Irish Fiction Research Articles

Rough Beasts: The Monstrous in Irish Fiction, 1800-2 by Jack Fennell

Reviewed by: Rough Beasts: The Monstrous in Irish Fiction, 1800–2000 by Jack Fennell William Hughes (bio) Rough Beasts: The Monstrous in Irish Fiction, 1800–2000, by Jack Fennell; pp. vi + 285. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019, £90.00, $120.00. With its relatively broad historical coverage—which frequently lingers on events and texts prior to 1800—and at-times eclectic selection of texts, Jack Fennell's Rough Beasts: The Monstrous in Irish Fiction, 1800–2000 may prove a somewhat frustrating read for researchers seeking insight into the function of horror in nineteenth-century Irish culture. Organized thematically rather than chronologically, the book opens with a succinct introduction to the theory of horror—a concept which Fennell rightly distinguishes from the generic gothic which has customarily dominated the criticism of supernaturally inflected Irish fiction. Following this opening gambit, the seven subsequent chapters guide the reader successively through the specter of famine; various incarnations of the witch; the ghost in its myriad forms; the Faustian bargain in Irish context; the revival of the undead in the familiar corporeality of zombie and vampire, supplemented by post-Celtic Tiger relics of failed capitalist enterprise; and the crypto-zoological shape-shifter. The closing chapter [End Page 574] addresses the spatial—as opposed to the personified—incarnation of horror. Finally, the whole is summed up in a conclusion which, sometimes irritatingly, rehearses once more essentially the same survey of Irish events that underpins the preceding narrative. Fennell's argument is premised upon the intimacy between horror and history, and the quite reasonable assumption that the horrific, in the form of monsters and the monstrous places they variously occupy or else create, represent the end of history. The horrific, in essence, is something that demonstrates the processes by which history is negated, overwritten, rendered uncanny, and made differently meaningful in the context of a country which has seemingly always been conflicted in its internal identity as well as in its relationship to England specifically, and the world-that-is-not-Ireland more broadly. Fennell's thesis thus goes somewhat beyond the Protestant Magic proposed elsewhere in Irish studies scholarship, and is more subtle and nuanced than the common yet simplistic assumption that the gothic and horror traditions of Irish writing represent first and foremost the fears of Protestant settlers menaced by the Indigenous dwellers beyond the Pale. There is horror, as Fennell convincingly demonstrates, in how a self-consciously Irish population may regard the personalities and behavior of their geographical neighbors in both historical and contemporary discourse; in how Roman Catholic identities (for, being historical, these must be fractured and plural rather than seamless and singular) may visualize not merely outsider-Protestants but also a native Pagan population whose beliefs inconveniently persist in the form of perceived superstition; and in how the nation (or the consciousness that became nation) expresses its own ambivalent attitude to a troubled history of division leading to civil war, and of a pervasive religious fundamentalism which has nonetheless underwritten a progressive move to secular statehood in recent years. As a broad and panoramic consideration of Irish history through an ingenious thematic perspective, Fennell's work is surely praiseworthy. It is in the demonstration of this thesis, its exemplification through text and analysis, though, that the volume's shortcomings become evident. Given the breadth of historical coverage implicit in the volume's subtitle, it is to be expected that a significant proportion of the texts under scrutiny will have been published in the twentieth century. Necessarily, again, these latter will almost inevitably foreground writing that was published following the establishment of the Irish Republic as a stable and independent entity—though, wonderfully, Fennell does take care to demonstrate how accession to the European Union was viewed by some as compromising Irish independence, the EU being demonized as the Vaimpir an Bhruiséil, or the Vampire of Brussels. There is some decent coverage of Edwardian material—relevant, certainly, to those who contemplate a long nineteenth century—and this nicely offsets the tenor of the later works Fennell discusses, including Seán Ó'Cuirrín's "Beirt Dhéseach" (1922), which amply illustrate the cultural paranoia of a Free State struggling to define a political...

Uncovering the Self: Identity and Otherness in Irish Fiction (Barry, Beckett and Banville)

"Fiction seems to be bound to the discovery of the self and the other. By engaging in ethical readings, literature can become a fruitful space of interaction in which the reader and text can communicate in order to make an acquaintance with otherness. In this regard, the present paper consists of several analyses on Irish fiction that propose explorations into the quest of self-discovery. As it stands, self-identity is iterated in terms of knowing both the self and the other and therefore discovering alterity. Through the works of Barry, Beckett and Banville, we intend to demonstrate various approaches towards self-identity and analyse how they came into fruition."

Spectrality as ethical gift and the chance for justice: living on and dispossession in James Joyce’s “The Dead” and John Banville’s Snow

ABSTRACT This essay will explore the theoretical pertinence of the spectre in modern and contemporary Irish fiction as dislocating the sense of history as the modality of the present. I argue for the intertextuality residing between James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” and John Banville’s novel Snow not on the basis of a model of artistic derivativeness or disavowal, but as part of a dynamic of spectral inheritance that forces us to redefine notions of epistemic and ontological closure. Banville’s image of being a “survivor” of Joyce provides me with the analytical apparatus to explore how survivability crucially depends on giving the past its futural chance. It is my argument that these conditions of living on and reckoning with the ghost in Joyce and Banville put in place a utopic and an-archic consideration of justice, which can ultimately only be given (over) to the ghostly other within the self.

“Addiction is a strange bastard”: Alcohol(ism) in Irish Fiction

Although it is hard to challenge the claim that alcohol can be considered inherent in Irish culture, the common perception of the fact often feeds on clichés. What helps understand this question is Irish literature. On the one hand, it portrays jubilant festivity to be found in many literary works; on the other, it renders the drama behind alcohol dependency, shifting the focus from joviality towards the more murky aspects of drink consumption, mostly thematised in contemporary literature. This article takes a closer look at how Irish literature renders alcohol use and abuse, and how the literary representations offer a broader perspective, allowing to reconsider some of the stereotypical notions of the proverbial Irish propensity for drink.

Elizabeth Bowen and the Politics of Consent

As a novelist preoccupied with the sexualized gothic conventions haunting Irish fiction since the eighteenth century, Bowen persistently turns to the fraught concept of British and Irish women's consent during periods of twentieth-century political violence. This article considers Bowen's use of gothic tropes of consent in The Last September (1929) as well as a more sustained engagement with the Irish gothic, citizen-subjecthood, and the political valence of consent in her WWII thriller, The Heat of the Day (1948). It argues that in formulating consent in relation to knowledge, and in articulating the necessarily contractual nature of consent, Bowen seeks to define the ethics of individual rights and responsibility during and after World War Two.

‘What Memory Costs’: Intergenerational Inheritance of Trauma in Elizabeth Bowen’s A World of Love, William Trevor’s Fools of Fortune and Mary Leland’s The Killeen

The intergenerational legacies of conflict create a context of partiality for those children who inherit the trauma of their parents. Taking the concept of the ‘hinge generation’ (Hoffman, 2004) and postmemory (Hirsch, 2008), this article examines how mid-century Irish fiction navigates the inheritance of the volatile period of the First World War, the War of Independence and the Civil War. Considering the ways in which memory theory and literary strategy are deployed to reflect the social, political and individual consequences of conflict, this article argues that Elizabeth Bowen’s A World of Love, William Trevor’s Fools of Fortune and Mary Leland’s The Killeen illustrate the long reach of the past across twentieth-century Irish society.

Mother Ireland, Blood-Mother, and the Lost Young Men In Selections of Modern Irish Fiction

This paper examines the crisis of three Irish young men whose lives are devastated by both their motherland and blood-mother. The discussion of this paper will be into three areas. First, how Ireland itself is portrayed as a fragile, subjugated female figure in several Irish literary works. Second, the attributes of three Irish mothers as mirroring the image of Ireland itself. Third, the dilemma of three Irish young men as products of both motherland and blood- mother. The scope of discussion will be on Cormac in O’Faolain’s No Country for Young Men, Willie in Trevor’s Fools of Fortune and Cal in Mac Laverty’s Cal. Irish people have been victims under the heavy hand of British colonialism. The merciless hand of the arrogant colonizer turned Irish people against each other, with an inner inclination towards sectarianism and animosity. Throughout such bloody history of occupation Ireland has been pictured by both British imperialists and Irish nationalists as a helpless, poor and humiliated femaleor a mother who is completely overwhelmed by her perpetual miseries, who needs help to be saved. While the British portrayal of Ireland as a weak female seeks to keep Ireland in subjugation, the Irish description of Ireland as a humiliated female aims to motivate the Irish people to defend their country. Such features of mother Ireland are transferred into the blood mothers in the three selected texts. Grainne, Cormac’s mother in O’Faolain’s No Country for Young Men, is responsible for Cormac’s escape where she cares more about her womanhood than her motherhood. Also, Eva, Willie’s mother in Trevor’s Fools of Fortune turns to be a reflection of mother Ireland, a victim of fortune that is full of rage. She, consequently, killed herself with bitterness and despair and led her son into the abyss of loss and escape. Though Cal’s mother, Garcia, died when he was young and didn’t act as an intensifier to his endless course of loss as in the previous cases, Cal was also victimized and after the burning of his house he stopped to believe in Ireland anymore. Cal’s father, who survived the burning of the house, turned out to be like an old female who laments her destiny. So Cal, like Cormac and Willie, couldn’t escape loss.

Ireland, Migration and Return Migration: the ‘Returned Yank’ in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to the Present by Sinéad Moynihan

present and no trite assumptions about its precarious future. The emphasis is on putting forward an honest and objective appraisal of the multifaceted and intriguing discipline that those of us working in Irish Studies have many reasons to be grateful for. Although it was not feasible in this review to cover the 37 chapters in the book, it should be said that each is worthy of mention and the matter can be easily remedied by acquiring a copy of the Handbook, which will not disappoint. Eamon Maher is Director of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in TU Dublin and general editor of the Reimagining Ireland series with Peter Lang Oxford. Notes 1 It should be remembered that Studies was the first twentieth-century academic journal to grapple with the massive changes that have been taking place in Irish society over more than a century. Founded in 1912, its articles have covered areas as diverse as economics, politics, literature, religion, historical revisionism, and others too numerous to mention. For an overview of the journal’s importance, see Bryan Fanning (ed.), An Irish Century: Studies 1912–2012 (Dublin: UCD Press, 2012). Sinéad Moynihan, Ireland, Migration and Return Migration: the ‘Returned Yank’in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to the Present (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), vii+274 pages. I remember a cartoon in an Irish paper showing some celebrity or other stepping off a plane at Shannon and a reporter immediately sticking a microphone in his face and asking, ‘Tell me, Mr Important, and what do you think of Ireland?’ It captured, if not perfectly, our obsession with what other people think of us, but it also signalled our endless concern about what we think of ourselves. Sinéad Moynihan’s widely-researched and fully-documented study of ‘the returned Yank’ in film and literature is a rich engagement with these issues. After all, what better way to find out what others think than to find out what those revenants see when they return? They have the privilege of having been here, been there, done many things and now come back with new eyes, sometimes dewy with romantic images, often blinkered with prejudice, but always filtered through glasses of their own. The author journeys with remarkable ease through film and literature, Studies • volume 110 • number 439 369 Autumn 2021: Book Reviews beginning with the ‘Quiet Men’ of the literature of the troubles, through the less-examined story of the female returned Yank, taking a hard look at the question of property to which we are in thrall, and querying the common genealogy of Irish fiction. In the introduction the question is asked as to whether the Returned Yank has repeatedly been ‘the catalyst for questions surrounding Irish identity: what is Irishness?’ Many readers may take a deep sigh at the thought of facing yet another study of this never-ending quest, but the approach here is generally refreshing. And it is perfectly correct to state without any backward glance that a great chunk of Irish literature is tangled with and often choked by this whole ‘Irishness’ question. But as there is no escaping it, we must plunge right in. One of the reasons we cringe at filmic depictions of ourselves is that they have such wide provenance. So, a film such as The Quiet Man itself will raise spoken or unspoken questions about its relation to our own experience. Where does it stand along the spectrum of stage-Irishness? Are we being unduly sensitive if we find corniness where none was intended? Yes, we can cringe at Darby O’Gill and the Little People, although it was always just a piece of hokum, and wince at Julia Roberts’ Irish accent in Michael Collins, even though those who are not Irish will find nothing at all wrong with it. Or should we be rightly angry at the fantastic absurdity of Angela’s Ashes, whether in book or in film? Any study of the fiction and films of the troubles is going to be fraught with sensitivity. Sineád Moynihan has read deeply in the original material, but is equally adept at sifting the secondary and critical response. In this way, we...

Jack Fennell, Rough Beasts: The Monstrous in Irish Fiction, 1800–2000

Jack Fennell’s latest book Rough Beasts: The Monstrous in Irish Fiction 1800–2000 sets out by telling the reader that it will run counter to key arguments in the Gothic that suggest gothic fiction and historical causality are connected. For Fennell, although horror may feature in the gothic, the two are not ‘perfectly synonymous’ because ‘horror ends history’ (p. 1). This has been Fennell’s position since he published Irish Science Fiction back in 2014. Here, he expands this thesis by suggesting it is the monster ‘who actually does the history-ending work’. Fennell does include historical context, as well as a significant social, cultural and historical argument for the historical time frame. His conclusion is also helpful in building his definition of horror. He suggests that the emotional state of the reader is irrelevant, and if the protagonist(s) ‘react to their situation with both immediate fear and existential terror’, then the work is in the horror genre (p. 241).

How a Canon Is Formed: Censorship, Modernism, and the US Reception of Irish and South African Literature

Any scholarly project that purports to trace connections between two countries names a field that is to some degree already there – lying buried in archives, of course, but also contained in habitual ways of seeing and talking about texts. The present special issue is no exception. If it makes sense to search for points of contact between Irish and South African writing, this says as much about how these two literatures have been framed in Anglo-American scholarship as it does about any objective traits that they may share in common. If this is the case, then the most interesting questions for comparative inquiry might have less to do with empirical research into intersections between Irish and South African fiction than with the ideological–institutional matrix that makes such research possible in the first place. What disciplinary pressures have encouraged scholars to turn to texts and authors from outside of the US–UK core? What material conditions of production and reception have made such texts available to Anglo-American culture brokers, and how has this material history influenced their critical valorization? And finally, what concepts, keywords, and methodological approaches do we use when discussing Irish and South African literatures, and what role have these tools played in the growth and consolidation of Anglo-American literary studies? In telling the story of their mutual incorporation into the US canon, my focus will be less on identifying concrete intersections between Ireland and South Africa than on tracing how a shared vocabulary of international modernism developed in and around these literatures. By investigating the history and politics of this process of canon formation, we can gain a better understanding not only of the nature of modernism itself, but of its evolving identity over the course of the twentieth century.

William Lane, the Ramble Novel and the Genres of Romantic Irish Fiction

Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is an open-access journal committed to foregrounding innovative Romantic-studies research into bibliography, book history, intertextuality and textual studies.We publish material in a number of formats: peer-reviewed articles, reports on individual/collaborative research projects, bibliographical checklists and biographical profiles of overlooked Romantic writers. Romantic Textualities also carries book reviews and a regularly updated blog and Twitter feed. The journal was relaunched in 2017.

Making Her Time (and Time Again): Feminist Phenomenology and Form in Recent British and Irish Fiction Written by Women

AbstractThis article reads Ali Smith’s 2014 novel How to Be Both alongside Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk (2016) and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017). Using Lauren Berlant’s conception of neoliberal “crisis subjectivity” and Sara Ahmed’s vision of feminist wonderment as an antidote to the neoliberal “promise of happiness,” it argues that each novel considers what might be salvaged and what might grow from situations in which young women become attuned to their mutual incarceration in neoliberal time’s double bind. It contends that the forced improvisation and feminist reorientation undertaken by the protagonists can be analyzed through the lens of temporality. Finally, it contemplates how the disciplinary-specific modes through which the novels’ protagonists consider temporality might be connected to the specific literary projects of their authors.

Anticipating Northern Ireland’s post-Agreement novel: narrative suspension in Deirdre Madden’s One by One in the Darkness

ABSTRACTThis article reads Deirdre Madden’s novel One by One in the Darkness (1996) as a transitional text from post-ceasefire to post-Agreement Northern Irish fiction. The article does so by taking into account the novel’s sceptical treatment of a possible peace agreement through various modes of narrative suspension, something that would find a renewed expression in the works of fiction published in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. Madden’s retrospective narration anticipates the Agreement’s rhetorical suspension of the country’s violent history even before it was signed in 1998 and in doing so, it certainly paved way to post-Agreement fiction’s penchant for re-imagining the past. The reading seeks to explore the novel’s proleptic potential in anticipating post-Agreement Northern Ireland’s suspended political situation through three interrelated conceptual frames – Benita Parry’s “anachrony”, Marcel Proust’s “involuntary memory” and Paul Ricoeur’s “affective trace”.

“A Pint of Plain is Your Only Man”: Masculinities and the Pub in Twentieth Century Irish Fiction

“A Pint of Plain is Your Only Man”: Masculinities and the Pub in Twentieth Century Irish Fiction

Changing Approaches to Migration Memory in Irish Fiction: Beyond the Transactional Migration Model

Changing Approaches to Migration Memory in Irish Fiction: Beyond the Transactional Migration Model

Forum Introduction: The New Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Forum Introduction:The New Eighteenth-Century Ireland Rebecca Anne Barr (bio) In the decade following Ian McBride's Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (2009), the study of what was once "Ascendancy" Ireland has been diversified, expanded, and revitalized. McBride's ambitious work was in many ways the product of two decades of historical revisionism, acting to concretize objections to the ideological restrictions of the New History of Ireland school.1 His work has helped dislodge orthodox and restrictive narratives about Ireland in the 1700s, replacing the image of Protestant hegemony with a vivid sense of the flux, tension, and incipient instability of this island of co-existing and competing cultures, creeds, and languages. As history "from the outside in" McBride's work evaded the ideological pitfalls of Irish Studies as a relatively immature field and one that had somewhat uncritically adopted the ideology of postcolonialism in the service of nationalist politics.2 As Sarah McKibben has noted, eighteenth-century Irish literature displays the pains and the profits of a "mutual transformation of socio-cultural forms," even as that transformation was marked by violence, subjugation, and resistance.3 Due to such historical complexity and complicities, eighteenth-century scholarship has been somewhat marginalized by the state apparatuses (both North and South). Both jurisdictions are currently marking their twentieth-century foundations in the so-called decade of centenaries, providing a funding bonanza for historians and academics. By contrast, both the 1798 rebellion and the rich [End Page 331] Georgian built heritage in Ireland is comparatively neglected, partly due to the ideological dissonance of Protestant republicanism and persistent ambivalence about the national status of the so-called Anglo-Irish (a term coined in the 1920s to distinguish between the supposedly "genuine" Catholic, Irish-speaking Irish, and the Protestant, sometimes-Unionist gentry).4 Academic research thrives, then, against a backdrop of relative disregard.5 Yet, in the context of Brexit's dramatic reshaping of political and intellectual boundaries, eighteenth-century Ireland offers a provocative case study for reassessing the interconnections of nations, literature, and political history. The constitutional flux of the period offers salutary analogues for our own time. As governments increasingly insist on the imperviousness of their borders and value the homogeneity of their citizenry, it behoves academics to recall the contested origins of permeable states. These conceptual and political borders are still shifting, still uneasy. This forum on the new eighteenth-century Ireland at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2018 sought to examine how recent work on eighteenth-century Ireland reshapes our understanding of the period and place and to reflect upon how new research offers to transform our sense of the cultural and political landscape of the time. Over the past decade, scholarship has re-examined Ireland's canon. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift is a signal example, bringing together bibliographers, intellectual historians, and literary critics to illuminate a multifaceted Irish author attuned to both English and Irish readerships and whose Dublin editions attest to a sophisticated audience with a taste for controversy, typographic inventiveness, and wit. Such revisionary projects are not confined to the behemoths of Irish literature but extend to once-unfashionable figures such as Oliver Goldsmith. Beyond the familiar figures, however, Irish literature of the period is too often overlooked by scholars outside the island as a kind of special interest category with little perceived relevance to those interested in broader trends in eighteenth-century studies. Indeed, despite English Short Title Catalogue listings, Dublin editions are frequently overlooked by scholars, presuming them to be mere reprints, though many make substantive editorial alterations and revisions. Work is underway to change this situation. Series such as Early Irish Fiction, c. 1680–1820 and The Literature of Early Modern Ireland have made rich and innovative Irish works available to readers in outstanding critical editions. Ian Campbell Ross's edition of History of Jack Connor (1752), by Irish-Huguenot author William Chaigneau, for instance, presents this novel in a revised and accessible form.6 Jack Connor's generic playfulness, self-conscious handling of picaresque, and thoroughly engaging narrative make it an ideal text for undergraduate studies of prose fiction in [End Page 332] English, not...

Imperial Analogues in Early Irish Fiction

Imperial Analogues in Early Irish Fiction

Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette (eds), British and Irish Fiction since 1940

Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette (eds), British and Irish Fiction since 1940

“A right kind of rogue”: Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies (2015) and The Blood Miracles (2017)

The following article analyzes two novels, published recently by a new, powerful voice in Irish fiction, Lisa McInerney: her critically acclaimed debut The Glorious Heresies (2015) and its continuation The Blood Miracles (2017). McInerney’s works can be distinguished by the crucial qualities of the Irish Noir genre. The Glorious Heresies and The Blood Miracles are presented from the perspective of a middle-aged “right-rogue” heroine, Maureen Phelan. Due to her violent and law-breaking revenge activities, such as burning down the institutions signifying Irishwomen’s oppression (i.e. the church and a former brothel) and committing an involuntary murder, Maureen remains a multi-dimensional rogue character, not easily definable or even identifiable. The focal character’s narrative operates around the abuse of unmarried, young Irish mothers of previous generations who were coerced to give up their “illegitimate” children for adoption and led a solitary existence away from them. The article examines other “options” available to “fallen women” (especially unmarried mothers) in Ireland in the mid-twenty century, such as the Magdalene Laundries based on female slave work, and sending children born “out of wedlock” abroad, or to Mother and Baby Homes with high death-rates. Maureen’s rage and her need for retaliation speak for Irish women who, due to the Church-governed moral code, were held in contempt both by their families and religious authorities. As a representative of the Irish noir genre, McInerney’s fiction depicts the narrative of “rogue” Irish motherhood in a non-apologetic, ironic, irreverent and vengeful manner.

Mapping Trans-Domesticity in Jordan’s <em>Breakfast on Pluto</em>

Mapping Trans-Domesticity in Jordan’s <em>Breakfast on Pluto</em>