Irish Literature Research Articles

Finding Shaw Among His Irish and Chinese Contemporaries (The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters)

Finding Shaw Among His Irish and Chinese Contemporaries (<i>The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters</i>)

‘I’ve Been Here Before’: Women Helping Women in Irish Abortion Narratives

In 2018, Ireland’s Eighth Amendment was repealed following a national referendum, and in January 2019, abortion became legal in the Republic of Ireland up to twelve weeks of gestation. Historically, Irish institutions have attempted to eliminate abortion through forced pregnancies in Catholic “mother-and-baby homes” and censorship laws designed to suppress information about reproductive health. However, abortion narratives in Irish literature reflect the realities of abortion in Ireland, including the networks of women who have helped people terminate pregnancies. For example, in Maeve Binchy’s Eighth Amendment-era short story “Shepherd’s Bush,” an Irish woman is assisted by friends and acquaintances who provide her with lodging, medical appointments, and camaraderie in London. Several works published in 2017, amidst the campaign to repeal the Eighth, depict young protagonists who share their abortion narratives and become activists. Many Irish people still rely on groups such as Women Help Women and Women on Web to safely access abortion medication, and the sharing of information and experiences remains relevant and necessary as Ireland transitions into an era of reproductive rights.

Crossing the disciplines - a starter toolkit for researchers who wish to explore early Irish literature

The inspiration behind this paper came from both authors’ long-term collaboration with our friend and colleague, Professor Ralph Kenna. This connection emerged initially through his interest in Rathcroghan and in our paper, ‘Exploring the Nature of the Fráoch Saga’, which we concluded with the statement that we believed it ‘presents a case that will hopefully ignite conversation between disciplines’. This led us to consider the potential value for researchers of compiling a template list of useful and reliable sources and resources to consult, in other words a type of starter toolkit or guide for any individual from an alternative discipline or background, who might possess, or, in time, develop a personal or professional interest in Early Ireland and Early Irish literature. In doing this, we decided for ease of illustration, to take the example of the location name Rathcroghan/Cruachan Aí, (the prehistoric Royal Site of Connacht in the west of Ireland and the place that we both work in and interact with on a daily basis), as a case study in order to demonstrate an initial methodological approach to not only the types of resources and information available, but also to highlight some potential pitfalls that may arise in the course of an investigation.

What is in a tale title? Togail na Tebe as an editorial construction

George Calder’s 1922 edition of the Middle Irish translation of Statius’ Latin epic the Thebaid was published under the title Togail na Tebe: The Thebaid of Statius. The Irish Text . This article examines manuscripts, manuscript catalogues, and the reviews of Calder’s edition to demonstrate that the title Togail na Tebe (‘The Destruction of Thebes’) was the editor’s own creation. The reasons behind Calder’s choice of a title are explored, and an argument is put forward as to how this title has informed approaches to the Middle Irish version of the Thebaid in modern literary criticism; in particular, in making connections to the medieval Irish literary genre togla (‘destructions’) evidenced in the medieval Irish Tale-Lists A and B. Other possibilities for a tale-title to this narrative are considered before it is recommended that modern scholars refer instead to this text as the Middle Irish Thebaid .

Otherworld women in early Irish literature by Heather C. Key (review)

Otherworld women in early Irish literature by Heather C. Key (review)

Self-Realisation at the Risk of Tranquillity in a Carceral Social Environment: A Critique of ARABY by James Joyce

James Joyce’s collection of short stories under the title Dubliners is a landmark contribution to Irish literature that reveals the frustration of the Irish people of his time. While many of the short stories there deal with men and women, old and young, “Araby” specifically concentrates on a juvenile. The carceral social atmosphere prevailing in the environment limits his space to the nearest possibilities of pleasure and drives him in a direction determined by his libidinal energy. Unfortunately, a young woman much older than him becomes the centre of his interest and later the target of his love. Urged by his desire for the woman’s company, he makes a trip to an oriental bazaar amidst so much chaos to purchase a token of love for his dream sweetheart. His escapade from the beginning to the end of his trip is full of discouraging incidents, but he finds his way to the stalls. Ultimately, he gets alarmed and frightened before a police interrogation that goes on at a stall. The dormant carcerality engineered by a panopticon in the vicinity of his house shows its true nature at the bazaar. That puts an end to the project he has embarked on in his mission to win the young woman’s love. Covering the entire scenario, the paper treats the story as a report on juvenile delinquency in a carceral environment.

Resisting Ireland’s Necropolitics of Asylum: Refugee Voices in Irish Literature and the Arts

Abstract This article examines the representation of the Irish Asylum system – known as Direct Provision – by an artist and a writer who have experienced it first-hand. Vukašin Nedeljković’s art project Asylum Archive (2007 –) and Melatu Okorie’s short stories “Shackles” (2010) and “This Hostel Life” (2017) respectively engage in the visual and literary representation of unlivable life in this carceral system, both articulating a compelling critique of the necropolitical violence exerted in and through its operations. Their work foregrounds the spatial and time dimensions of detention, highlighting the vulnerability of international protection applicants whose lives are not only bounded by confinement but also deferred in indefinite waiting. Besides, this article contends that these works go far beyond critique, offering very powerful critical insights into the inmates’ affective responses to the injustices of the asylum regime, and how these can potentially open spaces of dissent and resistance.

Éilís na Gaeilge

Many readers of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s short stories and novels in English may not have read her creative work in the Irish language. In this short essay I aim to make more readers aware of her contribution to literature in Irish and of where her work is situated within the overall range of modern literature in Irish. ‘Éilís na Gaeilge’ is a somewhat different writer than her English language doppelganger. Her Irish language novels, for example, are predominantly works of popular fiction such as murder mysteries. Much of her work in Irish is aimed at – or at least accessible to – a young adult readership and deals directly and indirectly with social issues that affect their lives. She is an exceptional writer who had already developed a national and international reputation writing in English before devoting much of her writing life to work in Irish. This essay aims to cast some light on the range and quality of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s creative work in Irish and to encourage those who can to engage with that work as well as with her more widely known stories in English.

THE PROBLEM OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN MARTIN MCDONAGH’S THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE

The end of the nineteenth century was a turning point for Irish theatre with the establishment of the Irish Literary Theatre as playwrights attempted to write national plays disengaging from the British theatre. This period is known as the Celtic Revival, a period of building a national identity both by political and cultural action, during which the playwrights contributed to the rejuvenation of the old Irish myths and traditions. However, at the end of the twentieth century when Ireland became a multicultural country with multiple identities, and opened to the outer world politically and economically, the Irish theatre, too, started to change its outlook by problematizing the nationalistic elements of Irishness instead of glorifying the national and cultural values. The Irish playwright, Martin McDonagh has also maintained a pluralist approach challenging the traditional and national elements in his plays. Instead of adhering to a national identity, McDonagh believes in cultural pluralism to adapt to the new century. McDonagh’s pluralist approach will be discussed with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘nomadic identity’ and ‘rhizome’. Thus, this paper aims to analyze how McDonagh problematizes the national identity in The Beauty Queen of Leenane by portraying characters, who are incarcerated by meaningless national values and norms.

Introduction

This themed issue of RISE seeks to remap the Irish literary and cultural landscapes in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It defines this period as from the 1930s to the 1970s — roughly coinciding with the conservative years of ‘de Valera’s Ireland’, starting from the ratification of Bunreacht na hÉireann in 1937 supervised by de Valera through Seán Lemass’ programmes of economic expansion which led to Ireland’s European Economic Community membership in 1973. It understands literary and cultural landscapes in the broadest terms: horizontally as a geographic space with borders real and imagined; vertically as a space where high and low cultures clash and commingle. This issue includes six essays by contributors based across the globe. They show us the various forms of border-crossing — geographic, linguistic, generic — that contribute to a fuller map of Irish literature and culture in the mid-twentieth century.

Opening Materials

Review of Irish Studies (RISE) 7.1 Remapping Irish Literary and Cultural Landscapes in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Decolonising Medieval Irish Studies

This short article reviews some of the colonial underpinnings of the field of Medieval Irish Studies (a subdiscipline of Celtic Studies), using the career of Whitley Stokes (1830–1909) as a case study in the entanglements between British colonial activity in India and the development of philological research on medieval Irish literature in the 19th century. It then proceeds to use autoethnographic reflections from graduate students in the field of Medieval Irish Studies whose backgrounds locate them at various intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. These reflections offer constructive pathways toward working to decolonise the discipline.

Renée Fox. The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2023. Pp. 267. $69.95 (cloth).

Renée Fox. The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2023. Pp. 267. $69.95 (cloth).

Aran Waves and Greek Echoes: Tragedy in J.M. Synge's Work- Riders to the Sea

John Millington Synge (1871-1909), prominent figure of Irish literature. In his Riders to the Sea written in 1902 and this was considered one of the finest one- act play. The purpose of this article is to show how Synge followed the classical unities of tragedy and how his characters and settings portraying the ancient Greek tragedians rather than Shakespearean tragedies.

Aran Waves and Greek Echoes: Tragedy in J.M. Synge's Work- Riders to the Sea

John Millington Synge (1871-1909), prominent figure of Irish literature. In his Riders to the Sea written in 1902 and this was considered one of the finest one- act play. The purpose of this article is to show how Synge followed the classical unities of tragedy and how his characters and settings portraying the ancient Greek tragedians rather than Shakespearean tragedies.

LANGUAGE REPRESENTATIVES OF VALUE ORIENTATIONS OF UKRAINIANS AND IRISH: A TRANSLATION ASPECT (BASED ON THE MATERIALS OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION AND MEDIA TEXTS)

The article defines the leading features of the linguistic representation of the value orientations of Ukrainians and Irish people in the translation studies aspect. It is emphasized that the works of modern Ukrainian and Irish literature combine spatial and temporal definiteness, i.e., closeness to the “real plot”, and the expressiveness of the reflection of a person – an actor, endowed with features and values that attach him to history. The tendency of the development of the value component in modern Ukrainian and Irish literature consists in the strengthening of the psychological load of images, in the desire to outline with the help of linguistic means not only the functional, but also the deep-emotional aspect of the national values of the Ukrainian and Irish people.

Antonio Bibbò, Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan 2022, pp. 304

Antonio Bibbò, Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan 2022, pp. 304

Enlightenment Ireland and the Concept of World Peace

Ireland’s paradoxical status within the British empire has been thoroughly researched and theorised. Ireland can now be imagined as both a subject nation and a recruiting ground for imperial profiteers. The thin red line emerges as disproportionately green while research into the slave trade reveals heavy Irish investment. Meanwhile eighteenth-century European imperialism flourishes alongside the earliest theorisations of “World Peace”, whether figured spatially as “universally peace” or temporally as “perpetual peace”. The Abbé Saint-Pierre’s influential work Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (1713) attracted the appreciative attention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Scholars debate the credibility of such projects, but their influence was considerable. Saint-Pierre’s notion of a European union which can arbitrate to prevent war fascinates, but it ignores conflicts arising from competitive global colonisation and by freezing pre-existing frontiers it may crush nationalist aspirations. What is Ireland’s place in the imagining of a world without war in the eighteenth century? To what extent is Ireland complicit in the entrenched injustices of a Pax Britannica and to what extent does a projected demilitarised world offer prospects for genuine self-determination? Looking at verse which celebrates the conclusion of various eighteenth-century conflicts, this article considers celebrations of the idea of “Peace” from Irish literary (and sub-literary) sources and attempts to consider the mixture of hopes and fears that animate understandings of how particular conflicts are concluded. The ways and means whereby “peaces” are extended in the literary imagination give a clue to versions of “enlightened” Irish futurity.

Review: Feminist Discourse in Irish Literature

Review: Feminist Discourse in Irish Literature

Using Autoethnography in e-Tandems for Fostering Glocal Cultural Awareness: An Irish-German Virtual Exchange

Autoethnography, the narrative exploration of one’s own cultural context and experience, has been proposed as a pedagogical method of tapping the knowledge of diverse groups of students for mutual cultural learning (Kumaravadivelu, 2008). With this in mind, we set up a virtual exchange (VE) between second-year students from the University of Galway, Ireland, preparing for their Erasmus year in Germany, and students studying Irish literature and culture in their final year at a northern German grammar school. In this exchange the students themselves were to complete an autoethnographic task. The VE showed that autoethnography can serve as an instrument to address some of the problems that O’Dowd (2006) identified while using ethnographic methods in telecollaboration: the emergence of an asymmetrical relationship with conflicting roles and communicative styles, overgeneralisation, and the inability to suspend judgement. Furthermore, autoethnography as a dialogic form appears to be moreappropriate than traditional ethnographic methods for Global Education, which, in contrast to Intercultural Learning, does not mainly aim at understanding other cultures distinct from one’s own, but at preparing students for “effective interactions across cultures” (OECD, 2018, p. 10, our emphasis) in a highly connected, endangered global society. By moving between the individual and the cultural, students can become aware of different but also interdependent local, national, transnational, and global cultural structures in which they live, partly connecting them to and partly distinguishing them from each other.