Irish Peasant Research Articles

Exploring Contrasts: Depiction of Irish Rural Life in Yeats and Kavanagh

This paper aims to investigate the depiction of Irish rural life in selected poems by W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh. Modern Irish poetry presents two contrasting perspectives on the portrayal of rural Ireland. Some poets like W. B. Yeats, Derek Mahon, and Seamus Heaney, along with other leading Irish poets, romanticize the Irish countryside, portraying it as charming, magnificent, and idyllic. These poets prefer to live in tune with nature, tempted by its pastoral landscape and inspired by its idealized tranquility. In contrast, other modern Irish poets, including Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland, Michael Hartnett, and many others, reject this idealized vision of the countryside. Instead, they offer a stark portrayal of rural Ireland, exposing its harsh realities and revealing the poverty, struggles, and hardships encountered by Irish peasants. This article, accordingly, seeks to explore these two different literary traditions within modern Irish poetry, with a focus on W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh as representatives of opposing attitudes. Specifically, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W. B. Yeats and The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh serve as the concentration for this study. In reaching its conclusions, the article finally reveals the divergent perspectives portrayed within the two poems, highlighting how Yeats and Kavanagh employ distinct poetic techniques to present their attitudes, sharply contrasting each other.

Time in the novel “The Snake’s Pass” by Bram Stoker as a plot-forming element

The article examines time as a plot-forming element in Bram Stoker’s novel “The Snake’s Pass”. The traditional idea of artistic time as a sequence of events flowing from the past into the present and future is interpreted from the point of view of the concept of linear and monumental time. Ireland’s legendary and historical past are intertwined and expressed in the present through the images of the bog, the treasure, the Englishman and the Irish peasant woman. The monumental past is associated with the uneasy relationship between Great Britain and Ireland at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries and the attempt of the author of the novel to metaphorically resolve the contradictions through the marriage of an Englishman and an Irish woman. Linear time is expressed in the image of an Englishman, the development of his relationships with the inhabitants of an Irish village, the engineering study of a bog, and the transformation of a poor Irish village into a prosperous region. The female image is created according to the canon of the “new woman” in the late Victorian novel, combining femininity and heroism, manifested in a difficult situation.

Wróżki i zacofanie irlandzkich chłopów w świetle wybranych dziewiętnastowiecznych dzienników z podróży

THE ROLE OF FAIRIES IN THE LIVES OF IRISH PEASANTS AND THEIR DEPICTION IN SELECTED NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRAVELOGUES
 Life in the nineteenth-century Irish countryside was not easy. Irish peasants lived in abject poverty and struggled to make ends meet. They consumed almost only potatoes and famines occurred regularly. Peasants often blamed their hardships on fairies, whose various races were supposed to inhabit Ireland. Tales about fairies were very popular among travelers who visited Ireland in the nineteenth century and subsequently published books about their travels there. They often highlighted the role of magic in daily activities of the Irish. The aim of this paper is to discuss the role of fairies in the lives of Irish peasants and argue that by underlining the attachment of the Irish to magical creatures, travelers underscored the backwardness of Irish peasants and propagated negative stereotypes about the inhabitants of the Emerald Isle.

The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture ed. by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald

Reviewed by: The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture ed. by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald Barbara M. Hoffmann The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture, edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018, 296 p., paperback, $39.95) Turning point, calamity, revolution, horror: these are but a few of the terms used to describe An Gorta Mór by the contributors to The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture, edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald. These terms—complex and almost contradictory in connotation—speak to the difficulty of representing the Famine, both at the contemporaneous moment and for generations after living with its legacy. With this important contribution to famine studies, Corporaal, Frawley and Mark-FitzGerald offer the first edited collection devoted to an entirely visual and material culture perspective on the Great Famine. The editors have divided the collection into three sections that follow, as Mark-FitzGerald notes in her introduction to the text, a "roughly chronological sequence": Section I, "Witness and Representation: Contemporaneous Depictions of Famine"; Section II, "Negotiating Form: Famine/Post-Famine Modalities and Media"; and Section III, "Legacy: Postmemory and Contemporary [End Page 147] Visual Cultures." The collection's range comes not only from this broad temporal view but also from the diversity of perspectives of the contributors, who hail from universities across Europe and North America as well as from institutions such as Ireland's Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and the Irish Heritage Trust and National Famine Museum in Strokestown Park, County Roscommon. Likewise, the contributed essays cover an impressive array of visual and material products: paintings and sketches, political cartoons, religious artifacts, textiles, memorials, television shows, graphic novels, and even a film that never was. This variety and diversity, looking to capture a fuller picture of the Famine in history and memory, is enhanced by another focus of the collection, as explained by Mark-FitzGerald: "prioritiz[ing] methodologically close readings of specific engagements with the famine." Rather than presenting broad or universalizing claims about the Famine and its representation, each chapter engages specific examples of visual and material culture, offering nuanced analysis of the product or production itself within its specific historical, cultural, and geographical context. Enhancing this goal, and an invaluable part of this collection, are the thirty-nine brilliant reproductions of the paintings, drawings, and artifacts discussed by the contributors. The four chapters in section one exploring contemporaneous material and visual items all deal with a predominant presumption that the Famine was a moment of aporia in terms of cultural production, not only because, as Niamh O'Sullivan points out in her chapter, "Irish artists tended to avoid the appalling conditions in which the majority lived" but also because that majority's struggle to survive supplanted all leisurely or artistic activities. The contributions in section one suggest that, while representations of the Famine by or depicting the actual suffering of the famine victims may be rare to nonexistent, exploring representations beyond that focus, both within Ireland and abroad, can offer a fuller understanding of the Famine. This suggestion to look beyond seemingly obvious images of the Famine is manifested in the first chapter, O'Sullivan's "The Bond that Knit the Peasant to the Soil: Rural Lore and Superstition in the Work of Daniel Macdonald." Rather than exploring Macdonald's famous 1847 painting An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store—"renowned as the only known painting representing the blight itself"—O'Sullivan examines representations of superstition in his works from just before and during the Famine. She reveals a continuity in such representations, highlighting not only superstition's role in uniting the Irish peasantry and providing a link between life pre- and post-Famine but also its connection to sedition and proto-nationalism that heightened during the Famine. In the second chapter, "HB's Famine Cartoons: Satirical Art in a Time of [End Page 148] Catastrophe," Peter Gray explores depictions of the Famine in the political cartoons by the London-based middle-class Catholic Irishman John Doyle, known as "H. B.," aimed at a...

George Cornewall Lewis, Irish character and the Irish poor law debate, 1833–1836

George Cornewall Lewis was a prominent political and literary figure in the mid nineteenth century, serving as both chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary under Palmerston. He had a wide range of interests and wrote on many topics from philosophy to philology and forms of government to astronomy. This article focuses on his views of what was called ‘the Irish character’ in the period 1833–1836, alongside the part which he believed a poor law could play in the reform of both the individual Irish peasant and the wider economy of Ireland. Lewis was an assistant commissioner on the royal commission which examined poverty in Ireland and was responsible for examining Irish migration to England and Scotland. He later wrote a confidential report to Thomas Spring Rice strongly criticising the royal commission's refusal to recommend a poor law for Ireland and also published a book in which he discussed what he saw as the main causes of, and solutions to, Irish poverty. Lewis's public and private writings provide a rich source of theory and philosophy surrounding the character of the Irish peasantry, its capacity to develop, and the central role of an Irish poor law in this process.

British Solutions to Irish Problems: Representations of Ireland in the British Architectural Press, 1837–1853

Existing scholarship on representations of Ireland in the British press has overlooked a subset of nineteenth–century publications: architectural periodicals. By analysing their coverage of Irish issues over a fifteen year period, including industrial exhibitions staged in Cork and Dublin, this article challenges the notion that the immediate post–famine years were a period of diminished interest in Irish affairs. Architectural periodicals suggested that Ireland’s problems could only be solved through greater Anglicization, as shown in their depictions of romanticised Irish peasants, government–sponsored engineering projects, and the construction of Irish workhouses.

“Social Sinn Féin and Hard Labour”: the journalism of W.P. Ryan and Jim Larkin 1907–14

The history of Irish journalism continues to develop, particularly studies of the key journalists associated with the Gaelic Revival. The present article contributes to this historiography by closely analysing the political and cultural nationalism of two of the era's newspaper editors, W.P. Ryan and Jim Larkin. Drawing on evidence found in editorials from the Irish Peasant (1906–10) and the Irish Worker (1911–14) respectively, it is argued that both writers adhered to a form of progressive republicanism. Moreover, while both editors advocated the Revivalist goal of national reconstruction, they were also vocal and articulate critics of the more conservative elements of this movement as well as Irish nationalism more generally. The article will also examine the ideological differences which existed between Larkin and Ryan themselves. In particular it will be shown how Larkin's labour republicanism was focused on the necessity for open class conflict while Ryan viewed a transition to socialism occurring in Ireland through cross-class co-operation.

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s “The Road to Brightcity” - Irish Peasants and Women between Myth and Prejudice

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s “The Road to Brightcity” - Irish Peasants and Women between Myth and Prejudice

A Mad Mother and Her Dead Son: The Impact of the Irish Theatre on Modern Korean Theatre

During the colonial period (1910–1945), Korean intellectuals introduced Irish artists and their works to the public through newspapers and magazines. Because of the political similarity between Ireland and Korea at that time, these intellectuals considered Ireland as an ideal to emulate. The impact of the Irish dramatic movement on modern Korean theatre was significant, in that it provided a direction for Korean intellectuals involved in establishing modern theatre. One of the most famous modern Korean plays from this period, Yu Ch’ijin’s A Mud Hut was indirectly influenced by Irish playwright Sean O’Casey whose trilogy is based on Dublin’s working class. The work of another Korean playwright, Ham Sedŏk’s Sanhuguri, was indebted to the works of J.M. Synge, whose plays deal with Irish peasants. In their plays, Yu Ch’ijin and Ham Sedŏk depict the miserable lives of some common Korean people as realistically as they can, by imitating the writings of Sean O’Casey and J.M. Synge. The main motif that appears in their works is that of a mad mother and her dead son. In Yu Ch’ijin’s play, this motif is represented by the land as an absent space. In Ham Sedŏk’s play, it is illustrated by the sea as an absolute space of fate. The mother figure in both plays is presented as a languid, defeatist and self-pitying figure who is confronted by the colonial reality represented by her dead son. Through these images, the future is portrayed as hopeless. This paper attempts to shed a light on a particular strand of modern Korean plays and their emergence under the influence of Irish theatre in the early twentieth century.

The Irish Peasant Drama and Violence: Mayne's The Troth and Red Turf*1

In Irish peasant dramas, the political movement for the emancipation of the farmers tended to idealize the rural world, which was made a symbol of Ireland and the new nation. In many of these plays Rutherford Mayne showed his interest in rural Ireland. His concern for agrarian matters was not only an intellectual or artistic one. He articulated his professional experiences with the inhabitants of rural Ireland and the redistribution of the land in his plays.The Troth is an historical play. It tries to evoke the mood of need and misery prevailing in the years of Famine. Several allusions give its setting a definite place in Irish history. The murder just seems to be a passionate act of revenge, disconnected from any effective political movement. The violence in Red Turf springs from a different source: the main character is placed in such a humiliating situation that he loses his patience at the climax of the conflict. In each of Rutherford Mayne’s plays the passionate reaction of the main character springs from circumstances which lie outside his own person and which he believes to be unable to cope with.The different motivations of the violent deeds are reflected in the structures of the two dramas. In the exposition of Rutherford Mayne's plays a situation is lined out which is not dramatic itself: The farmers are about to submit to a menace beyond their power; the cruelty of the landlord in one play and the ruthlessness of acquisitive neighbor in the other. In both plays it is the figure of a neighbor who brings the latent conflict to the surface. Passion and violence create a feeling of suffering which borders on tragedy.

The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (review)

Reviewed by: The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Jeanette Roberts Shumaker (bio) The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. By Jarlath Killeen. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. On the faculty at Trinity College, Dublin, Killeen provides a late nineteenth century Irish Catholic context for Oscar Wilde's fairy tales as a way to better understand them. Killeen observes that Wilde's two volumes of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), have been marginal to his canon in part because they do not fit into the usual view of Wilde as "a subversive writer" and in part "because children's literature . . . is considered a didactic and conservative form" (1). He starts with an introduction that explores "the critical history of the fairy tales and attempt[s] to explain why they have received relatively little attention" (1). Each of the nine chapters begins with a detailed review of the criticism of the fairy tale that is the chapter's focus, then explains the author's deviation from the standard view of that tale through the inclusion of Irish Catholic history. Unfortunately, Killeen's book lacks a concluding chapter that might present his generalizations about Wilde's fairy tales as a group, or that might address how the first volume of tales differs from the second; however, the final paragraph in the book does summarize his approach to Wilde's tales. Killeen's learned, well-written study includes notes, a bibliography, and index that will be helpful to scholars of Wilde, Irish studies, Catholic studies, and children's literature. Killeen's introduction situates Wilde's stories within the transformation of folk tales into fairy tales that occurred in the 1800s, when middle-class collectors of folk tales turned them from utopian peasant visions into didactic works aimed at children. Killeen contends that many Wilde critics deny that his stories are fairy tales because they see that genre as conservative and moralistic; instead, such critics prefer to align Wilde with the radicalism of the folk tradition (7-10). Killeen differs from such critics in that he regards Wilde's tales as didactic and intended for both children and adults. Killeen posits that Wilde, like his own father and like Yeats, took a Gnostic view towards his readers, "whereby knowledge is transmitted from the initiated to acolytes through codes and symbols" (10) that "operated in some mysterious and magical fashion on the human mind" (11). Wilde's Freemasonry reveals similar assumptions, as did his wife's membership in spiritualist and Theosophical groups (11). Killeen places Wilde within the great Irish short story tradition that emerged from Ireland's long colonial [End Page 82] history; Joyce, like Wilde, writes short stories that bridge "the sacred and the profane," as seen in Joyce's use of the epiphany in Dubliners (16). Wilde's parents, who collected and published Irish folk tales, "contributed significantly to the tradition of Irish Protestant investigation of native religious conventions" (6). Wilde may have gone with his father into western Irish peasants' homes to collect folk tales (7). However, Killeen explains Wilde's surprising attraction to the Catholicism of his Irish tenants and of poor Irish immigrants in London through factors beyond his parents' influence: not only homosexuals but Catholics in England and Ireland have a long history of coding secrets as symbols (171) as well as of "figuring spiritual and sexual heresy to the dominant modes of thought in both countries" (172). The Irish Famine, the unfortunate decline of folk Catholicism among the Irish, nationalistic Marian Catholicism in Ireland, the poverty of Irish immigrants in England, Irish child labor in London, problems in the Catholic Church inside and outside Ireland (such as Irish Puritanism and an international search for power), and the importance of Irish politician Daniel O'Connell are some historical features that Killeen discovers hidden within Wilde's fairy tales; Killeen convincingly turns such traces from Wilde's Irish background into keys to his mysterious stories. For example, Killeen observes that Wilde's "The Devoted Friend" is his fairy tale that has stumped critics the most. Some critics have seen it as endorsing the amoral aestheticism seen in The Picture of Dorian Gray...

Skills for Heterogeneous Associations: The Whiteboys, Collective Experimentation, and Subaltern Political Ecologies

Bruno Latour's Politics of Nature (2004, Harvard University Press) argues for a new ‘common sense’ for political ecology that disabuses it of any foundational grounding in nature. In this paper I interrogate Latour's project in relation to struggles that might be termed ‘subaltern political ecologies’. I argue that Latour's account of the political as bearing on the ‘progressive composition of the world’ offers insights for engaging with the inventiveness of subaltern political activity. I suggest that subaltern political ecologies offer both resources and challenges to the project of reworking the common sense of political ecology. To demonstrate this, I engage with the struggles against unequal social and material relations of the 18th-century Irish peasant movement, the Whiteboys. I follow the movement of their forms of political activity to London's dockside spaces. I suggest two skills that subaltern political ecologies ‘add’ to the politics of ‘heterogeneous associations’: the configuring of strategic arrangements of humans and nonhumans in antagonistic ways and the making of solidarities as ongoing interventions in the constitution of networks. This reworking of key political processes as active engagements in world-building activities seeks to foreground forms of political identity and agency which have often been marginalised, ignored, or dismissed.

Accepting the Grotesque Body: Bildungs by Clare Boylan and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

In Clare Boylan’s fantasy novel Black Baby (1988) and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’s realistic novel The Dancers Dancing (1999), female protagonists fear those who symbolize the grotesqueness of their own overweight bodies; hence, these heroines reject marginalized women, either black or retarded, and Irish peasants. Through their heroines’ struggles to accept both themselves and marginalized others, Ni Dhuibhne and Boylan deconstruct the psychology of self-hatred, whether it occurs in teenage or elderly women. Bakhtin’s ideas about the grotesque body, along with Stallybrass and White’s connection of the grotesque to prejudice, and Kristeva’s theory of abjection illuminate the conflicts over self-acceptance that Boylan’s and Ni Dhuibhne’s heroines face.

The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798-1882 by Michael de Nie (review)

Reviews thinking about Crick's claims about the impotence of critics who have developed their rational minds at the cost of neglecting, if not altogether disabUng, their emotional Ufe. The discussion of the analogy betweenJ. S. MiU and Hardy detaiUng their emotional immaturity, which borders upon a kind of adolescent arrested development, is chilüng to read. Contemplating Crick's thoughts about the kinds of novels for which professors and students share a mutual regard raises some troubUng questions about the relationship between inteUectual expertise and the capacity for passion. In training ourselves to become sophisticated thinkers, have we undermined any chance to become emotionaUy mature? The troubUng conclusion that the book hints at is that in some ways scholars and students remain aU but indistinguishable in their emotional education and development. MichaelJohn DiSanto Dalhousie University Michael de Nie. The EternalPaddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798-1882. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), xü + 340pp. Michael de Nie's book examines a broad cross-section of the British press to analyse "the arc of opinion in Victorian society" (13) on Ireland and the Irish from 1798 to 1882. By the author's own admission, the study is not "an exercise in formal newspaper history" (28). This is not certainly due to lack of consideration for the discipUne, of which de Nie shows a considerable awareness. His goal is not to identify editorial policies of specific tides, but rather to investigate how a range of national, local and special-interest newspapers were involved in the construction of British pubUc opinion on Ireland. De Nie's contention, after examining over ninety newspapers, is that the image of Ireland underwent several changes in the period under scrutiny. These shifts were based on what he terms objective and contextual interests in the representation of the "sister island." Objective interests for de Nie are "concerns that existed independently of each crisis in Anglo-Irish relations" (91). Contextual interests are instead related to specific incidents in the history of the two nations. For this reason, de Nie chooses to focus 128volume 31 number 2 Reviews his study on four of these topical events: the 1798 rebeUion, the 1845-52 potato famine, the "Fenian panic" of the late 1 860s and the Land War of 1879-82. In chartering this evolution, the main "objective interests" lie for de Nie in the three discourses of race, reUgion and class. Paddy "the objectified Irishman" (4) is constructed throughout the nineteenth century as a Celt, a CathoUc and a peasant. Gender for de Nie plays only a secondary role, mosdy in relation to certain pictorial personifications of Ireland as the maid Erin. Even if these ideologies formed the basis of British representation of Ireland, de Nie argues that they were not emphasised equaUy at aU times. Studies by L. P. Curtis and R. N. Lebow have in the past used race as the determinant concern in British images of Ireland. De Nie joins the growing ranks of those who chaUenge this view and argues instead that racial determination of Irishness emerged slowly and only as a part of a multilayered picture. As each crisis highüghted Irish resistance to AngUcisation, so did Paddy become more irredeemably "other." In chapter one, de Nie's attention is focused on the 1798 United Irishmen rebeUion and the foUowing Act of Union between Britain and Ireland in 1801. The author singles out several recurrent elements in the representation of the rebeUion. First is the Unk with France, especiaUy in the perceived role of French ideas in the inspiration of the rising. The British press portrays Irish peasants as guUible and naturaUy rebeUious, but blames the leaders of the United Irishmen for infecting them with French ideas. These character weaknesses are ascribed to a racial lack of rationaUty and a cultural CathoUc creduUty. Together these repeated assertions contribute to creating "strategies of innocence" exculpating Britain for the disorders in Ireland. The Union is presented as the necessary act of conciUation after the suppression of the rebels, and the gateway to future assimüation of the Irish into an overaU British identity. Chapter 2 examines perhaps the most controversial point in the relationship between...

Filiocht Nua: New Poetry

Gloucester Harbor North from the beautiful islands, North from the headlands and highlands, The long sea wall, The white ships flee with the swallow; The day-beams follow and follow, Glitter and fall. The brown ruddy children that fear not, Lean over the quay, and they hear not Warnings of lips; For their hearts go a-sailing, a-sailing, Out from the wharves and wailing After the ships. Nothing to them is the golden Curve of the sands, or the olden Haunt of the town; Little they reck of the peaceful Chiming of bells, or the easeful Sport of the down: The orchards no longer are cherished; The charm of the meadow has perished: Dearer, aye me! The solitude vast unbefriended, The magical voice and the splendid Fierce will of the sea. [End Page 58] Beyond them, by ridges and narrows The silver prows speed like the arrows Sudden and fair, Like the hoofs of Al Borak the wondrous, Lost in the blue and thund'rous Depths of the air; On to the central Atlantic, Where passionate, hurrying, frantic Elements meet; To the play and the calm and commotion Of the treacherous, glorious ocean, Cruel and sweet. In the hearts of the children forever The fashions their growing endeavor, The pitiless sea; Their sires in her caverns she slayeth, The spirits that love her she slayeth, And she laughts in her glee. Woe, woe, for the old fascination! The women make deep lamentation In starts and in slips; Here always is hope unavailing, Here always the dreamers are sailing After the ships. [End Page 59] An Epitaph for Wendell Phillips Of the voyagers of the right, here sleeps the last, his splendid light For lives oppressed benignly spent. All scom he dared, all sorrow bore: No hang your bays beside his door. Who shall in simple state endure Like him, thrice incorruptible? Who shame his valient voice and sure, The strength of all our citadel? Or turn tyrannic men That haughty, holy glance again? Here does he sleep; and hence in grief We heavily looked toward the sea, Nor with the passion of belief Descried one other such as he; Then shattered his great shield, and knew The king was dead, the kingdom, too. [End Page 60] Two Irish Peasant Songs I. In Leinster I try to knead and spin, but my life is low the while. Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile; Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all, Why from me that's young should the wild tears fall? The shower-sodden earth, the earth-coloured streams, They breath on me awake, and moan to me in dreams, And yonder ivy fondling the broken castle wall, It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall. The cabin-door looks down a furze-lighted hill, And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still; But once I hear the blackbird in the Leighlin hedges call, The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall. II. Ulster Tis the time o' the year, if the quicken bough be staunch, And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves In jets of angry spray that is the under-white of leaves; And from the thom in companies the foamy petals fall, And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall. Tis the time o' the year the marsh is full of sound, And good and glorious it is to smell the living ground. The crimson-headed catkin shakes above the pasture-bars, The daisy takes the middle field and spangles it with stars, And down the hedgerow to the lane primroses crowd, All coloured like the twilight moon, and spreading like a cloud. [End Page 61] Tis the time o' the year, in early light and glad, The lark has music to drive a lover mad; The rocks are dripping nightly, the breathed damps arise, Deliciously the freshets cool and graylings golden eyes...

Even a Worldly Philosopher Needs a Good Mechanic

Robert M. Solow Even a Worldly Philosopher Needs a Good Mechanic ANYONE WHO TEACHES ECONOMICS OWES A DEBT TO THE WORLDLYPHILOSOPHERS for having attracted so many bright and interested students to econom­ ics, much as Paul de K ruifs Microbe Hunters—a lesser book—recruited the young of my generation to the study of biology and medicine. Those same teachers are also aware that some of the same students felt let down by the texture of the discipline when they began to study it. Instead of debating big ideas about the nature of society, they found themselves drawing demand and supply curves and learning to set marginal this equal to marginal that. In the last chapter added to TheWorldlyPhilosophers, Heilbroner tries to diagnose the source of his own, more sophisticated version ofthis kind of disappointment. He locates it in the unwillingness of modem econo­ mists to focus on the essential characteristics of capitalism as a system of social relations. There and elsewhere he speaks of a failure of “vision” on the part of economists, and their misguided attempt to construct a Science—the capital S is essential—in the image of physics or astronomy. I have never been satisfied with that way of looking at the context and method of economics. Bob Heilbroner and I used to talk about this in the days when we saw more of each other. I take this opportunity to make one more statement of my view of the end of the worldly philosophy. From the start, I have to dissent from Heilbroner’s assertion that the disciplined study of economics (as we know it) is tied essentially social research Vol 71 : No 2 : Summer 2 004 203 to the capitalist system. His statement is: “The worldly philosophy is the child of capitalism and could not exist without it.” There is more in the same vein. I can think of at least two things wrong with this iden­ tification. One is that economics—and manifestly the economics we study and teach today—does have application outside of capitalism. A long line of economists, including Barone, Hayek, Lange, Meade, Dobb, Durbin, Crosland, and many others, has used standard tools to analyze how a socialist economy might operate. They cover a reasonably wide ideological spectrum—though there are no men from Mars among them, for good reason—but they are clearly doing economic analysis. To take a different kind of example, Vernon Smith has shown that econom­ ics has interesting things to say even about hunter-gatherer society; a slightly weaker point is illustrated by Radford’s famous article on “The Economic Organization of a POW [Prisoner-of-War] Camp” (1945). Sensible analysis of any economic system, capitalist or not, has to pay attention to the characteristic motivations and institutions of that society’s way of organizing production and consumption. You do not have to go all the way to Lionel Robbins’s famous characterization of economics as the study of scarce resources, and therefore presumably in some sense universally applicable, to see that some basic ideas can be adapted to a wide variety of institutional settings, some of them well outside capitalism. There is, after all, a well-recognized subdiscipline called “comparative economic systems,” whose practitioners believe that what they are practicing is economics. Which leads me to question Heilbroner’s formulation also from the opposite direction. Capitalist societies are not all alike, as he would have been the first to recognize. Even within the collection of histori­ cal and easily imaginable versions of the capitalist economy, there is enough variation to require nontrivial adaptation of basic economic principles to alternative institutional settings. From Irish peasants to post-Deng China, from the postwar United States to corporatist Austria, from French indicative planning to Erhard’s Germany, and from Thatcher’s England to Sweden’s Middle Way, there are enough similari­ ties and enough differences to require substantial tailoring to fit. I do 2 0 4 social research not think any purpose is served—not even Heilbroner’s own—by the suggestion that there is a clearly defined capitalism and therefore a unique vision for economic theoiy. There is a quite different, constructive way to visualize the...

New Negroes, Black Communists, and the New Pluralism

New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. By William J. Maxwell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 272 pages. $52.00 (cloth). $18.50 (paper). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. By Cedric J. Robinson, with a foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley. London: Zed Press, 1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. $24.95 (paper). UNTIL THE 1990S, SCHOLARS ALMOST UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED AN UNCOMPLICATED narrative of black Marxist history. Conventional wisdom held that the relationship between communism and black struggle was inherently corrupt. Critics of African American cultural arts frequently portrayed the affiliation between "white communists" and black intellectuals as a kind of reenactment of the colonizer-colonized encounter, where black creative workers were expected to submit to a racist agenda. But, in 1989 Cary Nelson's inclusive Repression and Recovery suggested that in modernist period literary study such an account was fraught with difficulty. 1 Looking at the 1930s, Barbara Foley's chapter on "Race, Class, and the 'Negro Question'" in her Radical Representations a few years later challenged decades of received wisdom. 2 The genealogy of the reading, which assumes that blacks were expected to adopt an inferior status in communism, is traceable to historians and critics in the 1960s and 1970s. The views of such scholars exhibited a popular [End Page 367] separatist narrative that reflected the ideology of U.S. black cultural nationalism. 3 In recent years scholars of the Black Renaissance and Great Depression, early to mid-century radicalism and Marxism, black Atlantic studies, and whiteness studies have seen the publication of several valuable recovery projects. Along with Foley, James A. Miller, in Bill Mullen and Sherry Linkon's Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture, has challenged prevailing views of black-white radical affiliation. 4 George Hutchinson's monumental accomplishment The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, though not attentive to radical commitment, has also confronted predominant notions of the color line between the wars, contending that the portrayal of a division between blacks and whites working in the cultural arts is inconsistent with the material evidence. 5 Now two distinguished publications have arrived, one a persuasively sustained re-visioning of black and white Marxism in the U.S., the other a reprint of an invaluable study of black Marxist history and theory. William J. Maxwell's New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars offers a vital reassessment of black American radicalism and proletarianism in the early decades of the twentieth century. And the University of North Carolina Press's reissue of Cedric J. Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition finally makes accessible this early 1980s vision of the origins of Marxist activism and black liberation struggle. Black Marxism is divided into three parts: the history of European capitalism and radicalism, the origins of black radicalism, and black radicalism's relationship to Marxism. The first section examines European socio-economic history, and its chief purpose is to analyze how "racial capitalism" developed. Now a familiar theoretical position, Robinson argues that the rise of industrial capitalism was built on a culture of racial construction. Emergent labor classes and ethnic minorities could be assembled through national identity formations--pitted against one another--to serve the dominant ideology. The Irish peasants' relocation to England during the Great Hunger of the 1840s, for example, occasioned the opportunity for "an ideological and physical drifting apart of the two 'races'": English and Irish (41). Thus "race" as a strategic mechanism for social control led to the immanence of "racialism" in Western civilization. Racialism ordered "the very values and traditions of consciousness through which the peoples of [End Page 368] these ages came to understand their worlds and their experiences" (66). Radicalism then rose in Europe as a revolt against capitalism but also as a resistance to nationalism, racialism, and racial capitalism. Black Marxism's inquiry into the constructedness of...

Invasions by the Late Blight Pathogen: Renewed Sex and Enhanced Fitness

Introductions of Phytophthora infestans, the oomycete plant pathogen responsible for late blight of potato and tomato, have had devastating human impacts wherever they have occurred. This pathogen was apparently sequestered in central Mexico until the mid-19th century, when introductions into the USA and Europe led to a series of crop failures – the most notable of which resulted in the Irish potato famine. A second series was documented in the late 20th century. There were terrible effects also from the second set of introductions, but no population was as vulnerable as the Irish peasants in the mid-19th century. Examination and comparison of these introductions has taught us that we must be prepared for the invasion of species that are more fit than the current population.

Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School, 1991-2000

Introduction: Nicholas Grene, on the margins: Synge and Wicklow R.F.Foster, good behaviour: Yeats, Synge and Anglo-Irish etiquette Frank McGuinness, John Millington Synge and the King of Norway Angela Bourke, Keening as theatre Tom Pualin, riders to the sea: a revisionist tragedy Antionette Quinn, staging the Irish peasant woman: Maud Gonne v. Synge Christopher Morash, all playboys now: the audience and the riot Martin Hilsky, re-imagining Synge's language: the Czech experience Declan Kiberd, the making and unmaking of myth: Synge as anthropologist Anthony Roche, Synge: the woman and the tramp Ann Saddlemyer, Synge's soundscape

A Yeats dictionary: persons and places in the poetry of William Butler Yeats

For William Butler Yeats, poetic license sometimes meant misquoting writers or misspelling Irish words. This reference guide illuminates the poetry of the Irish writer. A Dictionary: Names of the Persons and Places in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats uses Yeats' non-poetic writing, the principle criticism and the writings of his friends and critics to reveal the depth of his meanings. It identifies geographical, historical and literary references from classical antiquity to Irish culture. The pronunciation and etymological guides enhance the strong cadences of Gaelic words. This dictionary goes beyond mere identification to include biographical information and helpful cross-references to the poet's other works. Readers will learn, for example, that visited the cottages of Irish peasants to record their stories and superstitions first-hand - material that eventually found its way into his poems.