Irish Writers Research Articles

Interviews with four Irish writers

Introduction For several years, the Mediatheque – the multimedia library – in Vernon, Normandy (France) has been organizing a literary prize, ‘Escapades’, which is awarded every two years. The 2017 Prize is dedicated to Irish literature. Six recent novels, written by Irish writers, have been selected: The Gamal by Ciaran Collins (2013), Academy Street by Mary Costello (2014), The Trout by Peter Cunningham (2016), Ghost Moth by Michele Forbes (2013), Red Sky in Morning by Paul Lynch (2013), ...

Neil Murphy, John Banville

This monograph bearing on John Banville’s work – as its title clearly suggests – is the most recent and comprehensive assessment of the fiction written by a major Irish writer who won the Booker Prize for fiction, for his novel entitled The Sea in 2005. The main achievement accomplished by this study is that it manages to reconcile two seemingly contradictory interpretations or aesthetic agendas observable in Banville’s work : one heading in a postmodernist, experimental, deliberately transgr...

Honey, He Shrunk the Kids: Swift and Irish Writing

Honey, He Shrunk the Kids: Swift and Irish Writing

“No Country for Old Men”? The Question of George Moore’s Place in the Early Twentieth-Century Literature of Ireland

The paper scrutinizes the literary output of George Moore with reference to the expectations of the new generation of Irish writers emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although George Moore is considered to belong to the Anglo-Irish ascendancy writers, he began his writing career from dissociating himself from the literary achievements of his own social class. His infatuation with the ideals of the Gaelic League not only brought him back to Dublin, but also encouraged him to write short stories analogous to famous Ivan Turgenev’s The Sportsman’s Sketches. The idea of using a Russian writer as a role model went along with the Gaelic League advocating the reading of non-English European literature in search for inspiration. However the poet’s involvement in the public cause did not last long. His critical view on Ireland together with his uncompromising approach towards literature resulted in a final disillusionment with the movement. The paper focuses on this particular period of Moore’s life in order to show how this seemingly unfruitful cooperation became essential for the development of Irish literature in the twentieth century. The Untilled Field, though not translated into Irish, still marks the beginning of a new genre into Irish literature—a short story. More importantly, the collection served as a source of inspiration for Joyce’s Dubliners. These and other aspects of Moore’s literary life are supposed to draw attention to the complexity of the writer’s literary output and his underplayed role in the construction of the literary Irish identity.

‘The Eminent English Writer’: Aldous Huxley's "Point Counter Point" and Flann O’Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds"

Irish writer Brian O’Nolan, better known as Flann O’Brien (1911-1966), among other pseudonyms, published At Swim-Two-Birds, his first novel, in 1939. Early reviewers and contemporary critics alike have hailed it as a metafictional masterpiece, relevant for its mise en abyme narrative structure, lawless characters and mock-epic bravado. However, little attention has been devoted to how such an innovative design was originally conceived by its author in the first place. This article holds the belief that Huxley’s fourth novel, Point Counter Point (1928), stands as a major intertext among the many literary sources O’Brien might have perused when composing At Swim-Two-Birds. Apart from the presence of several direct references to Point Counter Point within O’Brien’s novel, Huxley’s text encompasses metafictional mechanisms that function in a similar way to those at work in O’Brien’s novel. Although there is no factual proof that O’Brien had read Huxley’s novel before he wrote At Swim-Two-Birds, this article endeavours to prove the existence of formal links between both metafictional assemblages by means of a detailed comparative analysis, ultimately concluding that O’Brien had indeed read Point Counter Point before setting out to write his first novel and found the self-referential features of Huxley’s work potentially productive.

Od Turgieniewa do Moore’a — rola literatury rosyjskiej w ideologii Ligi Gaelickiej

The paper scrutinizes George Moore’s fascination with Ivan Turgenev’s literary output, which led the Irish novelist into writing his first collection of short stories. Interestingly, the abundance of influences resulted in George Moore being one of the few Irish writers, who, throughout his writing career, went from the state of eager interest in the Celtic Revival to the bitter criticism of the Gaelic League, visible in his autobiographical accounts. Interestingly, his collection of short stories The Untilled field (1903) well illustrates this process. Initially written in order to be used by the members of the Gaelic League as a text for translation into Irish, and therefore as a medium of dissemination of the native language among Irish people, later became a source of influence for James Joyce’s Dubliners. Therefore, the following paper aims to investigate the case of George Moore’s The Untilled field as a literary and cultural phenomenon. The reference to Ivan Turgenev’s A sportsman’s sketches (1852) is to be scrutinized. What is more, the paper investigates how the initial interest in the idea of a „Dublin Turgenev” did not end on this particular project but had a greater impact on Moore’s literary career.

Ciudades sin palabra: silencio y destrucción en la Alemania de posguerra

Germany had never experienced such devastation as the one that the air raids left in its cities at the end of Second World War. Despite its magnitude, there are almost no documentary sources that deal with this disaster, and its absence in German historic memory is disturbing. Thinkers such as Enzensberger (2013) and Sebald (2003) have built theories that analyze this phenomenon. From their reflections, the current paper pretends to read two testimonies of this period, I Had Nowhere to Go, by the Lithuanian artist Jonas Mekas, and The Hidden Damage, by Irish writer James Stern, with the purpose of understanding this silence, with the hypothesis that as both authors looked the destruction, they also witnessed the conformation of an intentional oblivion.

Emma Dononghue’s and James Finn Garner’s Rebellious Cinderellas: Feminism and Satire for Empowerment in Contemporary Fairy Tales

The end of the 20th century witnessed a rewriting of traditional tales for children in English. In 1997, Irish writer Emma Donoghue published Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins, a sequence of re-imagined fairy tales that was shortlisted for the James L. Tiptree Award. In 1994, American writer James Finn Garner had also re-written many well-known stories for children and had them compiled in a single volume: Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. These new versions of Cinderella incorporate formal, structural and ideological alterations that subvert the traditional fairy tale genre. Using intersectionality as a theoretical research framework, the analysis of these works demonstrates that when the matrix of social power is dissected, the existing networks of oppression are exposed. While both versions are centred around gender, Donoghue and Garner employ different strategies, namely queer alliances and parodic scenes respectively, with the aim of overcoming the same structural obstacles. The resulting characters are rebellious and successful women who challenge tradition and open new horizons for female empowerment through the reinvention of the fairy tale genre.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: “ ‘Saluage soyl, far from Parnasso Mount’: Spenser and Shakespeare in Contemporary Irish Writing”

Teaching and Learning Guide for: “ ‘Saluage soyl, far from Parnasso Mount’: Spenser and Shakespeare in Contemporary Irish Writing”

“Saluage soyl, far from Parnasso Mount”: Spenser and Shakespeare in contemporary Irish writing

AbstractThis essay studies the literary politics of the reception of Spenser and Shakespeare in contemporary Irish writing, theatre, and public culture. Often conceived as a project of recovery or restitution, or as a niche interest for urban élites, the mixed fortunes and contrasting politics of Shakespeare and Spenser in 20th‐ and 21st‐century Ireland testify to the still sensitive politics of settlement and plantation, as well as the blind spots of nationalism and the national model of Irish literature. Focussing primarily on the current century, this essay traces crucial lines of reception back to W. B. Yeats and the Irish literary revival, pausing over Frank McGuinness's important play Mutabilitie (1997), which dared to imagine and provocatively recast both Shakespeare and Spenser's habitation in Ireland. That project found little support, just months before the Good Friday agreement was signed, but it stands over and guides a significant body of work in Irish drama and poetry in ways that have yet to be fully unpacked. Yet the contrast remains between the hero and the whipping boy, a congenial Shakespeare and a cruel Spenser, in literary engagements with Tudor Ireland. Although Shakespeare has generally been heralded as an enabling or emancipatory figure for Irish writers, this essay proposes that a richer and more radical politics can be accessed by the thornier route of confronting Spenser's place in Irish culture and history. The essay concludes by outlining a recent flourishing of interest in Spenser that seeks to exploit his potential for Irish culture and politics in these new, more honest but more challenging ways.

Negotiating the Relationship Human – Non-Human as a Question of Meaning in Twentieth Century Iranian Authenticity Discourse: The Role of Ǧalāl Āl-e Aḥmad’s Essay West Infection

Abstract The present article investigates the intellectual and discursive orientation of the culture-critical essay West Infection by the twentieth century Iranian writer Ǧalāl Āl-e Aḥmad (1923–1969). In doing so, it likewise discusses the question of why this particular text was to have so deep and lasting an effect in redirecting the sociocultural modernization debate among Iranian intellectuals from a mainly developmentalist discourse to one about the issues of authenticity and identity. While considering Āl-e Aḥmad’s essay as raising a question of meaning – more specifically the question of human being’s meaning in the face of dehumanization under the spell of technological ‘Westernization’ –, we critically examine, in the course of our study, former interpretive approaches that define Āl-e Aḥmad’s text as reflecting influence on the author of existentialist philosophy. At the same time, we also address scholarly discussions of West Infection that regard it as a manifestation of nativism or leftist anti-capitalism. Rather than trying, in our turn, to pin down what Āl-e Aḥmad has to say to any given ideological or philosophical doctrine, we attempt to understand the use by Āl-e Aḥmad, in his essay, of terms such as ‘authenticity’, ‘alienation’, ‘identity’ and ‘religion’ – some of which are highly evocative of existentialism and of nativism indeed – as constitutive of a discourse that – for all the arguable influence on it of modern ideologies and philosophies – deserves to be treated as a word in its own right in the debate about Iran’s sociocultural situation.

No tabuleiro de xadrez: Beckett e Duchamp

O presente artigo parte de um inusitado encontro (1940) entre o artistafrancês Marcel Duchamp e o escritor irlandês Samuel Beckett na cidade deArcachon, no sudoeste da França. Tal encontro é ocasionado em virtude dodesencadeamento da invasão nazista a Paris, bem como pelo interesse que ambosmanifestavam pelo jogo de xadrez. Primeiramente, aludimos brevementea relação do jogo com a literatura e com a filosofia, para depois efetuarmos aleitura de Fim de Jogo de Beckett, peça fundamental dentro da poética beckettiana– levando em conta que ela foi escrita e encenada após a segunda guerra– a partir de alguns pressupostos enxadrísticos referentes à terceira fase dojogo de xadrez (denominada justamente de fim de jogo) por parte de Duchamp.

“A Clannish Pride”: Eugene O'Neill's Eventual Embrace of His Irish Heritage

Abstract The plays of Eugene O'Neill dramatize acts of loyalty and honesty among members of Irish American families, from the early works (The Straw and Beyond the Horizon) to the last plays (Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Touch of the Poet, and A Moon for the Misbegotten). These virtues were not only featured in O'Neill's canon but also lived in his personal relations with kith and kin. O'Neill's embrace of his Irish heritage developed and matured over the course of several decades, from his teen years until his mid-fifties. He befriended fellow Irish writers O'Casey and Yeats and became a staunch supporter of the Irish Free State and eventually the Republic of Ireland. Over this long life's journey, O'Neill came to understand and believe that those key character traits were passed on to him via his Irish heritage, thus, encouraging him to embrace his “Irishness” with a certain “clannish pride.”

Radical & Free: Musings on the Religious Life by Brian O’Leary (review)

standards of UCD Press. It will be welcomed as an important addition to Joycean scholarship by Irish writers. Moreover, it should find a place in any library devoted to the Irish Literary Revival and the history of modernism in Ireland, as well as to life and culture in Victorian and Edwardian Dublin. Vivien Igoe deserves the gratitude of the many readers and scholars who will be delighted by what she has done. Peter Costello is an author and editor, with specialised interest in the life and work of James Joyce, on whom he has written extensively. Radical & Free: Musings on the Religious Life, Brian O’Leary SJ, (Dublin: Messenger Publications, 2016), 98 pages. Brian O’Leary’s book provides a short but very engaging exploration of religious life, with a focus on the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience. Despite its relative brevity, this collection of theological, spiritual, historical, psychological and personal insights gives the book a variegated feel, hinted at in the word ‘Musings’ in the subtitle. Much of the content is taken from a series of talks the author gave to consecrated persons in 2014, during the church’s Year for Consecrated Life. The book serves to inform and renew the reader’s understanding and living of the vows. It does so first by unveiling the original inspiration and biblical wisdom behind each of the evangelical counsels. It also offers an array of positive suggestions as to how religious can authentically live the vows today. These suggestions strive to be faithful to both the foundational impulse of the desert fathers and mothers ‘to renounce’, and contemporary demands on religious life and mission. Radical and Free can therefore be considered as both spiritual reading for anyone who wishes to engage with the question of how they live their vows, and as a source of valuable information for anyone who simply wishes to further their understanding and appreciation of religious life. In chapter one the author reaches back to the time of the nascent Christian church, the age of martyrdom, and the desert fathers and mothers, to offer a critical discussion of the historical origins of religious life. He also traces how the singular decision ‘to renounce’ evolved in time into the triad of evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience that we have come Studies • volume 107 • number 425 132 Spring 2018: Book Reviews to recognise as the hallmarks of religious life. The following six chapters can be read as three two-chapter pairs, unearthing the biblical wisdom and witness which underpins each of the vows and exploring contemporary ways of both understanding and authentically living those vows. In the case of both celibacy and poverty, the author notes how they have been presented in the scriptures as evils as well as goods. Obedience is explored through the biblical portrayal of creation and specific personalities, seen as being and living under the authority of God. As a general observation, the biblical roots of all the evangelical counsels become clearer as the missionary life of the church kicks into gear. In his discussion of the contemporary living of the vows, the author naturally attends to their apostolic value. What this reader appreciated more, however, was how pastorally attuned the author is to how the vowed life can serve the personal and relational needs of consecrated persons themselves: obedience is linked to self-acceptance (Is 45,9-11), chastity is presented as a living of life with God and others in a spirit of intimacy and mutuality, and poverty is shown as a way of allowing oneself to depend on others. The author’s years of experience show in his knowledge of the history and theology of religious life as well as his familiarity with how different religious institutes have adapted the ideals of religious life to their specific context. In that respect this book it is a useful resource for the ongoing processes of ressourcement and of aggiornamento called for by the Second Vatican Council. The introduction left this reader with the impression that the audiences of the original lectures consisted predominantly of older Irish religious people. This book, however, is a timely reminder to younger and older religious people...

Post-crash fiction and the aesthetics of austerity in Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane

ABSTRACTSince 2008, the phrase “age of austerity” has become commonplace in political, economic, and sociocultural discourse across Europe and the globe. This article contributes to interdisciplinary studies of austerity, a political and material phenomenon, from a literary studies perspective. The essay proposes Irish writer Kevin Barry’s acclaimed 2011 novel City of Bohane as an exemplar of “post-crash fiction,” as the text develops a trenchant critique of the age of austerity via its literary aesthetics. Foregoing realism in favor of speculative fiction, City of Bohane presents a foreboding view of what contemporary Ireland might look like 40 years in the future. The article examines Barry’s use of allegory and ekphrasis, demonstrating how these techniques develop an “aesthetics of austerity” that impels readers to view austerity not merely as a response to fiscal crisis, but rather as a humanitarian issue with deep roots in the historical operations of colonialism and sectarian division.

Mourning’s dissonance; who am I who mourns and whom do I mourn?

In this article I explore how a relational psychoanalytic and phenomenological perspective can open out new possibilities for interpretations of experiences of bereavement. I critically discuss Freud’s acclaimed paper, ‘Mourning and melancholia’ in the light of work by philosophers Merleau-Ponty (a phenomenologist) and Judith Butler (a contemporary post-modern feminist philosopher). I reflect on how questions of identity, language, and embodiment, crucial themes in Merleau-Ponty’s and Butler’s theorising of human subjectivities, emerge in two literary/autobiographical accounts of mourning: Nora Webster, by the contemporary Irish writer, Colm Tóibín, and Mourning Diary by the French philosopher, Roland Barthes. Through my discussion of these philosophical and literary texts I argue for a psychoanalytic perspective which is attuned to the conscious and unconscious subtleties and complexities of mourning and engages with the ways in which the identities of the mourner and the mourned and the relations between them are, for the mourner, constantly in flux. I emphasize the importance of attending in the psychoanalytic relationship to the specificity and uniqueness of individuals’ languages of mourning and to the effects on experiences of bereavement of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, and physical ability within particular socio-historical and cultural contexts.

In the Firing Line: Censorship, the Civil War in Ireland, and its Aftermath

In the Firing Line:Censorship, the Civil War in Ireland, and its Aftermath John Horgan Correction: Ceartúchán: Correction We wish to correct an error in volume 33, no. 3 (Autumn, 2018) in the article "Redemptive Suffering in the Isenheim Altarpiece and Bernard MacLaverty's Cal,"https://muse.jhu.edu/article/714957 by Lanta Davis. The image on page 82 is mislabeled. The image credit should instead be: The Isenheim Altarpiece (third view). By permission of Musee d'Unterlinden/Art Resource, NY. We regret the misidentification. The online version has been corrected. Much of the research about media in independent Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century has focused, understandably, on the controversies that attended the establishment and convoluted history of the Censorship of Publications Board, especially in relation to work by Irish writers that was thought to impinge on the allegedly pristine and incorrupt nature of Irish sexuality, and on political censorship during the World War II. Less studied—perhaps because it was more chaotic, and also more short-lived—is the military and political censorship instituted in the early years of the Free State by an administration that found the problems of establishing its legitimacy exacerbated by the unexpected but lethal and intense, events of the civil war.1 The challenge of focusing on this brief, but significant period of controversy is made more difficult by the sometimes chaotic condition of the early Free State administration's filing system, and by what appear to be differing (but, at least on paper, unvoiced, views within that administration on the relative values of military activity and of more irenic measures to be taken against their republican opponents. This is particularly true of the period of heightened tension and, eventually, civil war, following the Treaty setting up the Irish Free State administration in January 1922, which was to be ratified by the UK parliament on December 6 of that year. It is impossible to overestimate the climate of fear and suspicion that prevailed in 1922–23 as former comrades-in-arms found themselves first politically, and then militarily, in conflict with each other in the increasingly ruthless civil war that broke out in July, and the heightened tension following Michael Collins's assassination on August 22. The security and [End Page 62] military situation was further exacerbated after November of that year, following the execution of eight republican prisoners, and the retaliatory murder by republicans of the TD Sean Hales in Dublin in December. Clearly, political and administrative responsibility for managing the resultant challenges presented by the institution of media censorship was diffuse and inadequately centralized, involving recurrent tensions between military and civil leaders. The cabinet papers from this period reveal many unresolved tensions, and disputes about areas of responsibility between different government departments, about the role of the military, and regarding the nascent and erratic machinery of censorship itself. The leaders of the Anglo-Irish War had not anticipated this problem; this may, in part explain, their unfocused, often uncertain (and on occasion, despairing) attempts to deal with it. The relatively scant records that remain also reveal that newspaper editors' attitude to the new Free State government did not preclude attempts by both the Irish Independent and the Irish Times to record some of the events of the civil war in ways that sometimes failed fully to heed the new government's hostility to any language that might imply that their military opponents had claims to political legitimacy. The implications of the onset of civil war for newspapers had been considered poorly, if at all, by the new administration. The national daily newspaper with the greatest circulation in Ireland, the Irish Independent, had been hostile to the Rising because of its loyalty to the fast-disappearing Irish Party at Westminster, but by the time of the civil war it had patently shifted its loyalty to the new Free State administration. Its national contemporary, the Protestant-owned and Unionist Irish Times had—albeit for different reasons—been hostile to constitutional Irish nationalism, and opposed post-1921 Irish Republicanism virulently, but rapidly came to a political accommodation with the new Irish Free State—not least because of that newspaper...

Redefining Family in Jennifer Johnston's Foolish Mortals

Redefining Family in Jennifer Johnston's Foolish Mortals Mara Reisman (bio) To date, Irish writer Jennifer Johnston (1930–) has published eighteen novels and written numerous stage and radio plays. She has won prizes such as the prestigious Whitbread Award, and her book Shadows on Our Skin (1977) was short-listed for the Booker Prize. In 2012, her literary achievements were recognized by the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards, which honored her with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award. Beginning with her first novel, The Captains and the Kings (1972), Johnston has explored the effects of Irish nationalism and politics on individuals. In Foolish Mortals (2007), Johnston focuses on the issue of family at both a personal and political level in order to reveal and inspire transformations in domestic relationships and gender roles in twenty-first-century Ireland. This book signifies a change in Johnston's depiction of family relationships. These relationships may begin as difficult, as in her earlier work, but end in reconciliation. In addition, the family structure is redefined and reconfigured to include more types of families. Patricia Craig (2007) recognizes Johnston's perspicacity about contemporary Irish society and notes that "Part of the author's achievement here is to undermine … conventional ideas about family relations and activities." The questions that Ciara, the daughter in Foolish Mortals asks—"What, anyway, is a happy family?" (Johnston 2007, 148) [End Page 516] and "What's normal?" (172)—are among the central concerns of the text and part of the political discussions happening in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Ireland. By addressing who constitutes a family, Foolish Mortals participates in the debates about homosexuality, marriage, divorce, and the Irish family that were in the foreground in the 1980s and were still taking place at the time of the book's publication. These changing attitudes about families and relationships can be seen in the characters' negotiations of structural changes to their families. The novel documents the shift from idealizing the nuclear family to recognizing and accepting a multiplicity of families including two gay couples, a divorced mother and her daughter, an older woman and her caregivers, and the large family these smaller units compose. Memory is crucial to this renegotiation of relationships. This attention to the past, as many critics argue, is a prominent feature in Johnston's fiction.1 Yulia Pushkarevskaya contends: "Like many other Irish writers, Jennifer Johnston exhibits a particular fascination with memory. … However, rather than the past itself, it is the interpretation of the past … that assumes a particular significance in Johnston's oeuvre" (2007, 73). In keeping with Pushkarevskaya's observation, the characters in Foolish Mortals must not only uncover the past but also must reinterpret it. The novel offers a complex look at memory and shows that both actively dealing with the past as well as the seemingly contradictory need to forget some of it (in this case through amnesia or dementia) are necessary to facilitate positive changes to the Irish family structure. Foolish Mortals also expands the focus on mother-daughter relationships to look at other familial relationships. Anne Fogarty (2002), Heather Ingman (2007), and Ann Owens Weekes (2000) argue that a shift takes place in the late 1980s and 1990s in relation to mother-daughter narratives: in earlier Irish novels, the daughter's story is foregrounded; in later Irish novels, the mother's story begins to be told. In this context, part of what differentiates Foolish Mortals is that Johnston gives both mother and daughter a voice, privileging neither of their stories. Other characters in the text also get a voice, which expands this subject position even further and heightens the novel's themes of tolerance, inclusion, and the need to understand disparate perspectives. I begin with a brief discussion of some of the contemporary political battles about family and gay rights in Ireland. I then address how Johnston uses moments of fissure—breaks in memory, in the [End Page 517] privilege of the heteronormative family, in marital stability (infidelity, divorce, attempted murder), and in maternal expectations (wanting a career, not wanting children)—as opportunities for change to family structures, gender roles, and belief systems. In these moments, characters realize...

Ireland, the Irish, and Biofiction

Ireland, the Irish, and Biofiction Michael Lackey (bio) In 2006 the novelist David Lodge confessed that before writing about Henry James, his “concept of what constituted a novel . . . did not include the possibility of writing one about a real historical person.”1 The traditional approach to fiction focused on an actual person was to change the character’s name in order to give the author more creative freedom. One thinks of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are based on Woolf’s parents), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Daisy Buchanan on Ginevra King), and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (Willie Stark on Huey Long). But for Lodge 2004 marked a decisive turning point: In that year James was the protagonist of Colm Tóibín’s The Master, Lodge’s own Author, Author, and Michiel Heyns’s The Typewriter’s Tale.2 Although Lodge focused on the confluence of biographical novels about James in 2004, the collection of contributions to this issue of Éire-Ireland offers another way of thinking about this seemingly sudden aesthetic boom of the literary genre. In 2003 Colum McCann published Dancer, a novel about the Soviet icon Rudi Nureyev. In 2004 Emma Donoghue’s Life Mask, a portrait of the artist Anne Damer, and Tóibín’s The Master also appeared. If we focus only on biographical novels—that is, biofiction—about James, as Lodge does, we might look to that subject’s life and work in order to illuminate the sudden surge and subsequent legitimization of this form in the early years of the twenty-first century. However, this exploration of biographical novels by Irish writers and about Irish subjects offers a different conclusion from Lodge’s suggestion of the year 2004 as a turning point for the form. This issue aims to demonstrate how [End Page 98] the study of Irish biofiction represents a promising field of scholarly inquiry and how understanding the form’s origins, evolution, and current popularity necessitates engagement with Ireland’s politics, religion, and movement toward national autonomy. The biographical novel has in fact been a significant literary genre for many years. Klaus Mann’s Alexander (1929); Thomas Mann’s Joseph novels (1933–43) and Lotte in Weimar (1939); Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934); Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939); Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951); and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) represent just a few noteworthy examples. Moreover, when we look at the origins and evolution of this literary form from a scholarly perspective, Irish writers played a vital role, using biofiction to create powerful new ways of signifying and being. Their countryman Oscar Wilde, for instance, provided a key theorization of the form and illuminated what the contemporary biographical novel has become; the Mayo-born George Moore, working in the same tradition as Wilde, published biofiction in the form of The Brook Kerith (1916), a novel in which Jesus, having survived the crucifixion, renounces his earlier teachings as dangerously fanatical. The contributions that follow include an essay by Suzanne Hobson analyzing Moore’s The Brook Kerith, a reflection piece by author Sabina Murray on her biographical novel Valiant Gentlemen, and conversations with three Irish biofiction writers of the early twenty-first century—Tóibín, McCann, and Donoghue. Scholars have long had difficulty processing the significance of Moore’s groundbreaking production. But in her contribution to this issue Hobson carefully locates Moore’s novel within a rich tradition of biblical biofiction—enabling readers to understand his novel as a major pioneering work in the subgenre. Murray’s essay, meanwhile, allows us to move beyond Irish authors to consider biographical novels by non-Irish authors about Irish figures (in this case Roger Casement), many of them dissidents within conventional society.3 She reveals the particular relationship [End Page 99] between a major strand of Irish biofiction and the country’s political history as a British colony and its valuation of dissent. Finally, to explore Ireland’s specific contribution to the genesis, evolution, rise, and now prevalence of biofiction, the interviews in this issue consider the ways...

“More National (to Ireland) than Personal”: James Prior’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1837)

No full biography of Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) appeared until 1837. It was written by a fellow Irishman, James Prior, who had already published a well-received biography of Edmund Burke. Prior explicitly claimed Goldsmith for Ireland, situating him in a tradition of writers whose lives were not well known and paying attention to other Irish writers in his London circle. Prior’s book was praised for its research but criticized for the accumulation of detail, especially about minor figures. John Forster in 1848 and Washington Irving in 1849 each used Prior’s research to issue biographies of Goldsmith aimed at a wider public. Prior was furious. A controversy ensued in which Prior claimed that the information he had gathered belonged to him. Forster struck back. Public and critics alike responded favorably to Forster, whose version of Goldsmith was judged “real biography” and whose argument that biographers do not have possession of facts seemed common sense. Posterity sided with Forster. But this essay argues that Prior’s anger can be understood differently if we take Irish history into account.