these little dynastic, ethnic, furious battles strike a chord.1 Heaney allows that “there is of course an ethnic energy and a vengefulness from the past” in Northern Ireland, but that these impulses are “more widespread than that”—emanating at least as insistently from southeastern Europe. By displacing his response onto former Yugoslavia, Heaney suggests that Ireland’s historically specific situation should not be read too faithfully into the primitive landscapes of Beowulf. In contrast to Heaney’s insistence on cultural specificity, the mainstream media and some scholars have explained the Northern Ireland “Troubles” and the Yugoslav Wars in strikingly similar terms: as tribal conflicts rooted in the blood feuds of primordial, savage Europe.2 Indeed, this “tribal warfare thesis” has been applied persistently to these two conflicts. Since the nineteenth century, the [End Page 31] Balkans and Ireland have frequently appeared as distorted doubles in British and Anglo-Irish literature, imagined as primitive backwaters in the margins of Europe. Count Hermann Keyserling’s immortal remark in his 1928 book Europe— “If the Balkans hadn’t existed, they would have been invented”—now resonates with the opening of Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland: “If Ireland had never existed, the English would have invented it.”3 Although balkanization is most apparent in English literature through the fin de siècle, Andrew Hammond’s British Literature and the Balkans (2010) places the Yugoslav Wars on a continuum with earlier balkanist discourse.4 For that matter, it is striking that Irish Gothic readings of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which find the plight of colonial Ireland in Dracula’s Romanian landscape, became trendy just as war in the Balkans broke out and peace talks in Northern Ireland began.5 The branding of the “Troubles” and the Yugoslav Wars as tribal warfare no doubt has roots in fin de siècle balkanization. But we have yet to consider the intersections between Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia, despite the richness of the texts—particularly in poetry, a genre generally neglected in most literary studies of the Balkans.6 Yet the genre of poetry in general, and Irish-themed elegy in particular, has responded powerfully to the superficial paralleling of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia. The 1990s saw multiple individual poems and volumes of poetry dedicated to victims of former Yugoslavia that implicitly or explicitly bring in Irish, and especially Northern Irish, themes. These volumes include Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia (1993); In the Heart of Europe: Poems for Bosnia (1998); and Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia, edited by [End Page 32] Chris Agee (1998).7 Not all of these poems come from Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. But all of the poems considered here are transnational elegies that mourn the dead of Yugoslavia through Northern Irish contexts.8 In the rhetoric of tribalism in postwar Europe, the tribe is imagined as a base unit of human groups, an almost oppressively intimate collectivity. Intimacy is also an underlying concern in the theory of lyric. Intimacy takes on additional force when brought to bear on the lyric “I” and addressed or implied “you” of the elegy. Experiments with intimacy between poet and addressee—particularly the circumstances in which these overtures break...

In recent years, a growing recognition of the interconnections (in addition to the conflicts) between the worlds of the coloniser and the colonised has enabled the construction of an enhanced collection of differentiated and nuanced historicogeographical accounts of the spaces and practices of colonialism. Indeed, it has become somewhat fashionable in postcolonial studies to emphasise the fluidity and 'in-between space' of 'colonial' projects and 'native' reaction. This is, however, arguably to the detriment of engaging the enmity and violence frequently an integral part of the colonial enterprise. This paper interrogates the in-between spaces of a colonial Ireland just beginning to be defined in the early seventeenth century and demonstrates how they were delimited ultimately by an essentialised envisioning of a radical settler colonial discourse and a corresponding exclusivism in colonial practice on the ground. By examining the outbreak of the 1641 Rebellion in Munster, the discussion considers the emergence of competing and exclusive Protestant and Catholic identities, and highlights the bounded nature of cultural interaction in early modem Ireland.

The National Museum on Kildare Street, which Leopold Bloom visits in Ulysses, was an institution whose curatorial policies reflected ongoing debates about Ireland’s cultural history and colonial status. This essay argues that Ulysses reimagines the work of Ireland’s National Museum: where nationalists linked Irish identity to the ancient Celtic past through the Museum’s archaeological artifacts and loyalists and imperialists used the Museum’s administration to reaffirm Britain’s control over Ireland’s people and material history, Ulysses shows how the Museum could support alternative formulations of Irish identity. Additionally, the essay claims that Joyce represents the Blooms’ home as a museum of the ordinary, paralleling its collection to that of the National Museum. Although he uses both locations to suggest how museums might productively “curate” colonial people, Ulysses ultimately makes the case that museums could best represent life and identity in colonial Ireland through common domestic objects.