Irish Literary Tradition Research Articles

FIDELITY TO IRISH IDENTITY: ALLEGORY OF THE OUTSIDER IN JULIA O'FAOLAIN'S “FIRST CONJUGATION” AND JOHN MONTAGUE'S “AN OCCASION OF SIN”

Julia O’Faolain’s “First Conjugation” and John Montague’s “An Occasion of Sin” are contemporary short stories that have received critical attention. The authors’ attempts to renovate stylistic qualities of short story writing and to experiment with thematic issues in Irish literary tradition are main sources of this attention. This article examines the impact of outsiders who suddenly appear in a contemporary Irish setting in both works. Traditionally, Irish writers of fiction have pointed out a sense of isolation and solitude dominating the mind of Irish characters, which results in a network of dark and gloomy social relationships. The intervention of outsiders, however, renders this critical analysis exceptional in that outsiders disrupt social formations resulting in an identity crisis. O’Faolain’s “First Conjugation” introduces outsider image in the form of an Italian instructor who challenges the worldview of a young Irish girl, an insider in this setting. Depicted from the perspective of the Irish protagonist, the story illustrates how easily outsider challenges Irish identity. On the other hand, Montague’s “An Occasion of Sin” narrates outsider’s experience among Irish characters. The conflict between outsiders and insiders illustrates the urgent need for a renewal of Irish perceptions. Both texts focus on the aftermath of the arrival of outsiders among insiders leading to a climactic point of collision. Accordingly, this article reviews the relationship between outsiders and insiders in the selected works and argues that both texts appoint outsider as an allegory of questioning. Furthermore, the article concludes that outsider is a means of self-questioning that faces traditional notion of Irish identity and that eventually a solution to this inner conflict appears once again in the form of traditional fidelity.

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

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

‘Walking the boundaries’: Lynne Parker’s unpublished version of Federico García Lorca’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba

ABSTRACT Crossing the frontiers looking for inspiration has been part of the Irish literary tradition, and translation and adaptation of continental writers such as Federico García Lorca have played an important role. The dissenting Lorquian voices revive in Ireland to find new meanings for the silences of the original play. This article explores an unpublished version of La Casa de Bernarda Alba, by Lynne Parker (The House of Bernarda Alba, 1993). The study will first review the relationship between Irish theatre and continental drama by the end of the twentieth century, to address its internationalization as well as the relationship between the North and the South; after this, the contexts of (re)creation of the play will be analyzed, with a special interest in the situation of women in society in the Spain of Lorca and the Belfast of Parker. The study will include a revision of the process of Hibernization Parker carried out from the English version she used as a source. Furthermore, an interview with the playwright will be used to illustrate some points. Conclusions aim at recognizing the play as an act of linguistic acculturation and appropriation and as part of the canon of Irish rewritings of Lorca.

Stereotype blasting: Alan McMonagle as satirist and visionary

ABSTRACT This article examines Irish writer Alan McMonagle’s use of dark satire in his debut novel Ithaca (2017), which presents the story of Jason, a vulnerable child who meets another of society’s scapegoats, an unnamed “girl at the swamp”, and whose friendship offers an escape from the misery of life in the bog hole they call home. McMonagle’s invective finds external expression in his comic blasting of social constructions based on gender and class stereotypes in the Irish literary tradition. His engagement with the absurd sometimes takes the form of humorous and ribald satire, and sometimes lends his work tones of existential tragedy. The purpose of this article is to highlight his mediating role as a satirical writer who, in holding a mirror up to politics, reveals the psychological pain of Irish society and offers an original perspective on social inclusion and change in the Irish context.

In Spite of Dungeon, Fire, and Sword: Peadar Ó Gealacáin and the survival of the Gaelic Irish Literary Tradition

As we advance through the 19th century in Ireland, the Irish Gaelic Literary tradition, one of the oldest in Western Europe, found itself in danger of extinction. The failure of the Irish language to find foothold in the towns and cities, and the subsequent failure of the language’s literary movement to transition itself into the printed mode, left the literature and poetry locked within the oral and manuscript traditions. With the ethnic cleansing of Ireland by Westminster well under way, first through forced emigration and then through famine, a small group of scribes set themselves the mammoth task of preserving this national treasure by travelling the country and writing down the songs, poems, and prose which were the result of centuries of literary effort on the part of the native Irish. By the end of the period the population had fallen from almost 9.000.000 at its height to less than 4.000.000: with no monoglot Irish speakers left. However due to the efforts of this small group of individuals we retain most of our literary wealth. This work tells the story of one of them, Peadar Ó Gealacáin.

World-Ecological Satire: Peat, Brian O'Nolan, and the Irish Free State's Energy Regime

A world-ecological perspective of cultural production refuses a dualist conception of nature and society – which imagines nature as an external site of static outputs – and instead foregrounds the fact that human and extra-human natures are completely intertwined. This essay seeks to reinterpret the satirical writing of a canonical figure within the Irish literary tradition, Brian O'Nolan, in light of the energy history of Ireland, understood as co-produced by both human actors and biophysical nature. How does the energy imaginary of O'Nolan's work refract and mediate the Irish environment and the socio-ecological relations shaping the fuel supply-chains that power the Irish energy regime dominant under the Irish Free State? I discuss the relationship between peat as fuel and Brian O'Nolan's pseudonymous newspaper columns, and indicate how questions about energy regimes and ecology can lead us to read his Irish language novel An Béal Bocht [The Poor Mouth] (1941) in a new light. The moments I select and analyze from O'Nolan's output feature a kind of satire that exposes the folly of separating society from nature, by presenting an exaggerated form of the myth of nature as an infinite resource.

‘I know my parents made me by my hands’: The Villanelle in Ireland

Repetition is central to the structure and spirit of the francophone villanelle, a nineteen-line form composed of five tercets and a concluding quatrain. The opening and closing lines of the first tercet alternate as the closing lines for subsequent tercets, before coming together as the final two lines of the concluding quatrain. Full end-rhymes are also expected throughout, both in the first and third lines of the tercets, and to connect the middle lines of these stanzas, resulting in a unique and instantly identifiable form: A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2. This construction, ‘the classic form of repetition and persistence’,1 foregrounds an inability to progress without a turn to the past, as the villanelle ‘circles around and around, refusing to go forward in any kind of linear development … suggesting at the deepest level, powerful recurrences of mood and emotion and memory’.2 The villanelle, informed by what has been described as ‘the law of return’,3 has become one of the more popular conventional forms in contemporary Irish poetry, having attracted a number of established and emerging Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, and Sinéad Morrissey. To trace its emergence and entry into anglophone Irish poetry reveals the efforts of contemporary poets to exploit the form’s structure and history to complicate the Irish literary tradition and to foreground their literary inheritance as transnational, transgressing the borders of nation, language, and culture.

Retromodernism: New "Structure of Feeling" in Mike McCormack's Solar Bones

Retromodernism:New "Structure of Feeling" in Mike McCormack's Solar Bones Joanna Jarząb-Napierała For the last two decades, critics' attention has been turned, among many areas of literary studies, toward the New Modernist Studies, the emergence of which is symbolically ascribed to the year 1999.1 Within the bounds of this resparked interest in modernism, some scholars argue against the idea of periodization, opting for a continuity of modernism in the second half of the twentieth century as well as in contemporary fiction, known as transhistoricism. A second contentious point revolves around an aspect of European modernism's hegemony. Thus, the New Modernist Studies promote a transnational turn, allowing literatures from other continents to be analyzed in terms of the development of their alternative modernisms irrespective of the European model.2 The notion of modernism as an unfinished project is challenged by David James and Urmila Seshagiri, who detect a new movement in contemporary literature named metamodernism. The critics argue that a scholarly inquiry of the observable self-conscious and innovative re-creation of modernist aesthetics by twenty-first-century writers predetermines a precise definition of modernism as a period and as a paradigm.3 A similar phenomenon is noticeable among Irish writers of our times. Such novelists as John Banville, Sara Baume, Eimear McBride, or Anna Burns redeploy modernist aesthetics to comment on social and political aspects of Irish life.4 Among them one may name Mike McCormack, whose Solar Bones (2016) [End Page 55] may be read as one of many epitomes of modernism's reemergence in contemporary Irish prose.5 As long as the regeneration of modernist discourse in twenty-first-century fiction is no longer questioned, the motivation behind the writers' reevaluation of modernist methods still requires scholarly scrutiny. To further particularize the motivation for this active response to modernism visible in Irish contemporary arts and letters, especially in McCormack's case, the term retromodernism is proposed in the following article. The etymology of retromodernism resides in a conflation of the theory of metamodernism with a notion of retrotopia to amplify the meaning of the writers' need to "look back to the aspirational energies of modernism."6 In the case of Irish prose, modernism marks one of its greatest periods of literary development. One hundred years after the publication of James Joyce's fundamental works, McCormack creates a novel which to a certain extent appears to be a contemporary version of Ulysses. Whether Solar Bones in any way approaches the excellence of Joyce's artistry or if one hundred years is enough time for McCormack to avoid the Bloomian anxiety of influence does not fall within the ambit of this particular research. Instead, the article focuses on the role the re-creation of modernist aesthetics plays in the portrayal of contemporary Irish reality; analyzes modernist methods implemented in Solar Bones with regard to current political, social, and existential issues depicted in the novel; and argues that the theory of retromodernism best justifies the need among Irish writers, such as McCormack, to redeploy modernist techniques to tackle the question of the postmodern state of Irish society as well as individual human beings. Joyce—on the one hand, an Irish writer; on the other, one making a literary career as a voluntary exile—is more often than not treated as a link between [End Page 56] the Irish literary tradition and a European idea of modernism. To follow Nels Pearson's view of Irish cosmopolitanism, Joyce's modernism "arise[s] from a rigorous, nonhierarchical, and mutually transformative interplay of national and global consciousness."7 European centers of cosmopolitan literature such as Paris and Trieste allowed the writer to take a more reserved glance at the current situation in his homeland, by this token providing a more acute diagnosis of Irish society via the content as well as the experimental form. McCormack, with his allegiance to County Mayo, both in his works and in his life, appears to have a greater clarity from a closer distance. His locality results in his being solely compared to other Irish writers, Joyce inevitably being one of them. Specialists on Ulysses register many episodic similarities between the narration of Leopold...

From Shancoduff to Mossbawn: Lines of Convergence and Divergence in Kavanagh and Heaney

From Shancoduff to Mossbawn: Lines of Convergence and Divergence in Kavanagh and Heaney1 Una Agnew SSL Landscape and everyday life The poetry of Patrick Kavanagh (1904–67) and Seamus Heaney (1939– 2013) is inspired, in large part, by the landscapes and everyday life of their respective rural communities. The drumlin farm-land of South Monaghan and its farming chores are as central to the poetry of Kavanagh as the routine daily life of Mossbawn, Broagh and Anahorish are in the work of Heaney. Whether we realise it or not, this attention to very ordinary events such as spraying potatoes, milking cows or picking blackberries is significantly new in Irish poetry written in English. Raising these commonplace daily realities to the status of lyric poetry is a radical break with an Irish literary tradition that for years had been strongly preoccupied with nationalism: with Ireland as a ‘Dark Rosaleen’ or as the tragic beauty of Kathleen Ní Houlihan. In a BBC Radio 4 interview in 1974, Heaney uses the Greek word omphalos to root himself firmly in his home at Mossbawn. He explains: ‘would begin with the Greek word omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of someone pumping water outside our back door. It is Co. Derry in the early 1940s . . . There the pump stands a slender, iron idol, snouted and helmeted, dressed down with a sweeping handle’. A procession of neighbours come with rattling buckets to draw water daily and leave ‘weighed down by silent water’.2 Thirty-five years later this pump in his family’s backyard will still be iconic and will assume that place forever in one of Heaney’s finest poems, ‘Mossbawn: Sunlight’, one of two written in dedication to his aunt Mary Heaney: ‘There was a sunlit absence / The helmeted pump in the yard / Heated its iron, Water honeyed / In the slung bucket / And the sun stood / Like a griddle cooling / Against the wall / Of each long afternoon’.3 Studies • volume 107 • number 425 9 In a parallel way, the family setting outside Kavanagh’s home in Mucker on Christmas morning is foundational for an exploration of Kavanagh’s ‘childhood country’, the centre of his world. On Christmas morning the domestic world of his six-year-old self is captured in detail, as if rolled out on film: ‘My father played the melodeon / Outside at our gate; / There were stars in the morning east / And they danced to his music . . . Outside in the cow house my mother / made the music of milking; / The light of her stablelamp was a star / And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle’.4 Memory Early domestic settings such as these are essential sources of inspiration for both poets and are deeply embedded in their poetic DNA. ‘On the stem / Of memoryimaginationblossoms’areKavanagh’swell-chosenwords.5 Heaney’s poetry openly declares undying devotion to Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses.6 In his series of interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, he recalls how childhood memories from his Mossbawn and Anahorish days are organically stored in his body’s memorybank ,7 awaiting the trigger, that moment of inspiration that transforms a forgotten image into material for a poem. For Heaney, Toner’s Bog, stories of bottomless bog-holes, the train shunting into Castledawson, blackberry picking, churning and his Aunt Mary’s floury apron all bear dividends in terms of poetic inspiration. Kavanagh’s ‘animal remembering mind’ is also packed with teeming archives of early memories that translate into poems. One such instance occurs when he finds himself an exile in London, dreaming back over the past and remembering the plight of a neighbour’s donkey he once borrowed and kept in an outhouse overnight: ‘We borrowed the loan of Kerr’s big ass / To go to Dundalk with butter. / Brought him home the evening before the market / An exile that night in Mucker’. Almost as incantation, we hear Kavanagh naming the familiar items of harness and, with characteristic humorosity, address in sonnet form his own sense of exile and ‘out-of...

Geomantic by Paula Meehan

Reviewed by: Geomantic by Paula Meehan Kathryn Kirkpatrick Geomantic by Paula Meehan, pp. 102. Dublin: Dedalus Press. Distributed by Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY. $15.95 (paper). Paula Meehan’s seventh and latest poetry collection, Geomantic, develops the concerns of her previous volumes, bringing new formal expression to issues of class trauma, ecological crisis, and gender politics. After the extended eulogies of Painting Rain (2009), Geomantic employs a spare and supple form from both the exigencies of life in a public role and the lived experiences of social and political struggle, the inner life always informed by soundings from the outer. Among other influences, Meehan describes these eighty-one nine-line poems., [End Page 148] in which most lines comprise nine syllables per line as formally inspired by Seamus Heaney’s “Postcard from Iceland.” Meehan took up her post as Poetry Professor of Ireland shortly after Heaney’s death, and her choice of form became both a tribute to him as well as a support to herself, “Seamus’s hand that I could grab.” She has also located the formal structure of the book in the memorial quilts for the youth lost to drug addiction in Dublin’s inner-city communities; in this sense, the volume became a counter-commemorative act in a year of official celebrations of the Easter 1916 Rising. And in a late poem in Geomantic, “The Quilt,” we also find this patchwork volume’s deep resonances with women’s communal work, “my grandmother’s quilt I slept under / the long and winding nights of childhood.” Finally, somewhere between the brevity and accreted histories of the haiku and the imperialist-inflected argument of the sonnet, Meehan finds in the nine-line poem employed by Spenser, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Larkin, and Lowell a middle way: she registers the influences of her mentor from the United States’ west coast, Gary Snyder, with his Zen Buddhist training in Japan, as well as of her early studies as a student of the classical myths of Greece (the country where the volume ultimately lands). Indeed, the closing poem of Geomantic, “The Island,” is set in one of Meehan’s spiritual homes on the island of Ikaria in Greece. Her early training as a classicist finds lived expression through her months of embodied writing on that island and communion with its rhythms: “At home again on Ikaria, / our own bee-loud glade.” This opening line of Meehan’s final poem in the volume manages to name not only Greece, but also Yeats and the Irish literary tradition (especially “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”), as well as the influence of the American Romantic tradition in Yeats’s echoing of Thoreau’s Walden. There are new notes for Meehan sounded in this volume, including powerful poems on aging like “The Age of Embrocations and Naps,” “The Old Professor,” and “The Hands.” There is also a widening of the representation of sexuality with the inclusion of poems of same-sex love such as in “The New Regime,” “The Withdrawal,” and possibly “The Sea Cave.” And some familiar themes in Meehan’s work are deepened. Geomantic’s unapologetic anti-rationalist currents pick up that powerfully generative aspect of Yeats’s life and work and bring it fully forward, not only in the book’s title, but also in poems like “The Hexagram” and “The Handful of Earth.” This latter poem insists on a living, responding more-than-human world, a perspective that permeates her sense of poetry and its role in the world. In an interview with Jody Allen Randolph at UCD just before the release of Geomantic, Meehan observed that literary critics are often unaware of how much of themselves they reveal in their own writing. “Poems are like mirrors,” she stated. “People look into them and the poem is reading them, their education, their vocabulary, their emotional tenor; it reads what they bring [End Page 149] to it.” In an era when master narratives and master plans feel palpably insufficient, Meehan’s poems in this volume as in others evoke a humility that should, in turn, humble us as readers, critics, and fellow poets. Her assertion of the wily agency of the poem itself...

Children, Childhood and Irish Society, 1500 to the Present By MariaLuddy, James M.Smith (eds.) Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014 ISBN: 978‐1‐84682‐525‐5, 448 pp, €58.50 (hb)

Childhood studies is an emerging area of scholarship in Ireland and this volume makes a significant contribution to the field. It ambitiously brings together 21 interdisciplinary essays, dominated by literature and history, but including other areas such as social work. To assist the reader in navigating these diverse studies, Maria Luddy and James M. Smith have arranged the essays into five thematic sections, expertly woven together in their introduction. The first two sections consider ‘the child and history’ and ‘charity, welfare and childcare’. The Irish child was considered instrumental in societal reform and military strategy in Tudor and Stuart times according to Mary O'Dowd, with preoccupations about child welfare only emerging during the 17th century. From the mid-Victorian period, child poverty was a central concern and Gillian McIntosh provides insights into attitudes towards Edwardian street-trading children. Welfare was provided by workhouses, church-run institutions and philanthropic organisations. Luddy highlights the work of the Dublin branch of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in increasing the reporting of neglect and abuse. Virginia Crossman notes that, despite campaigns to increase boarding out, institutional care (particularly church-run) predominated into the late-20th century. Eoin O'Sullivan shows how the 1970 Kennedy Report prompted a gradual transfer of welfare services to state-run professionalised community-based services. As well as improvements in the care and welfare of the ‘public child’ such as increased foster care, Robbie Gilligan identifies a number of gaps in state provision, including monitoring, and allocation of social workers. Despite parents' constitutional rights in relation to their children's education, Mary E. Daly notes that for many years they were excluded from playing any formal role by church, state and the teaching profession. Section three focuses on ‘shaping childhood cultures’. Ríona Nic Congáil analyses the extent to which the Weekly Freeman's children's Fireside Club column influenced the Gaelic League, while Ciaran O'Neill demonstrates how concerns about the imperialistic influence of the British schoolboy novel led to its adaptation for an Irish nationalist audience. Three of the studies use autobiographies to explore individual experiences. Drawing on hitherto underexploited 20th century Irish-language autobiographies Máirín Nic Eoin examines the representation of adult-child relationships, while Barry Sloan uses literary autobiographies to explore mid-20th century boyhood. Focusing on writers, Claire Lynch demonstrates that reading was an apprenticeship for both life and authorship, helping them make sense of the world. The following six essays explore ‘literary imaginings’. Mary Shine Thompson considers early modern understandings of childhood through Jonathan Swift's writing, noting for instance that despite emerging concepts of bourgeois boyhood, little distinction was made between girlhood and womanhood. Brandon Jernigan's re-examination of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales positions them as a space where issues regarding Anglo-Irish participation in Irish nationalism could be addressed. In Irish literature, the child frequently represents post-independence Ireland, mirroring the ideals of the newly formed state. Leeann Lane demonstrates how by foregrounding family, home and rural life, the children's author Patricia Lynch created a sense of history for post-Independence Ireland. Conversely, Eibhear Walsh notes the tensions that exist between the new state's nationalist and patriarchal ideals and European female education as portrayed in Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices. The maturation narrative, key in Irish literary tradition, is dominated by masculine interpretations and Jane Elizabeth Dougherty argues that despite Ireland's coming of age, symbolised by Mary Robinson's presidency, a maturation narrative for the Irish female child was still not possible in the 1990s. Kelly J.S. McGovern explores the extent to which queer time and space in Eilís Ní Dhuibne's The dancers dancing expands the maturation narrative to encompass the female child. Section five, ‘cultural representations’, commences with Margot Backus's comparative study of the representation of children in nationalist journalism. During the Land War (1882), children were portrayed with little sentiment but by the Lockout (1913) poor children were depicted in emotional and symbolic terms, serving to unify a fragmented nationalist audience. In her analysis of Irish films, Ruth Barton demonstrates how magical realism has given way to social realism; being childlike and innocent is a disability in contemporary Ireland with its corrupting influences. Finally, Harry Hendrick highlights the need for a conceptual framework for researching and writing histories of children and childhood. This volume is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of Irish childhood studies. Although scholars will be drawn to particular topics, reading the volume in its entirety is recommended, providing fascinating insights into the changing relationships between child, family, state and church over time and across disciplines. It will also be of benefit to researchers undertaking comparative studies, providing them with perspectives on childhood as experienced in Ireland, as well as Irish scholarship in this field.

A Life of Their Own: Women’s Mid-life Quest in Contemporary Irish Women’s Short Stories

Introduction: The Lonely Voice There have been some notable, if gradual, changes in many aspects of Irish women's role and life in general since other emerged in Irish society in the post-Eamon De Valera period from the 1960s. It is evident, possibly inevitable, that these changes in Irish women's lives are echoed in contemporary Irish women's stories, some writers of which are self-declared feminists or have engaged actively with the Irish women's movement. (1) Consequently, their literary works tend to be gynocentric, concerned overtly with women's issues and seek explicitly to give voice to women's quest for justice within male-dominated Irish society. This essay evaluates a recurrent motif in stories by Clare Boylan, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Stella Mahon, Mary Dorcey and Marilyn McLaughlin, the motif of quest. As opposed to the traditionally male genre of the monomyth or Bildungsroman, Irish women's quest motif is about a heroine who embarks on a different kind of adventure with the aim of achieving a different kind of goal. (2) This female quest involves subversion of the social norm, rebellion against a socially prescribed role and destiny, and reclamation of a lost place within Irish society. This essay argues that Irish women's stories serve both as a vibrant narrative genre within Irish literary tradition, and as a strategic device by Irish women writers who are seeking to engage with a collective, and evolving, Irish feminist awareness. Typically, such stories focus on women who start by accepting passively a socially imposed role and life as wife or mother, subsequently become bad by diverging from the traditional patriarchal view of women's role in Irish society, and undergo, ultimately, a transformative inner journey of self-discovery which leads them towards emotional independence and individuality. The short story genre as a strategic narrative device for Irish women has roots in Ireland's literary tradition and heritage. According to Frank O'Connor, the short story in an Irish literary context is a natural form deriving from the Irish storytelling tradition embedded in the Irish psyche (Casey 1990: 9), a genre associated closely with Irish history as well as with Irish women's writing. The short story is considered to be a natural progression of story-telling, letter-writing, diary-keeping, and even school essay-writing, forms of writing with which women were already familiar in their lives (Madden-Simpson 1984: 13, 18). The skills and techniques inherent in the short story medium are also relevant when seeking to reach a broad and diverse audience through printed, visual or social media. (3) Traditionally, the short story also plays an essential role in Irish culture and politics. (4) O'Connor argues also that the short story is a vital expressive tool for the population of a country, such as Ireland, in a post-colonial state (O'Connor 1963: 20). In the light of Frank O'Connor's view, Colm Toibin, echoed by Boada-Montagut, connects the prominence of the Irish short story to Ireland's status as a country with a broken and traumatic past. (5) Toibin's or Boada-Montagut's association of a political discourse with the short story genre may suggest a reason for the significant appeal of the short story genre within contemporary Irish women's writing. The short story serves Irish women's purpose of expression because, among the submerged population, Irish women as the Double Other have actually experienced the legacy of a double dispossession (Edge 1998: 215-6; Boada-Montagut 2003: 10). (6) Within the male-dominated Irish literary canon and tradition, women's writing has tended to be marginalised. (7) In this essay we suggest that Irish women may find the short story both an effective and also an instinctive way of expressing varied issues related to women as well as a medium which offers fresh scope for women to create a distinctive style of literature, a literature of their own (Boada-Montagut 2003: 38). …

<em>Dindsenchas</em>, Mr Deasy, and the nightmare of partition in <em>Ulysses</em>

<em>Dindsenchas</em>, Mr Deasy, and the nightmare of partition in <em>Ulysses</em>

“Arise, Sir Ghostus!”: Textual Spectrality and Finnegans Wake

This essay argues that the textual specter—a non-present presence, a dual being and non-being—precisely symbolizes, for James Joyce, the overlap between Irish myth and Irish history. It contends that Joyce’s corpus, central to Irish literary tradition, celebrates this impurity and offers readers insight into contemporary Irish novelists’ motivations for and methods of reinvention. In Finnegans Wake , Joyce establishes the specter, that figure of uncontrollable and uncanny repetition, as a narrative device for (re)inventing a more nuanced version of Irish history and, therefore, a more complex definition of twenty-first-century Irishness.

Celtic Tradition: The Guiding Force of William Butler Yeats

The folklore, myth, and legends of ancient Celtic traditions inspired William Butler Yeats a lot. By not falling into the trap of overly romanticizing his work, as many other authors of the time would do, Yeats was able to begin a tradition of another sort, the Irish literary tradition. By giving importance on the Irish culture in his work, Yeats fulfilled his own sense of national pride to the delight of his readers and audiences and to the chagrin of many of his English contemporaries who felt that nothing of value or worthy of study could come out of Ireland. From 1890 he was a member of the occult group of the Golden Dawn1, which fuelled his fascination with the mystic symbols of rosicrucianism and cabbalism. Because of these activities his thinking gave an emphasis on magic and apocalypticism that would remain a constant feature of his work. This article aims at exploring the Irish myth, folklore, occultism and the tradition that inspired William Butler Yeats. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/iiucs.v6i0.12248 IIUC Studies Vol.6 2010: 53-64

L’ immram nell’Irlanda del XX secolo Una lettura comparativa dei romanzi di Flann O’Brien

This paper seeks to offer a unitary vision of Flann O’Brien’s novels through a comparative reading with the immram , a genre from the Irish literary tradition with which O’Brien’s work bears numerous meaningful affinities and analogies. Particular attention is devoted to the Immram curaig Maele Duin , whose fundamental characteristics we find, in variable measure and manner, in O’Brien’s novels. The intolerance of linearity of plot, the digressive spirit and progression of the narration, the taste for literary artifice and meta-literary play, the centrality of the theme of guilt and above all the complete fluidity of time-space confines which are violated and continually re-defined are essential elements of O’Brien’s narrative which can be recognized, albeit in nuce, in the immram .

An Interview with John Banville

An Interview with John Banville Hugh Haughton and Bryan Radley The following interview with John Banville took place on June 23, 2011, as part of the Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive Conference and Festival at the University of York. Introducing Banville, Hugh Haughton called him "one of the most inventive, intellectually unsettling, and original novelists writing today, a great Irish fiction-writer who takes his bearings, not from Joyce, but from Beckett (among others)." "Like Beckett's," he said, "Banville's work has its origins in both Irish literary tradition and European culture. Like Beckett's, his dark comic genius combines bodily farce with psychic tragedy, linguistic wit with philosophical skepticism, and like Beckett's, Banville's texts develop through fastidiously composed sentences that are always exposed to their own fastidious self-critique." He quoted an interview the novelist gave with The Observer in 2000 in which Banville said that he didn't "think any novelist is happy just being a novelist . . . We should be poets. We should be composers and we should be making language do things that the novel won't allow you to do."1 He also cited Banville's confession in the same interview to the novelist's "low desire to write stories." Haughton suggested it was this double investment in the novel as narrative and as a form aspiring to go beyond narrative that gave Banville's work, like Beckett's, its protean signature. Before the interview, Banville read an extended extract from Ancient Light, which is due to be published in 2012 by Viking/Penguin. This provided the starting point of the discussion itself. The interviewers were Hugh Haughton and Bryan Radley. [End Page 854] John Banville: Two inquisitors! This is more like Kafka than Beckett . . . Hugh Haughton: Thank you for that tantalizing prelude to the new Banville novel. Like so many new Banville novels, it appears to be in a sense a postlude, or part of the afterlife of earlier Banville novels, in this case Eclipse and Shroud. Bryan Radley: We're back with the Cleaves again, Alex and Lydia. JB: Yes, for those of you who haven't read these books—and these guys read everything—the book revisits Alex Cleave, an actor, who first appeared in Eclipse, and his daughter Cass, who had committed suicide in Shroud, in which my great monster Axel Vander is, to some extent, implicated in her death. But I should, I suppose, say that . . . I'm playing a lot of games in this book because Alex Cleave, having retired as a theater actor, has been asked to star in a movie which is based on the life of Axel Vander . . . but of course he doesn't know this. He gets a suspicion of it, but then realizes that this couldn't possibly be the case that Axel Vander had known his daughter. So it's very complicated, and the reviewers will be absolutely furious that I require them to go back and read earlier books. But it's always good to annoy the reviewers. HH: You are a reviewer yourself, of course . . . JB: Yes. HH: Are you so easily annoyed? JB: Annoyed? No, not at all. Not at all. I'm the most gentle of reviewers, as you know. HH: You once began an essay by claiming that you didn't think you were a novelist; can you explain what you meant by this? JB: Well I wonder if any novelist thinks of themself as a novelist; you know, we all want to be someone else. I don't feel that . . . As you said in your introduction, I of course have that wonderful vulgar desire to tell stories, as we all have, to tell stories and to be told stories. And Beckett, you know, famously, when somebody asked him why did he call Company "Company," said, "The book is company." And it is. When you wake at four in the morning, you don't have to think about your bank balance or death or sex. You can think about the book. So it keeps one company. But, you know, I like to think that I do something else. I make sentences, this is what I...

George Egerton, James Joyce and the Irish Künstlerroman

George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859–1945), from Co. Laois, was the New Woman author most closely associated with the Decadent movement. As such, she was also the New Woman writer most profoundly affected by the downfall of Oscar Wilde. After the Wilde trials of 1895, Egerton's connection to Decadence and New Womanhood would make her work anathema to much of the British public. This essay will argue that ongoing tendencies to situate her texts solely within the New Woman categorisation and an English cultural location have had the detrimental effect of obscuring their importance to a specifically Irish literary tradition. By examining Egerton's 1898 novel The Wheel of God, focusing on its status as an Irish Künstlerroman written from a position of exile, and drawing comparisons between it and the works of James Joyce, this essay will seek to redress this imbalance.

Introduction: Bernard Shaw and the Irish Literary Tradition

Introduction: Bernard Shaw and the Irish Literary Tradition Peter Gahan (bio) What will become of me if you extinguish the language of Swift in Ireland? —Bernard Shaw to Eamon de Valera, 13 August 1946 Irish Literary Traditions In his 2006 biography of Irish novelist Kate O’Brien (1897–1974), Eibhear Walshe (a contributor to this volume) includes O’Brien’s account of how as a young woman she went to a production of Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1901–3) at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin: “I went into the theatre that Saturday afternoon a nervous, green convent-school creature, just up from Limerick, and I suppose I came out looking much the same. But in fact I came out afraid to breathe; I felt as if I had been filled with some very brittle burning kind of light . . . I have never forgotten the shock of it or the tingling refreshment.”1 O’Brien’s experience was not unique; the same thing happened to Sean O’Casey on reading Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island (1904) around 1911–12, a life-changing event that set him on the road to becoming a playwright.2 As O’Casey wrote to Charlotte Shaw in November 1931: “G.B.S. is never absent. He is one of my great friends, anam-chara—soul-friend, as we say in Ireland, and has been for so many years, long before I met him in the flesh.”3 These revelatory, indeed ecstatic experiences of O’Brien and O’Casey may be judged as [End Page 1] minor incidents taking place on the periphery of an Irish literary tradition, but they nevertheless locate Shaw there. The questionable yet pertinent notion of an Irish literary tradition was confronted head on in the nine years’ existence of the Irish cultural journal The Crane Bag (1977–85), edited by Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard Kearney. The Crane Bag, refusing any exclusive political, linguistic, or religious interpretation of Irish identity, can itself be placed in a twentieth-century tradition of Irish journals that would include Horace Plunkett’s and Æ’s The Irish Statesman (1919–20, 1923–30), which had Shaw as a notable supporter and contributor, and Seán Ó Faoláin’s The Bell (1940–54), to which Shaw also saw fit to contribute (see Brad Kent’s essay in this volume). W. B. Yeats and James Joyce were the presiding avatars in The Crane Bag with Shaw more conspicuous for his absence than presence, an absence that might be used retrospectively to deconstruct the journal’s neo-Yeatsean attempt to forge yet another, if more up-to-date, heterogeneous Irish national identity. Yeats was held up as the instigator of a modern indigenous non-English literary tradition rooted in the rural Irish landscape, with its associated vernacular, mythology, legends, and folktales. That renewal of tradition set itself against a burgeoning xenophobic anti-English bourgeois Irish nationalism, reinforced linguistically by Gaelic and religiously by Roman Catholicism, articulated most prominently in The United Irishman (1899–1906) and later in Sinn Féin (1906–14), both edited by the founder of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith. Joyce, wishing to escape such soul-ensnaring insular conformity, looked rather to the new artistic conscience of a modern Europe, personified in the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, rather than to a mystified Irish past. Joyce figured as a contrary—indeed a Shavian—dissenter inveighing against both Yeats’s and Griffith’s competing putative modern Irish national cultural traditions. The minimal Shavian presence in The Crane Bag repeats an earlier absence in Joyce’s writing. As the late Joyce scholar Martha Black argued in Shaw and Joyce: The Last Word in Stolentelling (1995), the influence of the author of The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1892) on the author of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916) in his role as an Ibsenite writer in exile, as well as thematically on his works—especially that of Back to Methuselah (1921) on Finnegans Wake (1939)—has been successfully willed out of existence, not least by Joyce himself.4 Among the eighteen issues of The Crane Bag, an isolated voice to give Shaw his full due was Jorge...

Beyond the stereotypes: Mary Lavin's Irish women

This paper discusses Mary Lavin's place within the Irish literary tradition by means of an analysis of her representations of female characters. It argues, first, that Lavin's short stories depart from the short story tradition in general and the Irish short story tradition in particular by failing to subscribe to the cultivation of the romantic outsider and focusing instead on family relations and social responsibilities. Second, Mary Lavin's marginal position in a feminist or female literary tradition is explained through her unwillingness to portray women as victims and through the absence of a clear critique of patriarchy in her work. The paper then tries to characterise the relationship between individual and society in Lavin's short fiction in a more positive way, by focusing on the notions of individual fate and personal responsibility, which turn out to be crucial to Mary Lavin's philosophy. This philosophy is first discussed explicitly in a reading of the story ‘Happiness’ and ‘The Widow's Son’ and subsequently shown to lie behind the oppositions and dilemmas in several other stories. Finally, the article demonstrates how Lavin manages to realise her Nietzschean belief in an Amor Fati in some of her most positive female characters through a clever use of imagery and point of view, without thereby succumbing to sentimentality or cliché.