Irish Background Research Articles

Middlebrow Culture, Self-mockery, and Maeve Brennan’s New Yorker Stories

ABSTRACT This article, attending to the periodical codes of The New Yorker and the magazine’s middlebrow brand of sophistication, explores the significance of Maeve Brennan’s satirical stories. While Brennan’s Irish background and Dublin stories have received critical attention, her New York stories have not yet been fully appreciated in relation to her long affiliation with The New Yorker and America’s smart magazine culture. Drawing on scholarship from periodical studies, middlebrow culture studies, and the cultural histories of The New Yorker, this article argues that the publication of The New Yorker provides a rich context in which to better understand Brennan’s satire and self-mockery as social commentaries that probe the middlebrow concerns of class anxiety and imposter syndrome.

The Life of Cardinal Humberto Medeiros of Boston: Whatever God Wants by Richard Gribble, CSC

Reviewed by: The Life of Cardinal Humberto Medeiros of Boston: Whatever God Wants by Richard Gribble, CSC Joseph White The Life of Cardinal Humberto Medeiros of Boston: Whatever God Wants. By Richard Gribble, CSC. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. 364pp. $120.00. The honorable tradition of episcopal and clerical biography continues. Having produced biographies of San Francisco Archbishop Edward Hanna, Bishop Vincent McCauley, CSC of East Africa, and significant priests: James Martin Gillis, CSP; Patrick Peyton, CSC; Jake Laboon, SJ; and Nelson Baker, the author examines the life of Cardinal-Archbishop Humberto Medeiros of Boston (1915–1983). Gribble introduces him as “a tragic figure who, due in large measure to his absolute fidelity to God and the magisterium of the Church, experienced much opposition,” especially in Boston. Characteristically “unwavering” in his positions, Medeiros is portrayed as “a significant figure in a difficult time of transition in the Church . . . in the wake of Vatican II and American society.” Making exhaustive use Medeiros’s papers in the relevant archives and an impressive range of published sources for context, Gribble aims to fill “lacunae” in the historical record of the Catholic Church in Boston and the United States. A Portuguese national born in 1915 on Sao Miguel Island in the Azores, Medeiros grew up in a poor and intensely pious Catholic family there. The post-World War I depression prompted his father to find work in the Portuguese community of Fall River, Massachusetts in 1923—the first of three stays. His family joined him there in 1931. Humberto then began public high school. His background as a poor immigrant formed in him the “need to reach out to the poor” that guided him throughout life. In response to his call to diocesan priesthood, the [End Page 91] Fall River diocese assigned him to studies at the Theological College of the Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, DC. Ordained a priest in 1946, Medeiros balanced ministry in the Fall River diocese’s parishes, while also pursuing graduate studies in CUA’s very conservative theology graduate program, obtaining the doctorate in 1951. Throughout the volume Medeiros’s understanding of priesthood builds on what he learned in seminary formation by Priests of the Society of St. Sulpice (Sulpicians), who staffed the Theological College. Reflecting their heritage in the French School of Spirituality, a priest’s supernatural identity with Christ clearly separated him from the laity. From this basic view of priesthood, Medeiros later added views of ministry especially those informed by Vatican II. From 1951 Medeiros served Fall River’s Bishop James Connolly, first as secretary then as diocesan chancellor and later also serving as a pastor. When Vatican II opened in 1962, Connolly chose him as his peritus. Attending council sessions expanded Medeiros’s understanding of the Catholic tradition without departing from a basically conservative outlook that rejected dissent. Faithful adherence to the Vatican Council’s pronouncements guided his leadership in church renewal. In 1966, Medeiros was appointed bishop of the new Diocese of Brownsville on Texas’s border with Mexico—an area partitioned from the Corpus Christi diocese. He was thereby tasked to organize a new diocese’s administrative and pastoral services. From his own experience of immigrant life, he served this largely Latino diocese as a compassionate advocate for the poor. Upon arrival there, he had to deal with migrant workers’ strike against local farmers over just compensation and worked to find a mutually satisfactory resolution for both groups. This role led to his appointment to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ ad hoc Committee on Farm Labor that in 1970 lent support to the California grape strike. Committee service meant regular travel to visit migrant workers’ camps around the nation and addressing social justice issues. In 1970, to widespread surprise, Pope Paul VI appointed Medeiros archbishop of Boston in succession to the retiring Cardinal Richard Cushing. Though raised in nearby Fall River, Medeiros, lacking an Irish background, received a tepid reception among Boston’s largely Irish ethnic clergy and flock accustomed to the princely style and perks of his predecessors. Raised to the rank of cardinal in 1973, Medeiros held on to his self-effacing and unpretentious ways reflecting his humble...

The Irish Background of the Icelandic Calendrical Reform

The Irish Background of the Icelandic Calendrical Reform

Predicted cardiac and second cancer risks for patients undergoing VMAT for mediastinal Hodgkin lymphoma

Background and purposeTo predict treatment-related cardiovascular disease (CVD) and second cancer 30-year absolute mortality risks (AMR30) for patients with mediastinal Hodgkin lymphoma in a large multicentre radiation oncology network in Ireland.Material and methodsThis study includes consecutive patients treated for mediastinal lymphoma using chemotherapy and involved site radiotherapy (RT) 2016–2019. Radiation doses to heart, left ventricle, cardiac valves, lungs, oesophagus, carotid arteries and female breasts were calculated. Individual CVD and second cancer AMR30 were predicted using Irish background population rates and dose–response relationships.ResultsForty-four patients with Hodgkin lymphoma were identified, 23 females, median age 28 years. Ninety-eight percent received anthracycline, 80% received 4–6 cycles ABVD. Volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) ± deep inspiration breath hold (DIBH) was delivered, median total prescribed dose 30 Gy. Average mean heart dose 9.8 Gy (range 0.2–23.8 Gy). Excess treatment-related mean AMR30 from CVD was 2.18% (0.79, 0.90, 0.01, 0.13 and 0.35% for coronary disease, heart failure, valvular disease, stroke and other cardiac diseases), 1.07% due to chemotherapy and a further 1.11% from RT. Excess mean AMR30 for second cancers following RT were: lung cancer 2.20%, breast cancer in females 0.34%, and oesophageal cancer 0.28%.ConclusionFor patients with mediastinal lymphoma excess mortality risks from CVD and second cancers remain clinically significant despite contemporary chemotherapy and photon-RT. Efforts to reduce the toxicity of combined modality treatment, for example, using DIBH, reduced margins and advanced RT, e.g. proton beam therapy, should be continued to further reduce potentially fatal treatment effects.

"I'll Go On" – Terry Eagleton, Writer


 
 
 This essay seeks to link Terry Eagleton’s work as a novelist and playwright with his work over many years, in theory, philosophy, and literary criticism. The several pieces discussed here shimmer with raw energy, innovative technique, and a deep grasp of the tangled histories of England and Ireland. The ability to work in both critical and creative modes is rare and the constantly shifting boundaries of the work considered here indicate Eagleton’s desire to carve out a genre that incorporates an inclusive model of expression. The issue of Irish history and politics is an abiding concern for Eagleton; the painful and violent struggle for Irish independence is a constant theme in his work and makes a connection with his own Irish background. Ireland is also a shelter to Wittgenstein in Saints and Scholars, a work that shows Eagleton as also able to cut philosophy and narrative with a ready and effective humour.
 
 

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

Admission patterns in a psychiatric intensive care unit in Ireland: a longitudinal follow-up

AimsThis observational study aims to describe the course of the admission and clinical characteristics of admissions to the PICUs in the Phoenix Care Centre, Dublin, Ireland. The authors hypothesised that the length of stay (LOS) would be shorter in male patients as compared to females.MethodThis retrospective cohort study was carried out at the Phoenix Care Centre Dublin, Ireland. Informed consent was not sought as this was a retrospective chart study involving anonymised clinical data which was collected as part of routine clinical care and no items of information were reported that would enable the identification of any subject. We described primary outcomes using frequencies, percentages, mean and standard deviations, median and interquartile ranges (IQR). Between groups comparisons were made using x2 tests for categorical variables; t-tests, ANOVA tests, or Kruskal-Wallis tests, for continuous variables; All analyses were two-tailed, and a P-value ≤ 0.05 was considered statistically significantResultOver the study period from Jan 2014 to Jan 2017 inclusive, there were 96 admission episodes to the PICU. The mean age of admitted cases was 37.1 (SD = 11.3) years (range 18–63 years). The mean length of stay (LOS) was 59.3 (SD = 61.0) days (median 39.5 days). All patients were admitted under the Mental Health Act legislation. We identified assault as the primary risk factor for pre-admission 62% (n = 62) to the PICU. Antipsychotic polypharmacy was used in 61% (n = 55) of the admission. The mean daily antipsychotic dosage was 139.4 % (SD = 65.1) of BNF maximum daily dose. A diagnosis of acute psychotic disorder (B= -1.027, p = 0.003, 95% CI: –1.691 to –0.363) was associated with reduced LOS in PICU. Majority of admissions 43% (n = 39) had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, followed by Bipolar affective disorder BPAD 21% (n = 21), schizoaffective disorder 18% (n = 18), and acute psychotic disorder 9% (n = 9).ConclusionPsychiatric Intensive Care Unit is an essential service for the severely ill psychiatric patients and is a progressively developing sub-speciality. An important finding from our study describes the cohort of patients admitted being predominantly male, younger-aged, single, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, legally detained, and from an Irish background. The primary indication for a referral is the risk of assault, showing the need for the intensive and secure treatment model that a PICU can provide.

Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell: A Turbulent Friendship

Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell: A Turbulent Friendship1 Jeffrey Meyers I In Stepping Stones (2008), Dennis O’Driscoll’s excellent book of interviews, Seamus Heaney recalled that he first met Robert Lowell in 1972 at Sonia Orwell’s party to celebrate Lowell’s wedding to Caroline Blackwood. Heaney was young enough to be Lowell’s son and from a rural Irish background, remote from Lowell’s patrician pedigree. He had not been invited to that grand occasion, but was staying with Karl Miller, editor of The Listener, who was on the guest list and brought him along. He was shy of meeting Lowell ‘because of that nimbus of authority that ringed his writings and his actions’,2 but ‘actually got into a corner with him for about half an hour and did the laundry list, as [Joseph] Brodsky used to say – checking out what was to be said about which poets … It was a genuine enough meeting, and he was immensely charming and even more immensely intelligent’.3 Later, on several manic and memorable occasions, the two developed a close friendship that influenced and inspired Heaney’s poetry. At the party Heaney was not only introduced to distinguished poets, but also gained insight into the politics of poetry: the prestige and power that controlled lucrative teaching jobs and lecture tours, fellowships and honours, of which he would later reap the full harvest. After Lowell’s untimely death in September 1977, Heaney wrote two essays, a memorial address and two poems about him. Lowell had social and political, as well as poetical, influence. Heaney remarked that ‘Lowell was the last American to be a dual citizen of the university and the world beyond it, at home in Harvard, but also at home among the metropolitan set, a figure to be photographed at cocktail parties and on marches to the Pentagon’ (SS, p.273). He used Keats’s description of Wordsworth to describe Lowell’s distinctive genius, and also explained why Lowell’s reputation, though not his poetry, fell after his death when fashions changed and standards declined: ‘Lowell is taking the punishment Studies • volume 109 • number 436 448 that’s always handed out to the big guy eventually; so no, I’m not surprised. Lowell was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, a Eurocentric, egotistical sublime, writing as if he intended to be heard in a high wind. He was on the winning side from the start: Boston Brahmin, friend of Eliot, part of the literary establishment on both sides of the Atlantic’ (SS, p.280). When Heaney’s reputation later soared, he too took his share of low blows. Caroline Blackwood, a witty and talented writer, was also a considerable figure. Her wealthy and aristocratic family came (like Heaney’s) from Northern Ireland, but her father, killed in Burma in the Second World War, was the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. An heir to the Guinness brewery fortune, she was also a great beauty. Her first husband, Lucian Freud, had painted her portrait that was as stunning and sensuous as Botticelli’s Venus. In August 1975 Heaney invited Lowell to a poetry festival in Kilkenny, Ireland. As Lowell feared from past experience, the event became a week of drunken and quarrelsome reelings and writhings. Heaney expected Lowell to arrive for his midweek performance, but he came on the previous Sunday and stayed with him through the next weekend. Heaney’s nine-year-old son Michael, with unusually formal diction, told Lowell that he preferred soccer to sonnets: ‘I know you are a famous poet, but it’s my ambition to meet a famous footballer’ (SS, p.216). During that prolonged visit Lowell, a wayward and distant father to his own daughter and son, envied Heaney’s close family life and sadly remarked, ‘You see a lot of your children’ (SS, p.216) – as if that were a rare event. Heaney said that Lowell ‘had a wonderful way of coming close, personally and critically’ (SS, p. 216) and he valued both aspects of that intimacy. In a letter of 11 September 1975, a month after the Kilkenny chaos, Lowell advised Heaney to follow his own practice of salvaging the best...

How people of African Caribbean or Irish ethnicity cope with long-term health conditions in UK community settings: A systematic review of qualitative, quantitative and mixed method studies.

Living with a chronic or mental health condition can be challenging and requires considerable adjustment. As ways of coping are culturally influenced, it is important to understand how minority ethnic populations cope, to inform appropriate services. This review aimed to explore the coping strategies used by UK residents from an African Caribbean or Irish background between 1960 and 2020. A systematic literature search on strategies used to cope with chronic health conditions in both populations living in the United Kingdom identified 26 relevant studies. Data were extracted, quality of papers was appraised and critical interpretive synthesis was applied. Two major foci of the studies were coping strategies and barriers to coping. The main coping strategies were denial/scepticism, self-management, spirituality and religion. Within each population, there was variation in ways of coping. The review highlights the complex role of religion in influencing coping strategies. It demonstrates how personal and minority ethnic populations' experiences of service use are connected with stigma, fear and mistrust, which also act as barriers to seeking help and to coping. Coping with a chronic or mental health condition in the Irish and African Caribbean populations is under-researched. Stigma, fear and mistrust in services act as key barriers to help-seeking and religion is a prominent coping strategy. However, few detailed examples were given on how it was used to assist individuals when managing a chronic or mental health condition. Also due to a lack of research, firm conclusions cannot be drawn for the Irish population.

Christ Would Break Your Tongue

“Christ Would Break Your Tongue” is part of my on-going exploration of growing up as a United Church minister’s daughter in small-town Ontario. In the title poem, I inquire into the interstices of gender, voice, and authority. In “Dominion” I grapple with how the Christian underpinnings of Western culture place humans above other creatures and lifeforms to the detriment of all living beings. In “Billy Stewart’s Geography” I begin to explore the church’s role in political oppression, colonialism, and residential schools, building on my poetic interests in family dynamics and place (Stewart, 2003; 2012). I use poetic inquiry (Butler-Kisber, Guiney Yallop, Stewart, & Wiebe, 2017; Faulkner, 2009; Galvin & Prendergast, 2016; Prendergast, Leggo, & Sameshima, 2009; Thomas, Cole, & Stewart, 2012) as a research method to reflect on and through language, letting the poems be the plumb-line of the research process. Poetry’s use of the associative, the particular, and the unconscious allow me to explore terrain which may have been previously un-worded. This is needed to write through shame and grief. I believe with Orr (2002) that “the more of our own stories that we can tell, the richer and more complex our selves become. The richer a use we make of our past experience, the more open we are to present experience” (p. 102). This openness is crucial in the search for word and action. Educator Maxine Greene (1977) calls us to be open or “awake.” How can poets be awake to this complex social/political moment and use their craft to speak? Poetry works with stories and lyric which are once personal, ideological and often shaped by religion. As a white settler Canadian, I strive to uncover the complicity of my religious and Northern Irish background in hierarchical and oppressive relations. My hope is to provoke.

A Novel Truth about Casement’s “Irish” Identity

A Novel Truth about Casement’s “Irish” Identity Sabina Murray (bio) I first became fascinated with Roger Casement—Irish revolutionary, humanitarian, and gay icon, hanged for treason in the First World War—in the summer of 1999 while on holiday on the New Jersey Shore. I had purchased W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn at the local Barnes & Noble. This was an odd choice of beach reading; Rings, as with all of Sebald’s writing, is steeped in an erudite gloom. Or maybe it was the perfect reading: an escape. Included in its peregrinations was a chapter on Casement, whose story intrigued me. By strange coincidence I picked up a copy of Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost at my publishers in September of the same year. A hefty chunk of the work was devoted to Casement, his humanitarian works, his role in outfitting Conrad for his journey up the Congo and into modernism, his unfortunate end. These encounters with Sir Roger goaded me in a way that I did not fully understand, and I looked him up, learning with some surprise that we shared a birthday. I felt that this held a meaning, but did not know what this might be beyond the banal fact that we were both born on the first of September, although some years apart. Sebald, a German writer born in 1944, also had little in common with Casement, but as Sebald’s writing takes psychological distancing as a defining element, this would seem to have been by design. Hochs-child, as a historian writing on the Belgian Congo, had obvious reason to address Casement in his book; it would have been irresponsible not to include him. Historians can write about anything and anyone as fact demands it, but, ironically, in fiction there is often a desire to connect the invented with the real, the character with the author. The identity of the author is too often a factor in judging a novel’s authenticity, regardless of the book’s merit. My qualifications to write the novel might be questioned. Although I was drawn to Casement with that strange empathy that draws one to make characters of figures, [End Page 167] I still comprehended the significant distance between his experience and my own. Casement’s Irishness gave me pause. I associate Irishness with feistiness. It comes with an Australian childhood, in my case one spent with Loreto Sisters in Perth. Being a half-Filipino, half-American child, I had few points of connection with the other students beyond being Catholic, which everyone was, except for the Greeks and the two Jewish children who were enrolled at Loreto Nedlands, more willing to try their luck with the Catholics than the Church of England. We were mostly the children or grandchildren of hardworking immigrants, predominantly of Irish background, to which I pretended nominal belonging, courtesy of my surname. Our hero was Ned Kelly, our loyalty sealed by having grown up on the eponymous 1970 film that starred none other than Mick Jagger. Reenacting the life of Ned Kelly was a playground staple, but it was very hard to find actors willing to play for the other side, even for the final martyr-producing shootout. In Australia our heroes were bushrangers, and we knew in our blood that the criminals who had been sent to our distant shores—whose history we inherited despite our relatively recent arrival, just as all Americans inherit the legacy of slavery—were largely victims of injustice. When Oscar Wilde visited America in 1882, a visit historical for its epic remark-making, he observed, “The Americans always take their heroes from the criminal classes.” Yes, he was referring to Americans, but it took an Irishman to notice. In the early days of my research, I traveled to Belfast to meet with the mural artist Danny Devenny and his wife Deborah, a social worker active with Sinn Féin. Danny had spent some significant time in H-Block during the Troubles and, as I learned in the bars of Belfast, was to many a local hero. The Devennys did not identify so much with their Protestant neighbors as with oppressed people...

"Bit, by some mad whig": Charles Macklin and the Theater of Irish Enlightenment

Critics invested in Charles Macklin as an Irish playwright have tended to focus on Love à la Mode (1759) and The True-Born Irishman (1761), while those interested in theater censorship have centered their discussion on The Man of the World (1781) but have ignored his Irish background. This essay offers a more nuanced assessment of Macklin's ethnopolitics by bringing these two different emphases into dialogue. David O'Shaughnessy argues that Macklin was an influential figure who, if contextualized within a sustained tradition of London Irish Whiggery, helps make the case for considering the theater as one of the primary institutional structures of the Irish Enlightenment.

An Unpublished Interview with Arthur Miller

[Editor's Note: Arthur Miller has the distinction of being one of the most interviewed literary figures of his time. During his long career, he was open to sitting down with print and broadcast journalists, theater critics, and scholars to discuss his views on his own work, the state of the theater, American and international politics, and social issues. The inaugural issue of The Arthur Miller Journal (Spring 2006) included one of Millers final interviews before his death, a conversation with his biographer Christopher Bigsby. I am pleased that this issue contains a previously unpublished interview with Miller by Rupendra Guha Majumdar of the University of Delhi. Conducted in Millers New York apartment on 27 April 1993, the interview is a lively exchange with Majumdar who was a Fulbright Fellow at Yale at the time. The edited conversation includes Millers views on his famous plays, nineteenth-century American writers, Eugene O'Neill, theatrical realism, and his plays of the 1990s. I have included Majumdars introduction that details the unique circumstances that led to the interview. The photos that Majumdar has provided include what may be the only Miller "selfie" on record!Stephen Marino]IntroductionWhen Arthur Miller graduated from Brooklyn's Abraham Lincoln High School in 1932, his most satisfying accomplishment came as a football player on the second squad of the school's team. He certainly was exposed to the football "heroes" on the "A" squad whose personalities he would use in fashioning Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman. Miller's youthful athletic shape was recognizable in his robust appearance at seventy-seven. In fact, if it had not been for his white hair, he could have passed for a man in his early sixties, Willy Loman's age in the selfsame play. Over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, straight-backed, walking briskly, his speech equally focused, though with contemplative pauses, the hint of a smile on his face-Miller presented the picture of a man on his intellectual toes, leading a very active social and professional life; a man respected by serious theatergoers the world over for many decades. This was what I saw when I met him in New York in 1993.Miller's international image is rooted in his alignment with an American tradition further complicated by his being Jewish. This is similar to Eugene O'Neill and his Irish background. From the beginning of Miller's career in the forties to the start of the twenty-first century, he acknowledged the vital presence of his (fellow-Connecticut) precursor, O'Neill, without having been, in any sense, under the latter's artistic shadow. It is quite an amazing coincidence, therefore, that a character in O'Neill's lone comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, set in 1906, and published and produced in 1933, not only should be called "Arthur Miller," but also turns out to be a football champion and university student.1I forgot to ask Miller about this piquant connection between his name and that of his precursor's protagonist when I met him in Manhattan. I presume he must have been aware of it, because I later came across his own reference to the O'Neill play in his discussion of the Great Depression in the introduction to The American Clock (1980), set in 1930s America. Miller is likely to have had his share of surprise in meeting a stage doppelganger of sorts: yet the nostalgia for a lost frontier-suggested in a title like Ah, Wilderness!-and the sense of alienation and transcendence that defines the problematic angst of many of O'Neill's protagonists can also be seen in Miller's heroes. Indeed, Miller himself upholds the "noble quest" and the "fabulous appetite for greatness" that he attributes so magnanimously to his pathbreaking precursor, in his New York Times review (6 November 1988) of Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill.2On 15 February 1993, I wrote Arthur Miller a letter from Yale University, where I was spending an academic year in the English Department as a postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow from Delhi University, India. …

Representations of Eugene O'Neill: Fiction, Autobiography, and Adaptation

Sponsored by the Eugene O'Neill Society at the 40th Annual Comparative Drama Conference, Baltimore, MD, 2016This year's O'Neill Society panel at the Comparative Drama Conference (CDC) developed in response to the call put out by Davies King and Beth Wynstra for a special section of the O'Neill Review devoted to representations of Eugene O'Neill. We merged that topic with a proposal to the CDC from the previous year concerning recent books on O'Neill, a panel that had been cut due to lack of a slot. Then we heard that Tony Kushner was going to be the keynote speaker at the CDC in 2016. Kushner, whose “The Genius of O'Neill” was reprinted in the 2004 issue of the EOR, has written the libretto for an opera about O'Neill and Carlotta, A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck (2012), which he tells us is on the way to becoming a full-length opera to be called A Fire at the Shelton Hotel. He has been working on a screenplay about O'Neill and was active in the Society's celebration that Jeff Kennedy organized in the summer of 2015 in Provincetown to commemorate the centennial of O'Neill's first plays. Kushner happily agreed to join the panel, at which point the conference organizers, coordinated by Laura Snyder, turned the panel into a plenary session with the six participants included below. We are grateful to Tony Kushner for taking the time to stay over in Baltimore on Friday night to join us in the April 2 discussion, but unfortunately our recording of his portion of the discussion, which we had meant to transcribe for inclusion here, was faulty, so, as they say, “You had to be there.”Jackson Bryer began the session with a presentation on how O'Neill, the playwright of most austere reputation, came forward with an entirely new face in the 1950s when his plays were used as the basis of two Broadway musicals. Rob Dowling spoke about being consulted by the cast of the Roundabout Theatre Company's production of Long Day's Journey Into Night, which was just then in rehearsal, concerning the Irish background of the characters, especially the “second girl” Cathleen, the character who holds center stage in Ronan Noone's The Second Girl. Jeff Kennedy recounted the extraordinary sixty-year history of the work of Arthur and Barbara Gelb to give an authoritative biographical portrayal of O'Neill, which will culminate with the release in fall 2016 of their final volume, titled By Women Possessed. Davies King spoke about an early photograph of O'Neill, perhaps the first to show him self-consciously posing as “author,” in terms of how it reflects O'Neill's acting the role of the Stirnerian “egoist.” Beth Wynstra told us of her investigation of the question of how students come to understand the intersection of O'Neill's life and writing. Last, Tony Kushner told us the history of his late-developing fascination with O'Neill and his long (and ongoing) struggle to write a screenplay centering on O'Neill's suicide attempt in late 1911. One offshoot of that project is the one-act opera mentioned above, composed by Jeanine Tesori, which was developed from the frame narrative he had devised for the screenplay. Kushner also told us of his admiration of O'Neill for taking on topics that might seem risky from the standpoint of political correctness. We are grateful that Tony Kushner has followed so well in that tradition and, in that sense, represents O'Neill.

American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–55: The Politics of Enchantment

American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–55: The Politics of Enchantment

The greening of Oscar Wilde: situating Ireland in the Wilde wars

The importance of Ireland to an understanding of Oscar Wilde has been the subject of contentious discussion in recent years. For one group of critics Wilde has been considered “a militant Irish republican”, an Irish “terrorist by another name”, whose literary practices resembled those of “guerrilla warfare”, an ardent Home Ruler and Parnellite, and committed Irish nationalist whose work is suffused with references to Ireland and the Irish Question, very influenced by his Irish background and political views, possibly shaped by a genuine interest in and awareness of Irish folklore and the Irish oral tradition, and deeply engaged with issues of Irish identity and culture. For an opposing set of critics Wilde should at best be considered a “reluctant” Irish patriot, who referenced his Irish “identity” only when it suited him commercially, was more interested in exploiting intellectual fashions and fads than making genuine political points, was a shallow thinker in most areas of life and certainly didn’t use his writing to pursue Irish nationalist issues, was probably more of a British imperialist than an Irish nationalist, knew precious little about Irish folklore or Irish oral traditions, and his works contain few if any references to Irish issues or themes. The differences between these two interpretive communities certainly seem quite large, and these differences have been emphasised in a disputatious manner which has shed more heat than light on the messy matter of Wilde’s national identity. In this article I want to begin to clear up some of the misunderstandings I think have crept into this critical dispute and suggest fruitful ways in which opposing critics can come together in if not harmony then perhaps a less acrimonious, more productive way.

Irish identity and integration within the British armed forces, 1939–45

Abstract During the Second World War tens of thousands of volunteers from the island of Ireland served in the British armed forces. This article will examine the effect of an Irish background on the volunteers’ experience of the British forces. It will explore the ways in which the military authorities facilitated and encouraged the development of a pluralist Irish identity. In doing so the article will demonstrate how the volunteers’ ideas of Irishness were influenced by British perceptions and it will assess to what extent volunteers from North and South really shared a common Irish identity. The article will also place the Irish experience of the British forces in the context of a multinational army incorporating personnel from, among others, Scotland, Wales, the dominions and Poland.

Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South by Bryan Giemza (review)

Reviewed by: Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South by Bryan Giemza Kieran Quinlan Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South. By Bryan Giemza. [Southern Literary Studies.] (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2013. Pp. xiv, 361. $49.95 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-8071-5090-0; $39.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0-8071-59091-7.) Our understanding of the Irish Catholic presence in the American South has substantially changed over the last couple of decades due to scholarly investigations in a number of areas. The presumption of a solid “Scotch-Irish”—the usual term—hegemony has been modified by awareness that Catholic and Protestant identities in the north of Ireland and in Scotland were often fluid in the eighteenth century, that over the decades many nominal Irish Catholics morphed into Scotch-Irish Protestants because of the unavailability of churches of their own denomination in the Southern states, and that there were hosts of other migratory forgettings and anomalies. Of course, one should always have been a little suspicious of a solid South thesis in a world shaped by Father Abraham Ryan, the region’s hugely popular poet laureate in the nineteenth century; Kate O’Flaherty Chopin, disruptive feminist and unconventional Catholic; Scarlett O’Hara, iconic Southern belle; and Flannery O’Connor (a distant relation of Margaret Mitchell, as it turns out), a writer who dominated the genre of the Southern short story. In the past, an American Catholicism that was both defensive and triumphalist occasionally drew attention to some of these matters, whereas the idea of a “Celtic South” enjoyed surprising (and disturbing) popularity in the 1980s. Albert S. Foley’s challenging 1950s study of the biracial Healys of Georgia—one of them the “second founder” of Georgetown University—introduced a complication in the received narrative of minimal Irish Catholic Southern presence but without changing the overall understanding of the matter. What is new now is the emergence of a more mature and less belligerent examination of tangled histories. Brian Giemza is one of the most active scholars in this area with a previous study of Ryan (Poet of the Lost Cause [Knoxville, 2008], with Donald Robert Beagle) and an edited collection (Rethinking the Irish in the American South [Jackson, MS, 2013]). His present study recapitulates and greatly extends this theme with a wealth of material both secondary and archival on writers of Catholic Irish background in the South over the last two centuries. Some of these names will be unfamiliar even to those engaged with the subject; others are more canonical but here presented in a new light or with a reinvigorated analysis. In particular, Giemza’s sections on Lafcadio Hearn, Joel Chandler Harris, Flannery O’Connor, John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces, Baton Rouge, 1980), Cormac McCarthy (based on extensive archival work), Pat Conroy, and Anne Rice (an interview) offer new material. Again and again, Giemza presses his argument in engaging ways—not, for example, too readily accepting O’Connor’s dismissal of her Irish roots but teasing out her many evasions, omissions, and contradictions on the subject. Giemza’s book also acknowledges the changing context of Catholicism in the modern world and is by no means a pious reiteration of orthodoxy, even if his own religious position seems to vacillate at times. His overall argument, then, is not that persons of Irish Catholic background invented the American South but [End Page 641] rather that they have contributed more to its formation than has been acknowledged and, in closing, that the Catholic element at least will continue as the Hispanic population of the region grows. If the book has a problem, it is because the author has so much to present that the narrative occasionally becomes overwhelming. Indeed, as Giemza acknowledges, “Space constraints have left more than one hundred pages of this manuscript on the cutting-room floor” (p. 273). We can expect to hear more from this investigative author. Kieran Quinlan University of Alabama at Birmingham Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press

The Brontës’ Irish Background Revisited

Interest is again being expressed in the Brontës’ Irish background. A number of points can be added to the research detailed in The Brontes’ Irish Background of 1986 and K. Constable’s A Stranger within the Gates in 2000. An important factor is the definite date now available for Hugh Brunty’s birth. Further to this, new light has been shed on the demography of County Fermanagh by the publication of the Ordnance Survey Memoirs in the 1990s and by more accessible copies of the Irish ‘Tithe Applotment’ and Griffith’s ‘Valuation’ on the Internet. This article brings some of this new material forward as a contribution to the understanding of the Brontes’ family heritage.

Whiteness and Diasporic Irishness: Nation, Gender and Class

Whiteness is often detached from the notion of diaspora in the recent flurry of interest in the phenomenon, yet it is a key feature of some of the largest and oldest displacements. This paper explores the specific contexts of white racial belonging and status over two centuries in two main destinations of the Irish diaspora, the USA and Britain. Its major contribution is a tracing of the untold story of ‘How the Irish became white in Britain’ to parallel and contrast with the much more fully developed narrative in the USA. It argues that, contrary to popular belief, the racialisation of the Irish in England did not fade away at the end of the nineteenth century but became transmuted in new forms which have continued to place the ‘white’ Irish outside the boundaries of the English nation. These have been strangely ignored by social scientists, who conflate Irishness and working-class identities in England without acknowledging the distinctive contribution of Irish backgrounds to constructions of class difference. Gender locates Irish women and men differently in relation to these class positions, for example allowing mothers to be blamed for the perpetuation of the underclass. Class and gender are also largely unrecognised dimensions of Irish ethnicity in the USA, where the presence of ‘poor white’ neighbourhoods continues to challenge the iconic story of Irish upward mobility. Irishness thus remains central to the construction of mainstream ‘white’ identities in both the USA and Britain into the twenty-first century.