Irish Fiction Research Articles

Intertextual transactions in American and Irish fictions By Andrzej Kopcewicz

Intertextual transactions in American and Irish fictions By Andrzej Kopcewicz

The Novelist's Nose: The Progress and Uses of Irish Fiction

The Novelist's Nose: The Progress and Uses of Irish Fiction

Short Stories, Novels and Spain. An Interview With Colm Tóibín

Colm Toibin (Enniscorthy, 1955) is the author of five novels, The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and The Master (2004). This last novel won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger for the best foreign novel published in 2005 in France, and it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Colm Toibin has a long career in journalism and was the editor of the magazine Magill from 1982 to 1985. He is also the author of several non-fiction books, including Homage to Barcelona (1990) and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994). He edited The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999) and has recently published his first book of short stories, Mothers and Sons (2006). Colm Toibin attended the 10th International Conference on the Short Story in English, held at University College Cork on 19-21 June 2008, where this interview took place.

Contemporary Fiction and the Critical Act

Contemporary Fiction and the Critical Act Matthew Hart (bio) Richard Bradford, The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 259 + viii pp. $29.95. Brian W. Shaffer, ed., A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945–2000. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 583 + xx pp. $167.97. Richard Bradford’s The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction closes with a familiar complaint about scholarly writing on contemporary fiction. “[T]he absorption of theory into academic criticism,” writes the professor of English at the University of Ulster, “has all but immunized the latter from that most contentious, subjective feature of talking and writing about literature: an inclination to offer an opinion on whether or not the novel or the author are any good” (246). Impatient with scholarship in which evaluative responses are “compromised by other commitments,” Bradford therefore declares in his preface: “One objective of this book will be to show that enjoyment and critical scrutiny are not mutually exclusive activities” (vi). Let me take Bradford at his word, then, and begin with the sort of judgment he prefers. The Novel Now is not a good book. I didn’t enjoy it, and my lack of enjoyment is directly related to my disagreement with Bradford over the function and value of the academic critical act. This doesn’t mean The Novel Now has no redeeming features. As a survey of recent trends in British and Northern Irish fiction, it is impressively comprehensive and unusually up-to-date. Published in 2007, the book nevertheless refers to several novels released only the previous year, with no visible strain on its argumentative structure. Sensibly divided into four parts, The Novel Now [End Page 192] moves from a discussion of the vexed post–1945 relations between modernism, realism, and the “new postmodernists” into an excursion on genre fiction; a consideration of novels that take up themes of gender and sexuality; and a multipart survey of fictions marked by “nation, race, and place.” Bradford writes, moreover, with commendable clarity and occasional brio, while his evaluative judgments hit the mark as often as they miss. For instance, I think his analysis of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) is a work of mere dutiful explication, deaf to the aesthetic and ideological ambivalences of that strange and wonderful counter-Bildungsroman. Yet I can only applaud his excoriation of Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), as a “blatantly exploitative” novel that stretches “clichés of violent nefarious teen angst beyond their known limits” (213). There’s more to say about Malkani’s fiction than this, but it’s an important point, made with admirable passion. So what’s the problem with The Novel Now? My first objection relates to Bradford’s linkage between the “fundamentalist” pursuit of modernist formal experiment past its interwar heyday (9) and an alleged academic prejudice for the new in all its forms (27). Bradford describes, without benefit of cited evidence, a supposedly well-known scholarly consensus that the novel “cannot rely upon precedent, irrespective of the intrinsic abilities of a new novelist who elects to write in a comparatively conventional manner” (27). What’s more, he describes this prejudice as one of the “legacies of modernism”—a dubious inheritance in which the “dictum that everything has to be new” has somehow replaced “the notion of evaluation, the appreciation of the specific qualities of a novel” (27). The unsubstantiated nature of these remarks is, I think, symptomatic of their superficiality. For if academic critics were really infected by a maniacal lust for novelty, how could one explain the esteem in which a formally conventional novelist like Pat Barker is currently held?1 Far from being an exception to the modernist rule, [End Page 193] Barker’s growing reputation (she has been the subject of two interviews and an essay in this journal alone) is better understood as just one sign of an established critical appetite for historical realism—a taste that, in the parts of his book not organized around generalized critiques of his own discipline, Bradford clearly understands very well (99).2 But I’m in danger of grinding my own ax. I do not dwell on Bradford’s argument with modernism for its own...

The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel Emer Nolan (bio) The Cambridge Companion to The Irish Novel, Cambridge Companions to Literature Series, edited by John Wilson Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xix + 286 pp. $29.99. It is curious that so few Joyceans are inspired by their interest in Joyce to read many other novels by Irish writers. A Joyce scholar researching the cultural context of Ulysses is more likely to look at Revivalist poetry or drama or even at The Freeman’s Journal or Titbits than to compare Joyce to other Irish novelists. Joyceans are possibly most drawn to Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien. Of course, Beckett and O’Brien are among the small number of Irish writers who respond to Joyce’s transformation of both the forms of realist fiction and the literary representation of Ireland—although usually only Beckett is regarded as having gotten beyond the position of disciple or imitator. Nor are international admirers of Joyce alone in this estimate of the Irish novel; many Irish critics imply that no other Irish novelist is particularly important. As Adrian Frazier puts it in his essay on “Irish Modernisms, 1880–1930,” “[e]verything that came before, and everything that came after, is small compared to the weight of one great novel, ‘Stately, plump’ Ulysses, the sacred book of modern fiction” (129). It can be argued that George Moore anticipated Joyce’s adaptation of modes of European naturalism to Irish fiction or that [End Page 379] Gerald O’Donovan produced a Catholic bildungsroman that prefigures A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,1 but accounts of these influences or parallels may appear to be motivated by a wish to reduce Joyce’s achievement to more manageable proportions. Equally, the adjective “Joycean” is sometimes applied to any contemporary Irish novel that breaks out of the conventions of the rather narrow, grim social realism so characteristic of twentieth-century Irish fiction—and sometimes even to novels that do not. The Irish novel, as a distinct genre, is generally taken to be about two hundred years old. Just as nineteenth-century novelists often complained that Ireland was too factionalized, turbulent, or primitive to lend itself well to the protocols of English literary realism, so novelists in independent Ireland lamented that their society was too narrow, stagnant, or repressive to produce good novels at all. As John Wilson Foster notes in his introduction, several of these mid-century writers, including Seán O’Faoláin and Frank O’Connor, excelled in the form of the short story (17).2 Nevertheless, they continued to blame the country, rather than themselves, for the small scale of their literary ambitions. Irish literary historians have tended not to be specialized Joyceans. To this day, Irish critics have produced few monographs on Joyce. Indeed, Joyce may be as much of an inhibiting presence for critics of the Irish novel as he seems to have become for some later Irish writers. In this serviceable but somewhat unadventurous The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, Bruce Stewart’s essay “James Joyce” at least makes due acknowledgement of Ernest Boyd and Vivian Mercier—two often overlooked early contributors to what we might call Irish Joyce Studies (141).3 But while Stewart’s essay shows that it is impossible to make much headway with the question of the “Irishness” of “Irish modernism” without at least alluding to the themes of linguistic colonialism or uneven economic development, he makes no reference to the critics associated with Marxism and postcolonialism who have done so much to energize and extend debates on Irish culture over the last two decades or so. In fact, it falls to some of the essayists who are discussing far less well-known and critically celebrated early Irish novels, such as Aileen Douglas, Miranda Burgess, Vera Kreilkamp, and especially Siobhán Kilfeather, to show how key studies of Irish culture by Terry Eagleton, Seamus Deane, and David Lloyd may not only illuminate the works of individual authors but also help us to track the emergence and development of particular literary tropes and conventions over several centuries.4 Kilfeather examines the aesthetics and politics of the...

Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women's Fiction: Gender, Desire and Power. Linden Peach

Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women's Fiction: Gender, Desire and Power. Linden Peach

Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce (review)

Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce (review)

Ambivalent Realism: May Laffan's "Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor"

Ambivalent Realism:May Laffan's "Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor" Jill Brady Hampton It is probably true to say that few contemporary scholars of Irish literature have heard of May Laffan (1849–1916), let alone read her works. It is also true that any scholar with even a cursory knowledge of present-day debates in Irish literature would be aware of ongoing discussions concerning which writers are, and are not, to be considered part of the "canon"—a debate that grew contentious after the publication of the first three volumes of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991.1 Recent studies of nineteenth-century Irish fiction, particularly of women's contributions, have invigorated the recovery of once-neglected Irish writers. Scholars have recognized the importance of such early Irish authors as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, William Carleton, and the Banim brothers. They also have heralded writers from later in the century including Charles Lever, Charles Kickham, George Moore, and Edith Somerville and Violet Martyn (Ross). Research on Thomas Moore retains a vigorous presence in the scholarly literature; oddly, Charles Kickham, the author of Knocknagow —among the most popular and influential of all nineteenth-century novels in English—still fails to attract much attention.2 Widely lauded in the 1870s and 1880s, May Laffan, too, fell into obscurity until fairly recently. [End Page 127] For students of nineteenth-century Ireland never to read the biting satire of May Laffan would be unfortunate. In The Cabinet of Irish Literature (1883), an ambitious early attempt to represent a canon of Irish writing over four volumes, editors Charles Read and T. P. O'Connor (later a prominent Home Rule politician) recognized her distinctive contribution: Miss Laffan is to some extent the precursor of a new school of Irish fiction . . . she deserves the highest praise for the courage and remarkable skill with which she has exposed some of the shams and the narrowness that deface the society of Ireland as of every other country. Her writings in this respect mark unquestionably a new era in Irish literature.3 Read and O'Connor's praise raises questions about both the current Irish literary canon and nineteenth-century writing. They may, of course, have simply been wrong in their judgment; but it may also be that the scholarly neglect of Laffan and other, equally significant, writers provides insight into both nineteenth and twentieth-century critical judgments, and that she, too, warrants a place in the canon. Laffan's acclaimed short story "Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor" (1879), an exemplar of Irish literary social realism and penetrating satire, makes the case compelling.4 In 1979, Robert Lee Wolff 's editing of Garland's Ireland: From the Act of Union—1800 to the Death of Parnell—1891 sparked interest in Irish fiction outside the Revival.5 Notably, Wolff was a professor of history, not literature. In acknowledging literature's value as an historical source, Wolff commented that "above all, it was the novelists who taught the reading public about nineteenth-century Ireland. It is the novelists who if given the chance can still today outdo the scholars in teaching us in the late twentieth century about Ireland in the nineteenth."6 Including Laffan, the Garland collection presented a new perspective on Irish Catholic middle-class life, which recent research has further [End Page 128] developed.7 John V. Kelleher, Wolff 's colleague at Harvard, also testified to the value of the Garland collection: But to declare that most of it lacked seriousness showed either that those who leveled the charge had only a few of the lighter books in mind or, more likely, that the Ireland they knew was so changed from what it had been even a few decades earlier that they could have little comprehension of what the older writers had struggled with and tried to express.8 Kelleher also emphasized the helpful information, perceptive observation, and intelligent comment on nineteenth-century Ireland offered by the collected fiction. Born in Dublin, May Laffan was the product of a denominationally mixed marriage, a rarity in the highly sectarian Ireland of the time where religion fostered mental, social, and cultural ghettoes. Her mother, Ellen Sarah, neé Fitzgibbon...

The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror by Aaron Kelly

MLR, I 03. I, 2oo8 2 I 5 life.Stouck thoroughly assesses the reception of each ofRoss's books, and his tone is sympathetic but fair.This book is thus not only a thorough and carefully researched biography, but also a significant social and literaryhistory. UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA ALISON CALDER The Thriller and Northern Ireland since I969: Utterly Resigned Terror. By AARON KELLY. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. Viii+2I3 pp. /45. ISBN 978-o-7546 3839-I. Northern Ireland has just claim to the titleofmost over-narrativized region on earth. According toAaron Kelly, the 'Troubles' have spawned almost 400 thrillers since 1970,most of themmale-authored. A fewhave attempted to register thepolitical and social injustices that gave rise to and sustained the conflict, even as they gothicize theNorth as a carceral topos.Most, however, deal in sensationalist fantasy and crass stereotypes thatmerely perpetuate ignorance and misunderstanding. Confronted by such one-dimensional, cliche-ridden texts,critics have tended to arraign rather than interrogate theirnarrative modes. Kelly's monograph is to be welcomed, therefore, forsubjecting the formaland ideological dimensions of thisvariegated literarycorpus to systematic, theorized investigation. This absorbing, ifjargon-heavy, study of the 'Troubles' thrillergenre significantly expands the critical frameworkswithin which contemporary Northern Irish fiction can be read. The book's central aim is 'to redeem not only the thriller as a formbut also the historical dynamics present in theNorth of Ireland, to affirma potential ity that disrupts what inmany of these books appears most fated, contemptuously dismissed, statically stereotyped and without hope' (p. i). To this end, Kelly blends Jamesonian, Benjaminian, and Brechtian theory in order to challenge the idea that 'the supposed crudity of popular fiction and Northern Irish society reciprocally re inforce each other' (p. 3). In the process, he contests the prevailing perception of thriller fiction as apolitical 'trash' by exposing thegenre's reactionary collusion with a view of theNorthern conflict as insoluble. The study as awhole isunderpinned by a conception of popular fiction as a complex dialectic between ideology and utopia, between 'the repressiveand redemptive modalities of its imaginary' (p. 9). Kelly elaborates his thesis over fivechapters. The firstexamines how theNorth functions ideologically in thework ofmany British thrillerwriters as a historically voided space within which English subjects simultaneously address and repress their own historical problematics. This leads him to consider inChapter 2 the extent to which Northern Irishwriters acquiesce in thisdominant representational paradigm. Kelly's focus here is on the dialectics of home and belonging inNorthern fiction, which, he astutely observes, 'is not reducible to a colonial afflictionor binarized na tional collision, but also invokes a complex totalityof displacements such as class and gender' (p. 57). Chapter 3 examines thedifficultiesposed by the social complexity ofurban space to thedominant ideologies of Irish nationalism and unionism, both ofwhich disclose a 'rusticative imperative' (p. 84) that figuresBelfast as a cityof 'infernal symbolic death' (p. 87). The chapter isenergized by a perceptive analysis ofMcNamee's Resurrection Man, throughwhich Kelly substantiates his claim that the thriller'smapping of the city as a network of crime reveals itspotential to repoliticize the closed binarisms of thenational imaginary. The fourthchapter skilfullymaps the aesthetic and ideological implications of the 'Troubles' thriller's portrayal of roguemasculinity and fetishized femininity, tropes thatoften coalesce around the representation ofBelfast as femme fatale.Here, Kelly 2I6 Reviews offersbrief but critically alert readings of a handful of the few 'Troubles' thrillers written by feminists,which, he suggests, do not necessarily espouse an emancipatory politics. The thriller's emplotment of transgressivemasculinities and femininities is further interrogated in the concluding chapter, wherein Kelly persuasively argues that 'theutopian mode of the thrillerhas a politically vital role toplay inunmasking the shadowy mechanics of contemporary capitalism and undermining the legitimacy of the state formation' (p. I64). LIAM HARTE Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction inContemporary America. By DAVID COWART. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2006. Xii+249 pp. $55; 31.-50. ISBN 978-o-80o4-4469-2. David Cowart brings a quite winning assurance to this critique, highly attentive, an American literarymap towelcome and not least for its lovely run of style. In taking on contemporary immigrant as against second-generation authorship, he looks to the refractionsof departure, journey, and arrival, for what inher 1926 narrative Gertrude Stein notably called...

The Unreliable Ripley: Irony and Satire in Robert McLiam Wilson's Ripley Bogle

The Unreliable Ripley:Irony and Satire in Robert McLiam Wilson’s Ripley Bogle Elke D’hoker (bio) In 1989 the young writer Robert McLiam Wilson surprised the literary world in London, Dublin, and Belfast with a highly original first novel: Ripley Bogle. The novel was praised as "one of the most precocious debuts of any modern writer" (Smyth 132) and won the Rooney Prize (1989), the Irish Book Award (1990) and the prestigious Betty Trask Prize (1990). Together with fellow writers Colin Bateman and Glenn Patterson, Wilson was hailed as one of the promising new voices in Northern Irish fiction.1 Keen to place this new writer and interpret his novel, reviewers and critics compared Ripley Bogle with Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers (1973), J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).2 They detected references to Dickens, Beckett, and Flann O'Brien and read the novel as a parody of the Bildungsroman and the "growing-up in exile romance" (Jackson 229). Moreover, given Robert McLiam Wilson's personal background as a Catholic Northern Irish writer, born in the troubled working-class area of West Belfast, Ripley Bogle was also read in the context of the conflict dividing Northern Ireland and scanned for concrete traces of the author's ideological stance. Yet Ripley Bogle's comic, ironical, and highly idiosyncratic fictional memoir cannot easily be contained within any one fictional or aesthetic model, nor can it simply be reduced to a specific political message or meaning. The novel's peculiar [End Page 460] combination of narrative unreliability, self-conscious narration, and a complex layering of irony and satire successfully eludes any straightforward interpretation and continuously frustrates the reader. Drawing on new theoretical approaches to narrative unreliability by critics such as Ansgar Nünning, James Phelan, and Dorrit Cohn, this article proposes to dissect the different levels of irony in the text and to discuss their effect on the political and ethical content of the novel as a whole. Robert aka Ripley? Ripley Bogle is the account of four days in the life of the eponymous hero-narrator, just before he turns twenty-one. Ripley is living on the streets in London and elaborates in great detail on the bodily effects of hunger, cold, pain, and a craving for cigarettes. He gives an equally detailed description of the streets and hide-outs of his city and relates his meetings with tramps and other people. In between, he also narrates his poor childhood and difficult youth in Belfast and his brief period of fame as a student in Cambridge. In the final chapter, Ripley gives his narrative a surprising twist when he corrects a number of lies he told the reader. The overall tone of Ripley's narrative is comic, arrogant, and highly satiric as he sets out to ridicule almost all things and people he encounters. In particular, his dismissive statements about the Northern Irish situation have arrested attention in the existing, mainly political, readings of the novel. In a perceptive reading, Gerry Smyth argues that the novel "constitutes . . . a scathing attack on the calcified and disabling discourses of identity foisted onto young people by their forebears, living and dead" (132). Indeed, Ripley Bogle leaves the reader in no doubt as to what he thinks of the Irish and their Irishness: "What is it about Ireland that the Irish love so? What makes them guff on so endlessly about their country? Is it the pain and the poverty, the death and danger? Is it the spite, hatred, treachery, stupidity, vice, inhumanity or the comfortless despair? Whatever it is, we can see that the Irish have a lot to be grateful for" (Ripley 190). He denounces "all that Gaelic, nationalist, Celtic superiority bollockspeak" that his friend Maurice falls for and records clashes with "sectarian villains" from both sides of the conflict (101, 47). Ripley rejects the different political explanations of the violence in Northern Ireland. He locates politics "in the realms of theory—polite, debatable and not actually hazardous to life" and sets it apart from "the practical side of things, the fatal side of...

The Cambridge companion to the Irish novel

Introduction John Wilson Foster 1. The novel before 1800 Aileen Douglas 2. The national tale and allied genres, 1770s-1840 Miranda Burgess 3. The novel of the big house Vera Kreilkamp 4. The Gothic novel Siobhan Kilfeather 5. Catholics and fiction during the Union (1801-1922) James H. Murphy 6. Irish modernisms, 1880-1930 Adrian Frazier 7. James Joyce Bruce Stewart 8. Region, realism, and reaction, 1922-72 Norman Vance 9. The novel in Irish Alan Titley 10. Women novelists, 1930s-1960s Ann Owens Weekes 11. Two post-modern novelists: Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien Terence Brown 12. Life writing in the twentieth century Elizabeth Grubgeld 13. The novel and the Northern Troubles Elmer Kennedy-Andrews 14. Contemporary Irish fiction Eve Patten.

A guide to Irish fiction, 1650-1900

A guide to Irish fiction, 1650-1900

“I want a hero …” – Deconstructions of the Hero in Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century British and Irish Fiction

Since the 19th century modern literature has been characterized by the deconstruction and loss of the hero. While Carlyle aims at a re-definition of heroism and Hardy prefers to see the fate of his characters in the context of Greek tragedy, both Jerome K. Jerome and H. G. Wells show the world inhabited by grotesque and tragicomic anti-heroes. Deprived of volitional motion and constantly faced with abortive plans, they blunder through life on intractable bicycles which are the modern equivalents of the Wheel of Fortune. In contrast to the 18th-century picaresque tradition, in which the anti-hero's misery is frequently mitigated by sentimentality, Joyce's ‘Hades’ episode in Ulysses intensifies the 19th-century heritage of anthropological scepticism so that man is ultimately reduced to an assortment of rotting limbs and organs breeding maggots and death-moths.

The Vanishing Homoerotic: Colm Tóibín's Gay Fictions

It seems a stretch to say, as T?ib?n claims here, that a post-gay moment means that every single gay man's story is now intrinsically less interesting to Irish fic tion writers as a whole. But this claim does appear to characterize T?ib?n's own imaginative concerns, and to influence his choice of narrative form. Three of T?ib?n's novels, in particular?The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999), and his recent The Master (2004)?stand as contemporary Irish texts that foreground gay identity. Decriminalization in 1993 validated a range of Irish lesbian and gay cultur al identities that had been evolving, often outside the law, throughout the twen tieth century. In the decade since legal reform, Irish writers have responded to this legal validation, notably in the work of Cathal ? Searcaigh, Emma Donoghue, Jamie O'Neill, Keith Ridgeway, and Mary Dorcey. In The Contem porary Irish Novel, Linden Peach suggests that these marginal voices question the frames of reference that inform society's narratives about itself.2 Alan Sin field goes further; he argues that, If les/bi/gay people have some reason to take

Curious Streets

The psychological journey of migration is far longer than the geographical one.1 At the peak of his career in the mid-1980s, Desmond Hogan was being compared to Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro2 a...

Uncanny Doubles: The Fiction of Anne Enright

From Stoker s Dracula, to the Circe episode from Joyce's Ulysses, to Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman Irish fiction presents a range of doubles. Anne Enright's The Portable Virgin (1991), Wig My Father Wore (1995)? and What Are You Like? (2000) also use grotesque doubles to depict disturbing fears and longings. Doubles dramatize the instability of identity and its consequent unpredictability. As a result, they are particularly apropos to Enright's vision of an Ireland in the throes of cultural change, yet still measuring itself against its former nemesis, Britain. In The Portable which won the Rooney Prize in 1991, a wife's discovery of her husband's affair intensifies her fear of aging. Sharing the name of Mary with the Madonna of the story's title, the other woman is the wife's, also named Mary, double too. Doubling wife and mistress against their Biblical prototype, Enright exposes the ludicrousness of women's attempts to construct an eternally youthful identity that pleases men. Enright's first novel, Wig My Father Wore, moves beyond the critique of femininity seen in The Portable Virgin. Wig is a darkly comical novel about death and eternity. In Wig My Father Wore, one of the heroine's dou bles is a supernatural being. Having an angel for a double highlights the conflict between religious ideals and the technophiliac materialism of the contemporary Ireland. A television producer, Enright's protagonist works within the shifting, shallow milieu of popular culture. Enright's juxtaposition of her protagonist's trivial context with her metaphysical conflicts creates black humor and unre solved questions. Like The Portable Virgin and Wig My Father Wore, Enright's What are You Like? uses uncanny doubles to investigate how identity relates to the uni versal fear of death. What Are You Like? employs doubles who dramatize the impossibility of stabilizing identity or answering ontological questions. In Enright's second novel, the doubles are twins who do not know of each other's existence. A sense of the uncanny arises not through an identification between a supernatural being and a person, as in Wig My Father Wore and Virgin,

Editors' Notes: Notai na nEagarthoiri

Editors’ Notes:Nótaí na nEagarthóirí No Irish child of the twentieth century could grow up without encountering the influence and the enigma of the Catholic priesthood, and certainly not George O'Brien, who has recounted his childhood in Lismore, County Waterford, in three volumes of autobiography beginning with Dancehall Days (1988). Grim accounts of church–run industrial schools have become a staple of recent Irish fiction and memoir, among them Paddy Doyle's The God Squad (1988) and Patrick Touher's Fear of the Collar (1991). In this issue, O'Brien introduces the all-too-human figure of Father Willy, a priest in his village who had been removed from an industrial school. O'Brien reimagines for us a system that dehumanized both students and teachers alike, while in no way excusing the cruelty of such institutions. The stolen childhoods of which O'Brien writes confirm the Yeatsian allusion in the piece's title: "the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." Contemporary critics have come to think of the genre of autobiography as in many ways just as fictional as the novel. Certainly, every autobiographer is engaged in "editing reality." Yet first-person accounts arising out of marginalized communities, like the Irish Travelling People, still hold the promise of a much-needed veracity. Here, Dr. José Lanters examines the accounts of Sean Maher, Nan Joyce, Betsy Whyte, and other Traveller life stories collected in recent years, and finds that in these autobiographies the question of how the self is represented becomes especially vexed. Not only are the Travellers habitually defined as outsiders, but many are compelled by illiteracy to have their own stories written down by others. Many Traveller stories, she finds, are deeply ambiguous—doubting both their own legitimacy and the ability of the "settled" people to understand. The president-elect of the American Conference for Irish Studies, José Lanters is the author of Unauthorized Versions: Irish Menippean Satire, 1919-1952 (2000). Born in Athlone in 1921, the poet Moira Bailis has lived in New Jersey for many decades, and reading her poems in this issue's "Filíocht Nua"section—poems [End Page 5] arising from places in both Ireland and the United States—we see clearly how Bailis's transatlantic backgrounds inform her deceptively simple lines. Often, these poems hone in on moments when other presences make themselves felt, as when a museum visit in North Carolina raises the ghost of the immigrant experience, or when a goshawk in "Allta" becomes an avatar of lost wildness. In other poems, the presences are literary: her childhood reading burbles through as a plane touches down at a Midwestern airport, and, in "Memento" she perceives the example of William Carlos Williams in the simplest of moments on an ordinary road. Moira Bailis's poems have previously appeared in such journals as Parnassus and Contemporary Review, and she hosts a monthly poetry show on Farleigh Dickinson University radio, As Dr. Joseph Heininger notes, one of the most enduring of Seamus Heaney's literary affinities has been his fascination with Dante, seen in his translations of cantos from the Inferno and the use of models from Dante in the pilgrimage sequences of Station Island (1984). Just as important, Heaney has also embraced such Dantean forms as the tercet. Here, Heininger looks closely at the first major indication of the poet's engagement with Dante, "Ugolino," the closing poem of Station Island (1984). In the figure of the damned Count Ugolino, Heaney alludes to the persisting political violence of his native Ulster, "in which the sins of the fathers are visited upon the heads of the children, and the cycles of social and familial violence continue." This Dantean thread continues in "The Flight Path," a long poem in the 1996 collection The Spirit Level. Joseph Heininger's articles on Irish literature have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies and the James Joyce Quarterly. In the early years of the twentieth century, the post of under secretary for Ireland was among the most demanding and conflict-ridden jobs in the British government. When Balfour's Conservative government appointed the Catholic, Irish-born Liberal Sir Antony MacDonnell—fresh from an...

Irish fiction: an introduction

Following the structure of other titles in the Continuum Introductions to Literary Genres series, Irish Fiction includes: A broad definition of the genre and its essential elements. A timeline of developments within the genre. Critical concerns to bear in mind while reading in the genre. Detailed readings of a range of widely taught texts. In-depth analysis of major themes and issues. Signposts for further study within the genre. A summary of the most important criticism in the field. A glossary of terms. An annotated, critical reading list. This book offers students, writers, and serious fans a window into some of the most popular topics, styles and periods in this subject. Authors studied in Irish Fiction include: Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, John and Michael Banim, Gerald Griffin, William Carleton, Charles Lever, Sheridan Le Fanu, Edith Somerville, Violet Martin, George Moore, James Stephens, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty, Kate O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Francis Stuart, Brian Moore, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien, Jennifer Johnston, Roddy Doyle, John McGahern, John Banville, Eoin McNamee, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright and Emma Donoghue

Neil Murphy, Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt - An Analysis of the Epistemological Crisis in Modern Fiction

Neil Murphy, Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt - An Analysis of the Epistemological Crisis in Modern Fiction

The Big House: Space, Place, and Identity in Irish Fiction

How does Irish fiction stand out as being Irish? Irish novels are markedly Irish?from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800), first truly Irish novel1 to recent fiction of Maeve Binchy and Niall Williams. On many occasions Ireland itself is presented as a character in text, as in James Joyce's Dubliners (1914)? where Dublin and its people stand for whole of Ireland, enhanced by detail and exactness of Dublin sites, streets, and characters. In his 1988 critical history of Irish novel, James M. Cahalan points out that the Big House novel was most popular and enduring subgenre within Irish novel, except for Irish historical novel.2 What is clear is that these fic tions could not be set anywhere else; action must take place in Ireland. With both these genres emphasis falls upon Irish element?either from historical point of view or with a strong image (the Big House), which evokes Protestant Ascendancy. The spatial frames of Irish fiction are set and determined, despite their occasional disturbance by visitors. Space and place in Irish fiction play an integral role in both creation and rediscovery of iden tity, on both a personal and a national level. Published in 1800, Castle Rackrent may be seen as a novella or tale, owing to its brevity. Its full and weighty title?Castle Rackrent, An Hibernian Tale: Taken from Facts, and from Manners of Irish Squires, before Year 1/82?iron ically backs up case for text as tale over novel. Regardless, Edgeworth's title draws attention to book's Irishness.3 You know it is set in Ireland and is about Irish people. Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806) does this too, but in a more subtle and discreet way. Indeed, later Irish fiction?from Somerville and Ross's The Real Charlotte (1894) through James Joyce's fiction and on to William Trevor's Fools of Fortune (1983)?does not seem to feel need to declare itself as Irish so early on. This change of tactic suggests that Irish