Irish Literature Research Articles

VIOLENCE AND BIGOTRY: REGRESSIVE INNOVATION IN KEVIN BARRY’S CITY OF BOHANE

Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane is one of the most celebrated recent works of Irish fiction. It is set in 2053, and tells the story of a people living in an environment of constant conflict where senseless acts of violence and bigotry are prevalent. This surprisingly negative imagining of Ireland in the future cannot be ignored considering the modern history of the country. The contemporary history of Ireland is fraught with a long and desperate struggle against the English Empire and its colonial forces as they tried for centuries to take over their neighboring island and completely colonize Ireland and its people. The English used two main weapons to further their goals in this matter: brutal military force and cultural sabotage. The cultural sabotage that the English brought to Ireland was mainly done by replacing Gaelic with English as the language of the Irish, and portraying them as culturally inferior and uncivilized in comparison to their English neighbors. Irish literature of the past few centuries has struggled to come to terms with this history of violence and dehumanization perpetuated by the English. Surprisingly, Kevin Barry in his novel callously repeats and escalates most of these negative stereotypes that have plagued Irish literature for years. The following study takes a closer look at the history of colonial violence and negative Irish stereotypes, and argues that City of Bohane is regressive in its depiction of Ireland as culturally ignorant and violent. That is to say, while the story is set four decades into the future, the author inexplicably insists on moving back in time to unearth and repurpose major colonial stereotypes that portray the Irish as uncivilized and backwards, to the great detriment of his innovative style and creative use of language in this novel.

A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250

A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250

Irish Literature in Transition, 1780–1830 ed. by Claire Connolly

Irish Literature in Transition, 1780–1830 ed. by Claire Connolly

Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce: Joyces Noyces by Gerry Smyth

Reviewed by: Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce: Joyces Noyces by Gerry Smyth Annika J. Lindskog (bio) MUSIC AND SOUND IN THE LIFE AND LITERATURE OF JAMES JOYCE: JOYCES NOYCES, by Gerry Smyth. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 268 pp. $90.00. Before James Joyce settled on becoming a writer, he was drawn to music and considered a career as a singer. This passion is evident in his writing in many different ways, starting with the rhythms of Chamber Music and on to "The Lass of Aughrim," which so shakes Gretta in "The Dead"—"Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter"1—and the experimental "ear" episode in Ulysses, "Sirens."2 In another way, music is omnipresent in Joyce's writing in the prosody of his language and his perceptiveness to sounds. In the words of Clive Bell, who was not a particular fan, Joyce wrote a kind of "jazz prose," one of the first critical comments on the musical aspects of Joyce's works.3 Music in Joyce's works has since drawn considerable critical attention, with studies by Zack Bowen, Jack W. Weaver, Matthew Hodgart and Ruth Bauerle, Brad Bucknell, and Michelle Witen, which is just to scratch the surface.4 With his latest study, Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce, Gerry Smyth again adds to what he himself specifies as a "subfield" within the Joyce critical industry that was there from the start (66). I write "again" since this is not, in fact, Smyth's first foray into musical Joyce; his Celtic Tiger Blues: Music and Irish Identity has several chapters on Joyce's Chamber Music.5 He has also written essays on other aspects of Joyce, most notably on betrayal, and widely on Irish literature and music.6 Do we need another book on Joyce and music? I am not fully convinced, even though Smyth writes well and interestingly on almost all topics he approaches. He is not particularly explicit about what he brings to the conversation; while he spends some thirty pages on previous criticism of musical Joyce—a huge favor to any future critic venturing into this field—he never really positions his own work vis-à-vis this scholarship. As he himself acknowledges, his study offers "no specific 'thesis' to bring to bear other than its focus on JJ's response to music as both a personal predilection and a professional opportunity" (91). Much as Smyth makes "thesis" sound like a bit of a dirty word here, this is a fair description of his study, in which he does not present a unified picture of music in Joyce's works, but rather dips down a little here and there, as he pleases. This approach works mostly well and enables Smyth—especially in the second half of the study—to offer more sustained analysis of some of Joyce's "noyces" rather than to give a more cursory account of the whole. At times, though, I wish that Smyth would help his readers more; he sometimes neglects not only to offer any thesis but to tell us what he is about at all, which makes for difficult reading. This is the [End Page 369] case with the fragmentary and confusing "Three Lives" (4) that opens the study and offers three brief biographical sketches of Irish musicians (Edward Ceannt, Ina Boyle, and John McCormack). Apparently, the chapter reflects "issue[s] bearing upon Joyce's musical imagination" (3), or so the abstract in the electronic edition informs me—the text itself does not explain how or even mention Joyce, except in the last sketch, where Smyth notes that "JJ's profuse admiration for McCormack . . . remained tinged with jealousy" (7). McCormack is also the only musician of the three who reappears in the study. "Three Lives" opens the first of two larger sections in the text, which is called "Reading and Writing" (1). Here, Smyth discusses various topics that are sometimes related to Joyce but at other times delve more into the musical context of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For example, Smyth considers whether Joyce could have become a composer (possibly), his...

Making the Impossible Possible, A Review of Dance and Modernism in Irish and German Literature and Culture: Connections in Motion

Making the Impossible Possible, A Review of Dance and Modernism in Irish and German Literature and Culture: Connections in Motion

Food and Social Politics in Early Modern Ireland: Representing the Peasant in The Parliament of Clan Tomas

Recent historiography has demonstrated the immense material and metaphorical importance of food to representing social distinction in medieval and early modern Europe. To date there has been no effort to explore the Irish experience in this context. This article approaches the “meaning” of food in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ireland through a focused gastro-political analysis of Irish literary and material satire. It will examine representations of low-born food consumption in relation to broader early modern discourse around dietary classification, manners and food consumption. It will also explore the basis of Irish social food stereotypes by locating them in contemporary nutritional theories, philosophical and “scientific” ideas and by comparing imagined Irish foodways with a broad range of comparative European visual, literary and material examples. The “meaning” of food will be considered thematically, exploring dietary codification; the physical and moral embodiment of peasant foods; and the relationship between food association and sexual generation. This approach will demonstrate the highly sophisticated conceptual integration of European ideas and symbols in Irish culture, whilst developing a new tool for understanding the metaphorical intricacy of this period in Irish history. The article will move food, for the first time, into the arena of early modern Irish history, opening a window for future comparative studies of Irish and European food cultures.

Repetition, Parallelism and Antonymous Verbal Phrases in Early and Classical Modern Irish

This paper is divided into two sections. In the first, attention is drawn to three categories of rhetorical device described in the commentary to the Amrae Coluimb Chille, all of which involve some form of repetition. This is the starting point for a discussion of the artful use of repetition in Early and Classical Modern Irish literature. Examples of such repetition and parallel phrasing are provided for both periods. In the Classical period this inevitably involves some discussion of breacadh, a metrical and stylistic ornament involving repetition. In the second section, the focus moves to parallel phrases based on antithesis (such as English ‘the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away’) or contrast. The antonymy may be conveyed lexically (as in the example just quoted, ‘give’ vs ‘take’) or antithesis may be created morphologically (through a contrast of tense and voice, for instance, gonas géntair ‘he who kills will be killed’). The make-up of these antonymous parallel phrases will be described, the types of antithesis encountered discussed and questions of their interpretation addressed. A collection of Early Irish and Classical Modern Irish examples concludes the paper.

Agency, Consent and Loyalty: Michal daughter of Saul, and Royal Women in Middle Irish Literature

Agency, Consent and Loyalty: Michal daughter of Saul, and Royal Women in Middle Irish Literature

‘It’s Too Easy to Say that Institutions are Decolonizing’: An Interview with Senate House Library’s Richard Espley and Leila Kassir

Abstract In 2020, as public protest against anti-Black police brutality surged globally, institutional public statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement proliferated. Universities, libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions rushed to deplore racist violence and express their commitment to anti-racist and decolonial practice. Rather than release a statement of their own, staff at Senate House Library – the central library for the University of London and the School of Advanced Study – chose instead to pursue and embed a fledgling piece of reparative archival work, the Collections Inclusion Review, alongside their continuing efforts to improve the inclusivity and accessibility of their collections, particularly of literatures in English. This interview is a transcribed and edited version of a conversation with the two Senate House Library staff members leading this work: Richard Espley, now Head of Collections (and formerly Head of Modern Collections), and Leila Kassir, Academic Librarian for British, Irish, USA, Latin American, Caribbean, and Commonwealth Literature. The discussion ranged across issues of provenance, archive description, library layout, and the future of English as a discipline, urging attention to and amelioration of the exclusionary aspects of library practice. While critiquing institutional approaches to the legacies of colonialism, past and present, both interviewees expressed reservations about widespread claims to have ‘achieved’ decolonization, stressing that such calls are contingent on surrounding structures and processes, and suggesting that such radical dismantling remains a long-term aspiration, rather than a quick-fix solution.

Northern Soulscapes: Writing through Brexit in the work of Gerald Dawe, Angela Graham and Dara McAnulty

At a time of when the global crises of pandemic and climate change could be said to offer sufficient challenges to life in the British and Irish Isles, the implementation of Brexit provides a further gargantuan difficulty. Borders, bureaucracies and belief systems dissolve like the certainty that subjects once felt to their connection to states or Unions. Or new borders and systems appear, bringing with them unwieldy new protocols and practices. Shelves empty, goods sit locked in containers; caught up in the holding pattern of another new normal of online retail inertia. Dislocation, fear and anger rise. The epicentre of the Brexit shambles can be said to be located in the ever betwixt and between location of Northern Ireland. Here with its newly imposed sea border with Great Britain and its maintenance of European Union relations with the Republic of Ireland we see a fractured and fractious society struggling as ever to come to terms with how to balance the aspiration of opposing ideologies and national ambitions with an additional level of chaos. In a time of catastrophe what can literature do? This question, often posed during “The Troubles” has very much come back to be painfully reiterated to writers, readers and critics at a time of multiple lockdowns. However, if an examination is made of publishing in Ireland in the last couple of years, we see a buoyant press offering a number of intriguing responses to the significance and efficacy of literature to respond to the current human predicament. In this article I will examine the work of three contemporary writers, Gerald Dawe, Angela Graham, and Dara McAnulty. I will argue that their use of genre (memoir, short story, nature diary) provides a fresh and robust response to the chaotic present of Northern Irish political life. In their separate ways they contest the fixed, static and impermeable political echo chamber of Northern Ireland. Dawe, I contend, seeks a means through his autobiographical work to retrace time and space in the history of the province and articulate alternative ways of interpreting the past. He is able to draw sustenance and restoration from often overlooked times of possibility in his own and the wider story of Belfast. In Graham’s case, I would suggest that her bold and assertive first collection of short stories provides an acerbic and raw inspection of the past but one that also provides glimpses of reconciliation and genuine hope in the face of trauma. I conclude by exploring the work of McAnulty. Ostensibly a diary that traces his engagements with nature, his book is a tour de force that reimagines Ireland as a location gripped in the ravages of the Anthropocene startlingly brought to life by a young man faced with the challenges of autism. Part memoir, part praise poem to nature, it is a remarkable coming of age non-fiction work, which along with Dawe’s and Graham’s writing suggests that Northern Irish literature offers a broad and brilliant retort to the current local and global calamities that we face.

Preserving the Status Quo?: Periodical Codes in The Bell and Envoy during the Mid-Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT This article is among the first to read two key Irish literary periodicals—The Bell and Envoy—to highlight how male literary inheritance, homosocial bonding, and subtle discouragement combined to marginalize women poets from mainstream Irish literature during the mid-twentieth century. Close analysis will be employed to uncover the homosocial, highly gendered language and “compositional codes” found in these magazines, sometimes through conscious decisions and sometimes through unconscious manifestations of ambient normative assumptions about proper gender roles/spheres, contributed to the mainstream exclusion of Irish women poets during this important and often forgotten period in Irish literary history.

Образ постящейся девочки в творчестве Э. Донохью (на примере романа «Чудо»)

The paper analyses the novel “The Wonder” (2016) by the modern Canadian and Irish writer Emma Donoghue in terms of the synthesis of Irish and English allusions in it. The purpose of the research is to determine specificity of the interpretation of a fasting girl’s image, as well as the ways of actualising the motif of opposition between the Irish rural way of life and the English urban one. Scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the topic of the Great Famine (1845-1849) remains one of the main ones in Irish literature and requires a more detailed study in the context of the creative work of not only national geniuses but also modern writers, including E. Donoghue. As a result of the research, specific techniques used by the author to play on national stereotypes have been identified.

Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce

Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce

Образ миллениала в творчестве С. Руни (на примере романов «Разговоры с друзьями» и «Нормальные люди»)

The article is devoted to studying the artistic originality of the novels “Conversations with Friends” (2017) and “Normal People” (2018) by the modern Irish English-speaking writer Sally Rooney. The aim of the research is to determine the peculiarities of the millennial’s image interpretation, as well as the ways to actualize the motive of one’s identity rejection. The scientific novelty of the research is due to the fact that the topic of “erosion” of the notion “identity” is the main topic in modern Irish literature and it requires a more detailed study in the context of the creativity of not only national geniuses, but also young authors, including S. Rooney. As a result of the research, it was found that specific techniques in S. Rooney’s novels contribute to the creation of a new image of the millennial, the representative of the Irish “golden” youth.

Defining the Field of Irish-Australian Literature: Challenges and Conundrums

What constitutes Irish-Australian literature – if such a category exists – is by no means clear. This essay seeks to map the field and identify which Australian writers might be included. It does so while questioning how such a taxonomy could be constructed and how research on this under-explored area might proceed. Not only is the potential field large and amorphous, but it also presents formidable issues of ‘identity politics’. Because such study is performed in an era when identities are understood to be unstable and discontinuous, the article argues for an inclusive approach, noting that what constitutes ‘Irishness’ is internally contested. It asks questions about how émigré writers and their descendants and those who draw on the political and historical matter of Ireland have transformed such legacies. It also considers how those few writers who made the reverse journey engage with Irish literature and culture. The article speculates that such a study may potentially reconfigure understanding of the Australian literary tradition and the process of naturalising ‘the nation’, or at least complicate that narrative.

‘Ourselves Alone’? Encounters Between the Irish Literary Revival and Australian Settler-Modernisms, ca. 1913–1919

‘Ourselves Alone’? Encounters Between the Irish Literary Revival and Australian Settler-Modernisms, ca. 1913–1919

Revisionist nostalgia: John Banville, Angela Carter, and the circus

ABSTRACT Points of connection between John Banville and Angela Carter are rarely noted. This article argues for a fuller appreciation of their interinfluence upon one another as it uses their circus novels Birchwood (1973) and Nights at the Circus (1984) to explore the relationship between revisionism and nostalgia in both historiography and literature. It asks why Banville and Carter both imagine the circus as a vehicle for their revisionary work and examines how these authors manage what Carter terms ‘the pseudo-memory of nostalgia’. In doing so, this article tests the extent to which nostalgia and revision might be understood as opposing or even antithetical concepts and explores the high stakes of keeping lived experience at arm's length. Birchwood and Nights at the Circus are read here in context. Instructive comparisons are drawn with journalism and letters written by Banville and Carter in the 1970s and 1980s, and relevant works of historiography from a similar period. This article also incorporates material from an interview with John Banville which reveals his self-consciously fraught relationship with Birchwood's themes and content. More broadly, it is a notable attempt to indicate and assess the significance of Irish literature and culture in Carter's writing.

School readiness of five-year-old children from socio-economically disadvantaged areas: evidence from the Preparing for Life evaluation

Being school-ready when transitioning to the primary school system has been associated with favourable outcomes during schooling and adult life. While children living in socio-economically disadvantaged areas may be at a higher risk of being less school-ready, research in the area has highlighted that not all children experience such a delay. This study examined a range of factors that may account for differences in outcomes across five school readiness domains (physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive development, and communications skills and general knowledge) within a sample of children living in socio-economically disadvantaged areas. Drawing on data from a sample of five-year-old children involved in the Preparing for Life (PFL) evaluation in Ireland, this study explored the role of child and early environmental factors in facilitating or hindering children’s development across these school readiness domains. Statistical analysis identified child’s sex, parental involvement and learning materials at home, parent–child interactions, mother’s attempt to breastfeed, and mother–child attachment as significant predictors of school readiness after accounting for other factors. Findings contribute to the Irish and international literature on the role of early demographical and environmental factors in shaping school readiness, especially for children from socio-economically disadvantaged areas.

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

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

THE IRISH RENAISSANCE IN FACES

The end of the XIX – beginning of the XX centuries is the efflorescence period of national culture in Ireland. In historiography, this time was named the Irish Renaissance. Its bright representatives and organizations promoted national ideas, tried to restrain verbal aggression from the English language, to revive self-consciousness of their compatriots, developed sports, literature, theater, musical culture, and opposed the British way of life.
 
 The Irish Renaissance was not homogeneous. Some of its representatives tried to be politically neutral, tried to show their non-involvement in the existing political situation. The other held positions of active cultural nationalism. They believed that the Irish should revive their culture, cultivate their national identity, using a solid language base. They promoted the advantages of the Gaelic lifestyle as opposed to the English one. Still others proceeded from realistic attitudes, they saw narrow-mindedness of the Irish society, they were not afraid to point out its vices, and convinced in the need to include their homeland in the cultural space of the West. In addition to the multiplicity of options, the Irish Renaissance was an elitist phenomenon, since most of the society lived in poverty, did not have the opportunity to get a good education, and cared more about «daily bread». The most vivid appeals to the spiritual Revival of the nation were made in the theater and literature, the flourishing of which is associated with the names of W.B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, D. Joyce, D.M. Sing and others. To a large extent, the Irish Renaissance was a kind of reaction to modernism. It is quite possible to say that in Ireland there was a strong confrontation between the archaic and the modern. The important features of cultural Irish Renaissance were its anti-British orientation, the desire to emphasize national identity. The Hiberno-English version of English had similarities to Irish in some grammatical idioms, the inhabitants of the Emerald Isle, perhaps subconsciously, used the grammatical structures of their native language when speaking English. This linguistic tradition also influenced the Irish literature, which differed in various ways from the English literature.