Contemporary Irish Literature Research Articles

“Now I could tell my story”. Eavan Boland’s motifs of revising the Irish poetic tradition

AbstractThe prominent place that Eavan Boland occupies in the essentially male-defined and male-dominated canon of contemporary Irish literature is the result of the poet’s pioneering act of entering into a reconstructive and resituating dialogue with that tradition and which in turn has paved the way for numerous younger women poets to claim a place for their voices and redefine that tradition itself. The paper seeks to examine and explore a number of topoi with and through which Eavan Boland would negotiate her position in relation to the Irish literary tradition, from broad general motifs to ones peculiar to the Irish context.

Colonising the Nonhuman Other in Anne Haverty’s "One Day as a Tiger"

The rise of new ethical anxieties in the interaction between humans a nonhumans alike has not left human social relations and philosophical frameworks unaffected. One such framework could be argued to be ecocriticism, a tool of literary analysis that, although not exceptionally new, is not widely applied to contemporary Irish literature yet. In this article, I explore one instance of the animal trope in the novel One Day as a Tiger (1997), written by the Irishwoman Anne Haverty. The novel could explore and denounce how Irish society has not totally rejected colonialism and its anthropocentric foundation; instead, Haverty’s fictional Ireland seems to have appropriated the colonising discourse once applied to them and turned it against the nonhuman realm, especially animals, to justify their existence as an independent State. Therefore, the aim of this article is to explore if and to what extent the human protagonist of the novel otherises and reduces the nonhuman protagonist, a ewe, into a symbol of Irish nationality.

OBRASCI GRAĐENjA KNjIŽEVNIH (ANTI)JUNAKA U PROZI VILIJAMA TREVORA NA PRIMERU ROMANA „FELISIJINO PUTOVANjE“

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the patterns of building literary (anti)heroes in the prose of William Trevor based on the novel Felicia’s Journey (1994). As a standard-bearer of new realism in the contemporary Irish and British literature, William Trevor writes novels, novellas, and short stories with humanised characters, which he builds using the mimetic literary method, shapes by psychological descrip- tion, and evaluates according to the criteria of believability. As a Protestant in the Catholic Ireland, an Irishman in England and a countryman in London, the author forges his characters on the front line of the archetypal battle between the good and the evil in man and nature, Ireland and England, the country and the city, the old- world religiousness and the new-world loss of faith. The startling plight of all Trevor’s antiheroes (marginalised, atomised and alienated) initiates their introspective evalu- ation until the cathartic self-awareness is achieved through personal epiphany. The most striking character transformations occur on life’s by-paths which irreversibly lead from virtue to sin, from innocence to experience, from the collective and general to the individual and personal. However, the characters’ epiphanic self-awareness is always and exclusively paid by happiness, the loss of which poses the underlying atmosphere, tone, colour, and leitmotif of each and every Trevor’s literary work.

‘LITERAL FEELING’: RORY GLEESON’S TOUCH IN WRITING THE LIFE

Rory Gleeson is a novelist, screenwriter and playwright. His novel Rockadoon Shore was published in 2017 by John Murray Press. His short film Psychic debuted at The Galway Film Fleadh in 2018 before its showing on SkyArts. His play Blood in the Dirt premiered at The New Theatre in Dublin in 2019. He was the 2019 Burgess Fellow for Fiction at the University of Manchester. His latest piece of non-fiction will be published by Granta in 2021. This interview was taken in 2020, after Rory Gleeson was asked to be the contributing author to the Art and Craft of Translation Contest annually held at the Institute of Philology, Journalism and Cross-cultural Communication (Southern Federal University). Interview by Anush Akopyan. Key words : Rory Gleeson, creative writing, contemporary Irish literature, writer’s interview. DOI 10.18522/2415-8852-2020-4-53-61

Literary Contributions by Paddy Bushe, Bernard O'Donoghue and Suso de Toro

Paddy Bushe was born in Dublin in 1948 and now lives in Waterville, Co. Kerry. He writes in Irish and in English. His collections include "Poems With Amergin" (1989), "Digging Towards The Light" (1994), "In Ainneoin na gCloch" (2001), "Hopkins on Skellig Michael" (2001) and "The Nitpicking of Cranes" (2004). "To Ring in Silence: New and Selected Poems" was published in 2008. He edited the anthology "Voices at the World’s Edge: Irish Poets on Skellig Michael" (Dedalus, 2010). His latest collections are "My Lord Buddha of Carraig Eanna" (2012), "On A Turning Wing" (2016) and "Móinéar an Chroí" (2017). He received the 2006 Oireachtas prize for poetry, the 2006 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award and the 2017 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. He is a member of Aosdána. In 2020, Dedalus Press publishes "Double Vision", a two-volume publication comprising Second Sight, the author’s own selection of his Irish language poems, accompanied by the author’s own translations, as well as "Peripheral Vision", his latest collection in English.
 Bernard O’Donoghue’s was born in Cullen, County Cork in 1945, he has lived in Oxford since 1965. His first full-length collection, "The Weakness", emerged in 1991 with Chatto & Windus, following on from a trilogy of pamphlets. His second collection, "Gunpowder" (1995) won the Whitbread Poetry Award. More recently, he published the collection "Outliving" and a selection of his poetry by Faber in 2008, followed by "Farmers Cross" (2011), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2009 he was honoured by the Society of Authors with a Cholmondeley Award. Until recently, O’Donoghue taught and worked for Oxford University, specialising in medieval verse and contemporary Irish literature. His reputation as a scholar consolidated in 1995 with his critical work, "Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry", described as “excellent” by Ian Sansom in "The Guardian". More recently O’Donoghue edited the "Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney" and has produced a number of translations of medieval works, including "Gawain and the Green Knight" (2006) and, forthcoming from Faber, "Piers Plowman".
 Xesús Miguel "Suso" de Toro Santos (1956-) is a Spanish writer. A modern and contemporary arts graduate, he has published more than twenty novels and plays in Galician. He is a television scriptwriter and regular contributor to the press and radio. Suso de Toro writes in Galician and sometimes translates his own work into Spanish. His works have been translated into several languages, and have been taught in European universities. There are plans to make three of his works into films: "A Sombra Cazadora" (1994), "Non Volvas" (1997), and "Calzados Lola" (2000).

“Accursed Time”: Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun

Abstract: This article analyses the connecting threads between the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze – as they appear in his 1968 text Difference and Repetition, which is one of Deleuze’s major solo works (along with The Logic of Sense) prior to his famous, anti-Oedipal collaborations with Félix Guattari – and the final novel written by John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002). It shall be argued that Deleuze’s conceptualisations of temporality and humanity’s relationship with its physical surroundings find their perfect literary realisations in the pages of McGahern’s That They May Face as he attempts to provide a vision of contemporary Ireland’s transcending of James Joyce’s nightmare of history and the deadening habit of what Samuel Beckett’s character Pozzo calls “accursed time”. Shakespeare, Proust, Joyce, and Beckett are the four literary authors who most unite Deleuze and McGahern in shared enthusiasm and they shall be considered as mediating presences between McGahern and Deleuze throughout the course of the article. It shall be argued that a Deleuzian vision lies at the heart of contemporary Irish literature and that That They May Face the Rising Sun represents a primary textual example of this literary strand.

Do projeto de tradução de Liffey Swim, de Jessica Traynor, para o processo de tradução do poema sin-eater

Liffey Swim is a book of poems by the Irish writer Jessica Traynor (2015). It features characteristics to contemporary Irish literature, such as Irish identity and local culture related to other cultures. The Liffey Swim translation project takes into account Irishness alongside the theoretical and methodological reflections on translation of poetry through translation stages that observed form and content. This article presents a two-step result from the translation process of one of the poems, Sin-eater. The poem depicts a death ritual in Ireland, one of the defining themes of Irish literature. The first stage comprises the result of a cultural and linguistic revision, while the second stage focused on the rhythm and other phonetic aspects, for the reconstruction of image and spirit.

González-Arias, Luz Mar ed. 2017. National Identities and Imperfections in Contemporary Irish Literature: Unbecoming Irishness, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 248 Pages.

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“Writing is essentially a very, very innocent thing”: In Conversation with Marina Carr

Marina Carr participated in the Conference “Irish Itinerary 2018 (EFACIS): Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Literature and Culture” at the University of La Rioja. The following interview took place there on 13 February 2018, covering issues of gender, trauma, identity and travellers in an Irish context. Greek tragedy and myth, and Spanish adaptations of Marina Carr’s plays and creative writing were discussed as well. Carr offers a number of insightful responses and shares her views on gender, relationships and her motivations to write.

National Identities and Imperfection in Contemporary Irish Literature: Unbecoming Irishness

Gonzáles-Arias, Luz Mar (ed.). National Identities and Imperfection in Contemporary Irish Literature: Unbecoming Irishness. London; Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 248pp.

Introduction: Gender Issues in Contemporary Irish Literature

Introduction: Gender Issues in Contemporary Irish Literature

The Emergent Postsecular in Contemporary Irish Literature

The Emergent Postsecular in Contemporary Irish Literature

English

Benedict Anderson claims In Imagined Communities that nationalism and national identity are but fruits of a politicised imagination, and that the nation only acts what the State imagines. A decade later, in Tom Inglis re-examines such an imagination in a postcolonial Irish context, and traces the significance of the land in the process of identity formation. Anderson’s and Inglis’s understanding of personal identity formation resonate with the Deleuzian reading of a Rhizome-based local identity set against a monolithic backdrop of root-tree system. Where the former variety promises an animate, multifaceted identity, the latter conditions the development of Irishness to a closed system in which values are yet to be pronounced by the governing root, namely, the State. This is where one can draw the very red thin line between personal and national perception of reality (of being). The multilayered and dialectical nature of the modern Irish novel and its critical caliber has created an accurate touchstone that enables the Irish to identify the very two sides of reality. For the Irish, on the one hand, reality emerges as a monolithic, obdurate construct, fabricated and observed by the State; and on the other, it materialises as the nation’s memory of economic hardships, political marginalisation, ideological bifurcations, and psychological exiles. By exploring James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1974), this paper shall answer the question that Anderson and Inglis failed to address: what made the contemporary Irish literature a difficult reflection of postcolonial identity, which neither accepts the State’s atavistic nativism nor identifies with neocolonial political mindset? Keywords: Modern Irish Novel; Memory Studies; James Joyce; Flann O’Brien; Postcolonial Literature

A Map of Things Known and Lost in Anne Enright’s The Green Road

There is an ongoing debate among critics of contemporary Irish literature that divides those specialists who consider that Irish writers are too intent on revisiting the past history of the island, from the, comparatively speaking, scarce number of scholars who have been able to notice how contemporary Irish authors are minutely dissecting in their fictions the present socio-cultural circumstances of Ireland. Therefore, Fintan O'Toole (2001, 2010), Declan Kiberd (2005), Julian Gough (2010), and Eamon Maher and Eugene O'Brien (2014) represent those critical voices that maintain that the Irish writers are too intent on, almost obsessed with, looking to the past, and that they seem unable to dissect in their fictions the changing atmosphere of the island. Thus, Julian Gough stated in 2010 that "If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award winning Irish literary fiction, you wouldn't know television had been invented" (1). More recently, Eamon Maher and Eugene O'Brien exemplified this alleged disregard for the present focusing on the years of prosperity in Ireland, and wondered why "it was that our writers and artists, along with politicians, economists, academics and the media in general, failed to alert the public in an adequate manner to the dangers associated with the Celtic Tiger. Why was there no major novel, for example, that exposed what was really happening in Ireland at that time?" (2014: 6). Nevertheless, Anne Fogarty (2003), Eilis Ni Dhuibhne (2010), and Susan Cahill (2012) have been able to identify authors and works concerned with bearing witness to contemporary life in Ireland. In this sense, Ni Dhuibhne proves her point by offering some examples of novels all dealing in whole or in part with modern Ireland in its various manifestations pre-Celtic Tiger, Celtic Tiger, post-Celtic Tiger: Nuala O'Faolain, Almost There; Mary Rose Callaghan, Billy Come Home; Lia Mills, Nothing Simple; Catherine Dunne, Set In Stone; Jennifer Johnston, Truth or Fiction; Claire Kilroy, Only the Names Have Been Changed [sic]. Several of my books, which modesty prevents me from naming, could be added to the list (1). It cannot be denied that outstanding contemporary Irish authors continue to successfully delve into the past, as in the case of Joseph O'Connor (Star of the Sea, 2002; Redemption Falls, 2007), Sebastian Barry (Annie Dunne, 2002; A Long Long Way, 2005; The Secret Scripture, 2008; On Canaan's Side, 2011), Colm Toibin (Brooklyn, 2009; Nora Webster, 2014), Mary Costello (Academy Street, 2014), Lia Mills (Fallen, 2014), Evelyn Conlon (Not the Same Sky, 2015), and Nuala O'Connor (Miss Emily, 2015), to name but some examples of highly acclaimed Irish authors and novels. These works have shared the publishing marketplace with other fictions that deploy the changing socio-cultural circumstances of contemporary Ireland, such as Mary Rose Callaghan's The Visitors' Book (2001), Elizabeth Wassell's The Things He Loves (2001) and Sustenance (2011), Anne Haverty's The Free and Easy (2006), Eillis Ni Dhuibhne's Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow (2007), Chris Binchy's Open-Handed (2008), Peter Cunningham's Capital Sins (2010), Hugo Hamilton's Hand in the Fire (2010), Claire Kilroy's The Devil I Know (2012) Colm Keena's Bishop's Move (2013), Donal Ryan's The Spinning Heart (2012) and The Thing about December (2013), or Paul Murray's The Mark and the Void (2015). Therefore, we cannot agree with Maher and O'Brien when they maintain that there is no serious "fictional representation of the 1990s and beyond, apart from some references in the genres of crime fiction and chick lit" (2014: 6). Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that Irish women writers such as Mary Rose Callaghan, Elizabeth Wassell, Anne Haverty and Eillis Ni Dhuibhne wrote fictions in which they denounced the follies of Celtic Tiger Ireland and even anticipated the social, cultural and economic dangers of a rapidly changing society before the official financial collapse of the island in 2008 (Estevez-Saa 2010; 2013). …

ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC: MIGRATION, GENDER, AND SOCIETY IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH LITERATURE

1.Ireland on MoveFor centuries, geographical movement in Ireland has been characterized by rural-urban transfer to be subsequently followed by overseas migration. Only recently has magnitude and persistence of this phenomenon been acknowledged in some official documents (Report of Task Force on Policy Regarding Emigrants, 2002; Global Irish: Ireland's Diaspora Policy, 2015). In meantime, abundant literature has examined Irish migration phenomenon from many different perspectives, though little interest has been shown in relation between female migration and place. Undoubtedly, this is complex issue that has deserved much academic attention (Gray, 2000; Martin, 1997; Ryan, 2001; Walter, 2004). More recently, it is lives of Irish women abroad and their implicit/explicit relations with their homeland that have been object of scholarly interest (Donkersloot, 2012; Harte, 2009; Miller, 2008; McDowell, 2014; O'Keeffe, 2013).Border crossing is significant decision with vital implications that do not affect men and women equally, as Task Force on Policy Regarding Emigrants (Government of Ireland, 2002) indicates. According to Walter (2004), USA was preferred choice of Irish women from early 19th century, whereas in early 20th century Britain became most popular destination. Later, flows to neighbor country became massive between 1950s and 1980s, trend that changed by end of last century when other European destinations became more attractive. These movements necessarily affect concepts of land and nation as of identity begins to multiply and diversify. Ideologically, feminine icons of Mother Church and Mother Ireland (or Erin) had been gaining ground since 19th century for nationalistic purposes, and from first decades of 20th century, women were actively interpellated as national subjects through identification with territory, soil, land and landscape (Gray, 1999: 205). At time, paintings, songs and discourses praised rural Irish woman who embodied the values of motherhood, tradition and stability (Nash, 1993: 47). According to Ingman, nations construct their identity around fixed concepts of gender (2007: 3), and Ireland was no exception as, for too many decades, social status of women was framed by institutions that served to oppress them one way or another. These institutions, identified as family and household structures, and employment and welfare policies, were also legally supported in 1937 Constitution. That Irish gendered project targeted women to limit their access to work and public in order to produce decent women inhabiting virtuous spaces (Crowley and Kitchin, 2008: 355). Symbolically, as new values of nation clung to homely rural landscape, virtuous Ireland became to be whereas other places such as urban spaces, or destinations such as Britain and USA were identified as materialistic and threatening (Ryan, 2001: 272-273). In this context, phenomenon of female migration necessarily implied break with particular social model and would involve menace to national construction of Irish Free State, as numerous debates in media at time demonstrate (Ryan, 2003). Furthermore, that sense of place which has been identified as a component of identity and psychic interiority (Martin, 1997: 92), has for long been disturbing for many Irish women too, as mixed feelings involving duty, love, anger, independence and sorrow have been detected in female migration reports (Ryan, 2008; Walter, 2004). Discomfort might be word for many women's experiences abroad who felt tension between an assimilated Irish cultural space and actual space of opportunities ahead. Contemporary Irish literature shows strong tendency to look backwards and evoke those Irish migrants' experiences, an issue that is witnessing much success at present in form of fictionalized lives of Irish migrant women. …

Irish women: a different voice in Iris Murdoch’s Something Special

This paper aims to do justice to Iris Murdoch’s contribution to Irish short story writing. Although Murdoch is highly regarded among literary critics and common readers around the world, she is primarily labeled as a distinguished English novelist and philosopher. Grand narratives on themes such as morality and existence demarcate the majority of Murdoch criticism, while the fact that Dublin-born Murdoch also portrayed the contemporary Ireland she envisioned is unfairly obscured. This paper discuses Murdoch’s only extant short story titled Something Special, in which the dilemma of mid-twentieth-century Irish women is depicted. Introduction and conclusion aside, it falls into three parts. Part one presents the plight of Irish women amid the patriarchal society. Part two centers on the analysis of Yvonne Geary, the female protagonist of the story, against the backdrop of male-centered Irish culture. In part three, Yvonne’s dissatisfaction with the status quo as well as her efforts to get out from under the patriarchal tradition is investigated. It is found that this less documented Irish text sheds new light on the discussion of twentieth-century Irish women by inventing the prototypical feminist character, Yvonne Geary, and the story prefigures other feminist characters that subsequently arise in contemporary Irish literature.

(M)Others from the Motherland in Edna O’Brien’s "The Light of Evening" and Colm Tóibín’s "Brooklyn"

From the last decade, interest in the rewriting of received notions of the Irish diaspora and of the great famine in the literature produced in Ireland has notably increased, in an attempt to revise both Irish history and identity. Within this impulse in contemporary Irish literature, two enduring authors stand out, Edna O’Brien and Colm Toibin, whose novels, The Light of Evening (2006) and Brooklyn (2009), focus on the individual experiences of post-famine female emigrants to the United States in their unsuccessful attempts to find better living conditions either in the so-called “Promised land” or in their homeland. Taking O’Brien’s The Light of Evening as a predecessor of Toibin’s Brooklyn, I will argue along this paper that the stories of female emigration unfolded in the two narratives complement each other in ways that, by and large, have passed unnoticed by critics and reviewers. Considering the bond to the land as a metaphor of the bond to the mother, through the present discussion I will also explore O Brien’s and Toibin’s current discourses on emigration in light of their portrayal of the conflictive mother figures that mirror their own motherland.

The view from the shore: perceiving island monasteries in early medieval Ireland

This paper considers how island monasteries may have been perceived by ordinary people in early medieval Ireland. It is suggested that perceptions of island monasteries were not structured exclusively by Judeo-Christian ideas. They may also have been coloured by the fact that island monasteries share certain characteristics with other sacred islands, including royal crannogs and the Otherworld islands that were a prominent topos of contemporary Irish literature. Other variables were also crucial in determining peoples’perceptions, including geography, topography and the extent to which an establishment enforced separation according to gender. It seems that islands were rarely chosen as the sites of independent nunneries so, to a greater or lesser extent, island monasteries would have been primarily associated with men. There is, however, evidence for cemeteries specifically for women and for particular groups of lay people. Mortuary rituals and pilgrimages provided the laity with opportunities to access such holy islands. There are interesting similarities, of character and purpose, between the rituals performed on island monasteries, and other ecclesiastical sites, on the founder’s feastday on the one hand and those performed at royal ceremonial complexes on the other. Such similarities have significant implications for our understanding of how these sacred landscapes were perceived and experienced.

Irishness and Exile in Edna O'Brien's Wild Decembers and In the Forest

The increased number of persons moving in and out of Irish spaces complicates the definition of “home” and what it means to be “Irish,” a complication brought to the fore by the passage of the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act of 2004. The referendum met with much controversy because it restricted the rights of children born in Ireland to foreign parents and was “employed in such a way as to fix and essentialise Irishness, thus highlighting the threatening other, and to construct immigrants as suspect, untrustworthy, and deserving of Ireland’s hospitality only in limited, prescribed ways or not at all.” Not surprisingly, interrogating definitions of home and Irishness have been appearing more often in contemporary Irish literature, even before 2004. Edna O’Brien’s later novels reflect this tension, and reveal how problematic the “return” is for those who have lived away from Ireland. Whereas most of O’Brien’s early fiction exposes controversial issues of the private sphere, such as imprisonment and abuse, her works from the mid-1990s onward deal with those issues directly in relation to conceptions of the nation, or what O’Brien herself describes as a “trilogy of three themes important to Ireland and to me: politics, sex, and land.” The first two novels of O’Brien’s later trilogy, House of Splendid Isolation (1994) and Down by the River (1996), challenge images of the nation through an overt criticism of national politics and its reliance on constrictive gender ideologies. But her subsequent novels, Wild Decembers

New Uses of Traditional Healing in Contemporary Irish Literature

INTRODUCTION Historical and Cultural Research into Folk Healing Traditional healing was once found all across the world, especially the herbal forms (Domestic plant medicine represents the home survival kit Hatfield 2005: 1). Remnants of these old customs can be found documented across the world, in written form, and these are possibly just a fraction of the knowledge passed down orally over the centuries. However, all is not lost. Herbalists in various Irish counties have flourishing practices. In Ireland, informal groups such as the Clare Oral History Project collect information and pass it down to others in meetings and publications; in one such meeting recently, fear was expressed by several attendees that such knowledge was being lost to our age, and that unless action is taken now it will be lost to future generations. More formal associations such as the Centre for the History of Medicine (CHOMI), based in University College Dublin, hold regular academic conferences and seminars for the same purpose. Similar research is being carried out in other countries in Europe, and books such as Evidence-Based Herbal Medicine (2002) are coming out from the United States. Some of the more enterprising works are not content with description and documentation, but attempt to construct a rationale for the value of the research, for example, Moore and McClean's Folk Healing and Health Care Practices in Britain and (2010), which seeks to link folk healing with Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). Attempts are also being made to understand how some of the more esoteric practices, such as using cobwebs to heal cuts, and charms, can be effective. Some of these are clinical trials, as in the US book above. One of these fields centres around investigations of what is called, sometimes dismissively, the placebo effect, but which a number of serious practitioners and researchers believe has more deep-rooted physical and psychological effects yet to be fully explored, for example Finniss et al 2010. This system of healing has parallels in the ancient history of all cultures throughout the world, whether it be the efficacy of herbal remedies discovered locally, or the power and respect accorded to the medicine man or woman (Keith Thomas 1991, Rotblatt and Ziment 2002, Wildwood 1999). In Western Europe, it has largely yielded place to conventional medicine, but with pockets of older belief and custom in place; as Gabrielle Hatfield says: within the Celtic tradition, it is more likely that magico-religious elements of healing have played a greater part than in the rest of Britain, and the remnants of this can still be seen today ... [in the] Highlands of Scotland ... Wales ... [and] Ireland 2005: 139). This will be echoed in Faith Healer, in that the characters in that play confine themselves to practice in Wales, Scotland and (Friel 1984: 332). However, as we see in Moore and McClean's book above, these pockets of belief and practice have expanded in the last decade. Some aspects of the older customs may seem to be rooted in pre-Christian tradition. Christianity adapted itself to this in converting old practices into religious ones. However, vestiges of paganism remained, to lead to conflict between the establishment, particularly the organised Churches, and the healers. Timothy Corrigan Correll describes the historical situation: From the seventeenth century onwards, the leaders of the Catholic Church followed Tridentine directives that sought to impose uniformity in religious standards and practices. This included the enactment of synodal statutes aimed at routing magical and quasi-religious customs, including superstitious curing and beliefs ... (2005: 1). Perhaps the notable of these disputes in were those of clergy with the Co. Clare wise woman, Biddy Early, paralleled in two of the literary texts considered below, the healing women in both Keegan's and Curtis' fiction. …