Irish Writers Research Articles

Introduction: Shaw and Classical Literature—What You See Is Not Always What You Get

Introduction: Shaw and Classical Literature—What You See Is Not Always What You Get

Encapsulating Irish English in literature

ABSTRACTThis article examines the representation of Irish English in contemporary Irish writing, with particular reference to the narrative of the Ross O'Carroll‐Kelly saga, a series of comic novels created by Irish writer Paul Howard which has enjoyed phenomenal success in Ireland, due in part to the author's ability to convey contemporary spoken English in Dublin. Our study consists of a corpus analysis of three of his novels, where we are able to describe a number of key stylistic features which are distinctive of Howard's representation of Irish English, including the variable use of such discourse markers as like, roysh and yeah + no, as well as the use of the intensifying so.

Edmund Spenser and Transhistorical Memory in Ireland

Edmund Spenser has been beleaguered by some critics who deem him to be a willing and active representative of the worst of English colonial aspirations, and defended by others who see him as a humanist poet caught in the closing jaws of an imperial mission. This vacillation of opinion is seen in the rewriting of Spenser by Irish writers over time. Spenser has also haunted Irish critical work, moving through the contemporary academy in a swift transmission beginning in the 1980s, when ‘Spenser and Ireland’ became a subject of some significance. Yet now, only thirty years later, that attention has been diverted, leaving Spenser, in an Irish context at least, as a placeholder of memory. This essay considers key moments or changes in the rewriting of Spenser's cultural memory in Ireland, considering the long duration of his figuring in Irish literature and culture as a case study of transhistorical memory.

Colonial Discourse on Irish Dress and the Self as “Outward Dress”: Swift’s Sartorial Self-Fashioning

Jonathan Swift’s Irish writings are replete with sartorial imaginings that fashion his unique satirist self by interlacing, for mutual sub version, colonial discourse on Irish dress with a mock-Lockean idea of self as “outward Dress.” Swiftcontests the legacy of Edmund Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland (ca. 1596), a colonial attack on Irish dress that combined the Renaissance notion of dress generating identity by permeating the wearer and a more modern presumption of essential differences between the Irish and (New) English. Swift’s insight into Spenser’s contradictory logic penetrates Jack’s sartorial “Projects of Separation” from Peter in A Tale of a Tub (1704), and culminates later in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729) when Gulliver and the Modest Proposer, in deed or word, skin the Yahoos/Irish and literally turn them into shoes, in resonance with both William Wood’s contumely “eat [y]our Brogues” and Spenser’s View. By reversing and revamping the colonial sign of Irish dress, Swiftfashions and refashions his satirist self through a conscious mismatch of Anglican habit and Irish brogues.

Eco’s The Name of the Rose: Bricolage and montage of cultural history

Umberto Eco loved analogies, was an artist of the déjà-vu and a great bricoleur in architecting a pastiche of genre and a collage of intertextual anxieties of influences. I begin with his inspiration from one of his favorite and most influential writers, James Joyce, and will close with the influence of his all-time favorite movie, Casablanca. Eco’s remarkable study of Joyce’s works appeared in the first edition of Opera aperta. The influence of this meticulous analysis of puns, riddles, metonymy, and interactive metaphors resurfaces with his encyclopedic knowledge in The Name of the Rose. My argument is that Eco, keeping the famous Irish writer in mind, structured his own novels as dynamic epistemological metaphors. In addition to the skillful use of parodies, irony, puns, metaphors, erudition, semiosis, details, and comic relief, The Name of the Rose reveals many of Eco’s narrative strategies. Socratic dialogues, intertextual frames, citations, palimpsests, and chains of associations are at the center of his possible world of fiction where History and stories intertwine. From the cult movie Casablanca Eco learned how an intertextual collage of clichés was used constructively: “two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves and celebrating a reunion.” In The Rose we encounter clichés, archetypes, and familiar quotations that with Eco’s encyclopedic knowledge contribute to making his first hybrid cognitive narrative an excellent example of docere et delectare.

ANGLOSAKSONSKA POP KULTURA U ROMANU SAVETI MORISONOVOG UČENIKA OBOŽAVATELJU DŽOJSA ROBERTA BOLANJA I A. G. PORTE

Predmet našeg istraživanja je prvi roman čileanskog pisca Roberta Bolanja Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (Saveti Morisonovog učenika obožavatelju Džojsa), nastao u saradnji sa njegovim prijateljem, katalonskim književnikom Antonijem Garsijom Portom i objavljen 1984. godine. Temeljnom analizom dela koje sadrži sve potonje teme kojima će se Bolanjo baviti do kraja života (književnost, nasilje, smrt, ljubav, umetnost, kriminal, društvo, muzika), proučili smo elemente anglosaksonske popularne kulture kojima ova knjiga obiluje, a naročito reference na irskog književnika Džejmsa Džojsa i američkog pesnika i muzičara Džima Morisona. Budući da prvi roman Bolanja i Porte do sada nije preveden na srpski niti analiziran u akademskim člancima na našim prostorima, služili smo se literaturom na španskom i engleskom jeziku, zapisima Bolanja i Porte, novijim studijama hispanoameričke književnosti, kao i stručnim knjigama i tekstovima na srpskom jeziku o popularnoj kulturi i Džojsovom i Morisonovom stvaralaštvu. Zaključci do kojih smo došli mogu se svesti na sledeće: život na margini dvoje protagonista, Ane i Anhela, i njihova neprestana težnja da „provale na drugu stranu”, dva (alter ega) umetnika iz naslova romana koji samo na prvi pogled deluju kao dva kontrapunkta, omogućili su autorima romana da otvore svoja „vrata percepcije” zarad eksperimentisanja književnom formom (Džojs) odnosno samim životom (Morison).

Adapting The Quiet Man: John Ford, José Luis Guerín, and the Palimpsest of Place

In 1988, Catalan filmmaker José Luis Guerín took a film crew to the village of Cong in the West of Ireland. Cong was the site of the filming of John Ford’s adaptation of Irish writer Walsh’s story, ‘The Quiet Man’, thirty-seven years previously. Guerin’s resulting essay film, Innisfree (1990), is an adaptation of Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952) and a commentary on the relationship between Ford’s film and Cong. Situating Guerín’s work within a series of adaptive relations, this article argues that Guerín’s controversial film is best understood as an adaptation that explores the palimpsestuous nature of artistic and cultural adaptation. Guerín’s adaptation elucidates elided layers within both Ford’s adaptation of Walsh and Ford’s cultural vision, and posits Ford’s film as an integral part of the palimpsest of place. Guerín’s work enacts the meeting and mating of (un)related parts in artistic and cultural adaptation. As such, Innisfree prompts exploitation of the under-realized properties of the discourse of palimpsestuousness in relation to adaptation.

“Agora que pus no papel, posso começar a me esquecer”: sujeito, memória e representação nas autobiografias e diários de w. B. Yeats

Partindo de uma discussão do crescente interesse que as escritas de si têm despertado tanto na crítica quanto no público leitor, o presente artigo foca em aspectos teóricos que distinguem a prática do escritor irlandês W. B. Yeats em dois gêneros de escrita auto/biográfica: a autobiografia propriamente dita e o diário. Propõe-se análise que bebe de fontes teóricas de diversos contextos nacionais para atualizar o público brasileiro acerca das discussões que compõem a fortuna crítica deste importante autor das literaturas anglófonas. Yeats se apresenta como um sujeito exemplar para investigar-se a constituição do sujeito-escritor, as (im)possibilidades da memória e sua representação no espaço da escrita, em função da riqueza de seu acervo, da tradição dos estudos genéticos e biográficos que sempre caracterizaram a crítica yeatsiana e por sua própria preocupação com essas questões, presente em todos os gêneros de sua extensa obra.

Neurological inspiration in Beckett's Waiting for Godot

The work of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906–89) was substantially influenced by his medical readings. In 1952, he wrote his masterpiece Waiting for Godot, a play associated with the Theatre of the Absurd which described the fanciful lucubrations of two marginalised men, Vladimir and Estragon, awaiting the arrival of someone (a saviour; does Godot represent God?) who will never come. While they wait, they are joined by two other marginalised men (Pozzo and Lucky) with a comparable style of dialogue.

What matters for women: discovering Irish women through Maeve Binchy’s “All That Matters”

Irish women have long been marginalized, but sexual politics in Ireland has undergone many changes since the 1970s. This paper focuses on Maeve Binchy’s short story “All That Matters” in the hope of exploring the image of Irish women as presented in the story. The short story is collected in New Dubliners (2004), a collection of eleven stories by distinguished contemporary Irish writers presenting modern-day Irish scenarios in honor of James Joyce’s writings about Dubliners around a century ago. The study argues that although the phantom of patriarchy still haunts women’s lives in different forms, women in contemporary Ireland are more eager to challenge social taboos and work for their self-actualization.

Reception of the Easter Rising in British and American little magazines

This article examines the reactions of writers and readers to the Easter Rising in five British and American little magazines. The New Age, The Egoist, The Little Review, The Masses and The Phoenix have been chosen due to their links with Irish writers and culture, and because they were established periodicals that published over several years. Little magazines have been described as counterpublic spheres, in which oppositional opinions could be given voice against the conventional narratives of the mainstream. Though the politics of these journals was extremely divergent, collectively they operated as discursive spaces for a range of alternative voices. The reactions published in these journals give us a sense of the interaction between modernism and the Easter Rising in its immediate aftermath.

A Continuum of Irish Women’s Writing: Reflections on the Post-Celtic Tiger Era

In an interview for this special issue, Irish writer Claire Kilroy satirizes the overt posturing of hyper-masculinity associated with the boom time Celtic Tiger era. Parroting the hollow entitlemen...

Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846–1870 by Marguérite Corporaal

Reviewed by: Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846–1870 by Marguérite Corporaal Matthew A. Schownir Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846–1870, by Marguérite Corporaal, pp. 303. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2017. $34.95. Though the Famine has long been a seminal topic of Irish Studies, a vexing misconception persists that Irish literature written during and immediately after the Famine dared not mention the cataclysmic event. The notion that survivors found the Famine too existentially traumatic an episode to recount even in fiction is an understandable, if false, assumption. In Relocated Memories, Marguérite [End Page 150] Corporaal not only sets the record straight on this matter, but recontextualizes midcentury famine fiction as a transnational exercise for Irish writers and readers to memorialize and cope with the tragedy. Drawing on an impressively broad collection of novels and stories written in Ireland, Britain, and North America, Corporaal demonstrates the extent to which Irish writers embraced the Famine as a subject of Irish storytelling and identity. Indeed, famine fiction became a site of collective memory where Irish writers who experienced the event could employ “specific narrative and generic techniques to circumvent certain agonizing details” and thus mediate and reconfigure its trauma for readers. For example, the survivor and writer Mary Ann Hoare often wrote tangentially of emotionally painful episodes in her 1851 collection of stories Shamrock Leaves. Rather than make her main protagonists describe the death of an infant or a family’s slow starvation through first-person descriptions, Hoare instead opts for her narration to make vague, passing mentions of these events in order to displace and assuage the visceral memories of characters in the broader narrative. By decentering the experientiality of particularly gruesome and emotionally taxing moments in her story, Hoare attempts to temper literary accounts of famine suffering for her Irish audience. Other authors used similar narrative methods to accomplish the same goal. The narrator of a story published in 1847 laments that the protagonist’s sufferings are “the most painful part of my sad narrative and I must hasten over it.” This is not to say that fiction writers completely avoided exposition of the Famine’s human toll. Rather, Corporaal locates in the stylistic choices of Irish authors a desire to practice emotional triage through their works, demonstrating the fluidity of famine memory and how it is expressed in fragmented ways. Corporaal argues that although trauma plays a crucial role in shaping these narratives of famine memory, it also speaks to broader notions of how the Irish made sense of postfamine politics, identity, and of their tenuous place in the Atlantic world. Borrowing Alison Landsberg’s notion of “prosthetic memory,” she examines how Irish writers who did not directly experience the Famine used mediated memories to construct their own narratives and make sense of the event from a geographic or temporal distance. This is especially evident with texts written in British Canada and the United States at the time. Corporaal notes that American Irish writers tended to use different narrative techniques, descriptions, or themes than authors in Ireland. For instance, when using the Famine as a setting or a plot device American Irish authors would omit descriptions of their characters’ emaciated bodies. In contrast, stories written in Ireland often dwelt heavily on the physical aspects of starvation to reflect the experientiality of the author’s recollections. North American writers also portrayed Irish pastoral settings in romanticized, Edenic terms that diverged from the desolated landscapes emphasized by writers in Ireland. The cumulative effect of these differences [End Page 151] is a distinctly “diasporic memory” produced by texts that enshrines a softer, more hopeful, and nostalgic image of Ireland that informed New World recollections of the Famine years. This would seem to be Corporaal’s most prominent contribution: to understand how famine memory was produced and experienced by the Irish diaspora, it must be examined in a transnational context. The rough and irregular shape of famine memory stems from its bifurcated roots on both sides of the Atlantic. As such, it is a product of two mutually informed, but characteristically distinct, worlds. To reinforce this point...

The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 by Emily C. Bloom

Reviewed by: The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 by Emily C. Bloom Eileen Morgan-Zayachek The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968, by Emily C. Bloom , pp. 205. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. $80.00. Emily Bloom's The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 analyzes the work of four Anglo-Irish writers—W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett—who independently contributed to the British Broadcasting Corporation in the mid-twentieth century. The four authors central [End Page 156] to her study were but a few of the writers from Ireland who gravitated toward radio and specifically the BBC during the era of World War II. Bloom finds in their adaptations and original writings for radio a complex set of negotiations that transform our understanding of radio's impact on both literature and on literary modernism. Indeed, The Wireless Past is a highly intentional effort to improve on previous scholarship and reorient critical inquiry. Bloom's analysis proceeds from the recognition that scholarly approaches to radio broadcasting and modernism have remained a "fringe pursuit" by radio enthusiasts rather than a subfield of modernism studies, largely because questions about radio writers' identities and about the intertextuality between forms—literature and radio especially—have not been sufficiently engaged. The Wireless Past similarly seeks to correct a perceived overreliance on methods of analysis derived for use on printed literature, such as close reading, that do not apply well to sound broadcasting. Critical treatments of Irish writers' broadcasting contributions have also impeded understanding—specifically of the crosscultural and transnational implications of literary broadcasting—by focusing almost exclusively on the Irish contexts for developments in broadcasting. Bloom offers a means of getting beyond these critical shortcomings, modeling critical practices that duly examine how Anglo-Irish writers used radio broadcasting to engage and adapt literary forms and traditions, and transcend the boundaries of national culture. Bloom demonstrates how through their broadcasting projects they furthered a type of modernism she dubs "radio modernism" which had its own, distinctive "radiogenic" aesthetic that was defined by their simultaneous impulse toward revivalism and innovation. The writers central to The Wireless Past have not typically been studied as a group, owing to the differences in their aesthetics and careers. For Bloom, they serve as exemplars of radio modernism. They understood the instability of national identity through their own lived experiences: the "homelessness" and "displacement" they experienced in the decades after Irish independence and surrounding the World War II—combined with their shared interest in imagining transnational audiences for their work—made them, according to Bloom, uniquely qualified to perform modernist radio experiments at the BBC. As a foundation for The Wireless Past, the twin assumptions that these Anglo-Irish writers experienced the same displacement, a displacement that yielded the understanding of identity as being "essentially unstable" seems to partake in a form of essentialism that requires, at the very least, the social and historical contextualization that Bloom advocates and practices. She does not probe this starting point, but she does acknowledge how some readers may accuse The Wireless Past of reproducing hegemonic structures in reading Irish literature in the context of the British Broadcasting service. She also appropriately recognizes that access to [End Page 157] broadcasting opportunities at the BBC were not uniformly distributed among Irish writers: the privileged Anglo-Irish minority generally had greater access to BBC jobs than other Irish writers, and some of the Anglo-Irish played gatekeeping roles at times. The principal concern and main achievement of The Wireless Past is to show how these writers made radio a generative space at midcentury. Rather than succumb to the widespread anxiety among writers that radio would diminish or even extinguish the public's interest in literature (which Bloom explores thoroughly in the chapter "Elizabeth Bowen's Spectral Radio"), these writers tested the new media's capacity to engage and revise literary texts and forms. In this way their work demonstrates how electronic spaces were opening up to writers and enabling the possibility of new relationships with the literary past. Bloom succeeds in showing how their "radiogenic" aesthetics were never intended as...

Sounding Irish Radio at Midcentury

Sounding Irish Radio at Midcentury Ian Whittington The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968. Emily Bloom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 224. $80.00 (cloth). Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication. Damien Keane. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Pp. x + 195. $69.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). Reading through these two excellent new volumes situated at the intersection of radio studies and modern Irish literature, one feels presented with two very different instantiations of the radio listener. On the one hand, we have the dial-twirling shortwave enthusiast, stationed in (perhaps) Cork, and tuning in to transmissions Irish in affiliation but emanating from Dublin, Addis Ababa, New York City, Belfast, Geneva, London, and Berlin—transmissions that dazzle by their variety and that impart an awareness of their connectedness in dispersal. On the other hand, we have the idealized Third Programme listener of the midcentury BBC, at domestic ease in (perhaps, again) Belfast, attending closely and in the best tradition of appointment listening to familiar voices made new by the sense of their sudden, newfound proximity via the wireless. The former model is embodied by Damien Keane's Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication, the latter by Emily Bloom's The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968. If Keane's work rewrites rather dramatically the established geographical and formal dimensions of the Irish cultural field, Bloom's work pries that field open by slower but still sure degrees. Both make important contributions. What is remarkable, in comparing these two strikingly different texts, is how many parallels one finds at work in their logics. One senses that a new conceptual framework is cohering around literary radio studies: one that takes seriously the intermedial contexts of broadcasting and of literature, one that is attuned to the simultaneous and overlapping publics radio and literature created at local, regional, national, and [End Page 399] international scales, and one that understands radio to be neither an agent of hard determinism (subjecting its listeners to either the pummeling authoritarian tones of the dictator or the come-hither vocals of the crooner) nor of radical autonomy. Present, too, in both of these texts, is an archival consciousness that is at times reverent (as in Keane's acknowledgement of the work of historians, librarians, and archivists in remedying the longstanding informational vacuum surrounding Irish political culture at midcentury [5–6]) and at other times rousing (as in Bloom's rallying cry for greater access to extant radio archives that are all too often hidden away from public sight [21–23]). The differences that emerge between these works are not, however, superficial, even if at times they seem to represent different theoretical languages trying to address the same problems. Keane approaches the titular "problem of information"—which he describes as a simultaneous surfeit and deficit of information structured by global material inequalities—by treating all forms of textual production as part of the same contested field of relations. Thus the first chapter juxtaposes the broadcasts and League of Nations speeches of Taoiseach Éamon de Valera during the Ethiopian Crisis of 1935–36 with Walter Starkie's travelogue-cum-Italian-apologia The Waveless Plain (1938) as two versions of interwar Irish political self-positioning. In the former, de Valera—informed by a network of diplomats and civil servants—navigates multiple media in order to advocate for a protective withdrawal from an international order increasingly hostile to Ireland's interests. In the latter, Starkie uses aural media (his violin, the radio) as metonyms by which to conjure an organic fascist society, but neglects to address that society's structural mediation through government-mandated institutions and practices like the distribution of wireless sets. In each case, Keane's attention is on the often-obscured material and institutional contexts which subtend conventional debates about what counts as literary or political writing, and which in effect bind them beyond all disentanglement. Subsequent chapters deepen Keane's analysis of the mediated matrix of information that structured Irish cultural production around the war years. Chapter 2, "Dirty Work in New York," traces the...

John McGahern, Post-Revival Literature, and Irish Cultural Criticism

John McGahern, Post-Revival Literature, and Irish Cultural Criticism Stanley van der Ziel John McGahern’s attitude to many Irish writers from the first half of the twentieth century was often ambivalent. He instinctively disliked and distrusted the overt polemical stance adopted by many writers in the decades immediately following Independence, even if he could find in those same writers qualities of style or vision that he admired and, on occasion, even echoed in his own fiction. His relationship with the poet Patrick Kavanagh is a case in point. As early as 1959 he wrote to Michael McLaverty that, “Kavanagh is an irresponsible critic and a careless poet. It is a pity he doesn’t take more care with his poems because he is richly gifted.”1 On the one hand, McGahern deplored Kavanagh’s part in the brash literary culture that existed in Dublin in the 1940s and 1950s. He later immortalized his youthful experience, both of being subjected to what he described in an autobiographical essay from the 1990s as “the doubtful joy of Kavanagh’s company,” and of the general atmosphere of that imaginatively and intellectually stifling Dublin-bohemian milieu, by re-imagining it in his fiction.2 Such stories about rural drifters in the Hibernian metropolis as “My Love, My Umbrella” and “Bank Holiday” draw on the future novelist’s youthful experiences of literary coteries in Dublin during his twenties, as does the brilliant satire on midcentury Dublin literary culture that is The Pornographer (1979). Kavanagh appears as a character in both those short stories, and the portrait those fictions paint is not a flattering one. The unnamed poet in the Scotch House (the pub on Burgh Quay sometimes known as Flann O’Brien-Myles na Gopaleen’s “office”) in the earlier of the two stories, “My Love, My Umbrella,” from Nightlines (1970), draws clearly on Kavanagh and his quirks. His appearance and his reliance on baking soda as a remedy for heartburn are obviously based on the Monaghan poet. Moreover, the snippets of his conversation overheard by [End Page 123] the narrator and his lover are recognizably taken from Kavanagh’s poetry and occasional prose—his attention to “the blossoms of Kerr Pinks” as objects of aesthetic beauty references the early seminal poem “Spraying the Potatoes,” while the idea that “a man could only love what he knew well, and it was the quality of the love that mattered and not the accident” is loosely adapted from Kavanagh’s 1959 essay “From Monaghan to the Grand Canal” (or perhaps from one of his lectures on poetry).3 “Bank Holiday,” from the 1985 High Ground collection, not only shares its title with one of Kavanagh’s poems (as do two other stories from the same collection, “Gold Watch” and “A Ballad”); its plot also includes a confrontation between a middle-aged poet and a young civil servant which, as has been well documented, was based on a real meeting between McGahern and Kavanagh in a Dublin pub during the late 1950s.4 A number of aspects of the failed poet and one-time provincial journalist Maloney in The Pornographer also replicate recognizable traits and habits both of Kavanagh and of his contemporary Flann O’Brien. Maloney attends the funeral of the narrator’s aunt wearing a “wide-brimmed black hat [that] made him look more like an ageing dance-band personality than a mourner.”5 This ridiculous hat replicates the headgear considered to be “the badge of the literary man” in Dublin during the 1940s and 1950s, which was favored by both O’Brien and Kavanagh.6 Maloney’s fraught relationship with his readers draws on the same originals, as the different “acts of aggression” that Maloney perpetrates against the readers of his magazine column in the form of either “‘rocks’ or ‘jawbreakers’” or unvarnished insults—“he despised [his readers] and was fond of describing [them] as ‘the local pheasantry [sic], crap merchants and bull-shitters’” (P 26)—are reminiscent, respectively, of the belligerence of O’Brien’s “Cruiskeen Lawn” columns and of Kavanagh’s cantankerous occasional journalism in Kavanagh’s Weekly and elsewhere. On the other hand, McGahern harbored great affection and admiration for Kavanagh...

Ireland And The Problem Of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication by Damien Keane

Ireland And The Problem Of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication by Damien Keane

The Irish Contribution to the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: Nonimportation and the Reception of Jonathan Swift’s Irish Satires in Early America

The Irish Contribution to the Ideological Origins of the American RevolutionNonimportation and the Reception of Jonathan Swift’s Irish Satires in Early America Sean Moore (bio) When scholars study the literature and history of the eighteenth century, it is a commonplace to say that the American Revolution inspired similar Irish decolonizing events like the 1798 Rebellion of the United Irishmen or even the 1916 Easter Rising, the one hundredth anniversary of which we commemorated last year. A newly discovered document at Harvard’s Houghton Library, an original copy of a text discussed by T. H. Breen, however, reminds us that the pattern might have been the reverse (236). The 1767 Boston Nonimportation Agreement, a covenant signed by hundreds of Boston merchants to boycott British imports in the wake of the Townshend Acts—new taxes on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea—seems to have been inspired by Ireland’s similar idea in the 1720s. Led by satirist Jonathan Swift, this advocacy for an Irish boycott of British goods and the encouragement of domestic industry was targeted at the Declaratory Act of 1720, a measure that asserted the British Parliament’s right to levy taxes for Ireland without the Irish Parliament’s consent. This legislation, copied almost word-for-word when the British Parliament passed a similar Declaratory Act for the American colonies in 1766, was symptomatic of a greater centralization of the empire’s fiscal authority, generating much constitutional debate about the proper relationship between England and its external dominions (McIlwain 49–50, 50–51n2). Americans were inspired by this Irish debate because until the radical republican break with Britain in 1776, they were still attempting to make constitutional arguments within the tradition of anglophone political thought about their proper level of sovereignty vis-à-vis Britain. What both the [End Page 333] Anglo-Irish Swift and the Anglo-American Patriots were objecting to was the British fiscal-military state’s endless appetite for revenue, felt particularly keenly by the Americans in the wake of the Seven Years’ War (Brewer xvii). While the debt of the early Americans to the Irish political thought of the previous generations and centuries was well documented in the 1920s by Charles Howard McIlwain and more recently by Carla Mulford and Leo Lemay, little work has been done on literature’s place in articulating this thought. Further, though the Patriot and Loyalist receptions of Swift’s more English writings have been documented by many critics, much less work has been done on the reading and influence of Swift’s Irish satires in early America. This essay establishes that Swift’s advocacy for an Irish boycott, articulated in such literary works as A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), the Drapier’s Letters (1724), and A Modest Proposal (1729), influenced British Americans to propose similar political and economic actions to protest what they saw as unconstitutional London measures. It contends that the Anglo-Irish, a colonial elite struggling to protect its assets from imperial confiscation, were a political model for the Anglo-Americans, who similarly found themselves underrepresented in legislative deliberation affecting their economy. What both groups were arguing for in asserting control over their fiscal affairs was a measure of sovereignty, in relation to the British Parliament, over the proceeds of colonialism. This essay argues that the prism of book history, and its focus on reader reception, promises to make visible the relationship of Anglo-American to Anglo-Irish political thinking. It does so by drawing on the work of Hugh Amory, David Hall, and James Raven on the transatlantic book trade—the vehicle for the dissemination of such ideas. There is evidence, I explain, particularly from the America’s Historical Newspapers database and from the catalogues and borrowing records of the Salem Social Library and Redwood Library of Newport, that American readers took Swift’s Irish writings to hand during the nonimportation era. The broader implications of this argument are that Irish writing’s role in the ideological origins of the Revolution not only is manifest in the nonimportation agreements but also is indicative of the fact that American Patriots, like the Anglo-Irish, were not exceptional in their confrontation with...

Changing Places: Locations of Contemporary Irish Poetry

Changing Places:Locations of Contemporary Irish Poetry Anthony Bradley The sense of place in Irish poetry used to be one of its pleasures and an identifying mark of what was Irish about Irish poetry. That sense of place, though, almost always used to refer to rural landscapes and settings, from Yeats's Sligo, to Kavanagh's Monaghan, Montague's Tyrone, and Heaney's County Derry—all of which in their different ways have fed into the discourse of the nation, and what Benedict Anderson, in his classic study of nationalism, would call the "imagined community" of Ireland.1 Indeed, the names of places have long played an important role in combining Irish landscape, language, history, and mythology, and established a continuity between literature in Irish and English. The Irish-language genre of dinnshenchas (the lore associated with places) was assimilated to modern Anglophone poetry most notably in Yeats, Kavanagh, Montague, and Heaney, and became the central trope of Friel's controversial play, Translations (1980).2 Whether in literature or painting, the depiction of place is an essential aspect of imagining the nation; landscape is, as the post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha puts it, "the inscape of national identity," and so it has been in Ireland.3 But something has happened—at first gradually and then, it seems, all at once—to this connection between place and ideas of the nation. If the lyric is the sundial of history, as Theodor Adorno put it in "On Lyric Poetry and Society," the contemporary Irish lyric registers the time of the postnational, the time of late capitalism in its phase of globalization and consumerism, and consequently the place of Ireland begins to look like everywhere else, a disheveled urban landscape dominated by the corporate logos of consumerism and international finance.4 No doubt there are poets writing in Ireland now in both English and Irish whose work does not quite fit that matrix. No doubt, too, the [End Page 89] discussion that follows privileges poetry in the North, and a conservative, academic poetic. But it does seem that the center of gravity in contemporary Irish poetry has shifted, and its dominant character has indeed changed from what it was a generation ago. Even the work of Nuala Ní Dhomnaill, a poet writing in Irish and accessing Gaelic myth and folklore in what seems like a timeless landscape, is most famously translated by Paul Muldoon into the postmodernist mode, which, according to Frederic Jameson, is precisely the cultural expression of late capitalism.5 One can locate the beginnings of the rupture between literature and the nation­state in the aftermath of World War II, and the shock given to the idea of European culture and civilization by the atrocities of totalitarianism. Adorno pondered whether it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, and Eric Auerbach—one of European culture's greatest admirers, and the author of the monumental study of realism, Mimesis (2003)—foresaw the emergence of a literature in the world, as opposed to a continuing Eurocentric idea of world literature.6 Auerbach wrote in "The Philology of World Literature" that "Our philological [cultural] home is the Earth; it can no longer be the nation. … The most precious and necessary thing that philologists [critics] inherit may be their national language and culture. But it is only in losing—or overcoming—this inheritance that it can have this effect."7 Even Anderson recently conceded the shortcomings of his methodology in Imagined Communities: "using the nation and nation states as the basic units of analysis fatally ignored the obvious fact that in reality these units were tied together and crosscut by global intellectual currents … as well as vast religious networks and economic and technological forces."8 In Ireland, a new and different subjectivity, shaped by a different social experience than that of writers for whom the postcolonial is the defining template, conceives of place and setting in quite different ways. Geopolitical change in the form of globalism has surely played a role in shaping the distrust by contemporary Irish writers of the previously accredited discourse of the nation and postcoloniality. From about 1990 on, moreover, a number of scholars and critics [End Page 90] associated...

Relief Work and Refugees: Susanne Rouviere Day (1876–1964) on war as women's business

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the war writing of Susanne Rouviere Day, Irish writer, Poor Law Guardian and spokeswoman for the non-militant Munster Women's Franchise League (MWFL), who was a volunteer with the Religious Society of Friends War Victims' Relief Committee from mid-1915 to early 1917. It relates reports of speeches made by Day, in December 1914 and January 1915, to Irish and international feminist-pacifist discourse, the concerns of the Union of Democratic control, and developments within the MWFL. It suggests that Day's 1918 book, Round About Bar-le-Duc, a recently rediscovered manuscript, ‘St Martin’s Cloak’, and a 1916 article in The Englishwoman provide different perspectives on Quaker relief work in France from those in memoirs by writers such as A. Ruth Fry and Owen Stephens, and that they are valuable resources in the process of recovering refugee experiences in the aftermath of the battles of the Marne and Verdun.