Irish Writers Research Articles

Irish cosmopolitanism: location and dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett

Looking at the writing of three Irish expatriates who lived in Trieste, London, and Paris, Nels Pearson challenges conventional critical trends that view their work as either affirming Irish anticolonial sentiment or embracing international identity. In reality, he argues, these writers work constantly back and forth between a sense of national belonging that remains incomplete and ideas of human universality tied to their new global environments. For these and many other Irish writers, national and international concerns do not conflict, but overlap--and the interplay between them motivates Irish modernism. Joyce's Ulysses strives to articulate the interdependence of an Irish identity and a universal perspective. Bowen's exiled, unrooted characters were never firmly rooted in the first place. And in Beckett, the unsettled origin is felt most keenly when it is abandoned for exile. These writers demonstrate the displacement felt by many Irish citizens in an ever-changing Ireland unsteadied by long and turbulent decolonization. Ultimately, their work displays a twofold struggle to pinpoint national identity while adapting to a fluid cosmopolitan world.

Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature by Julieann Veronica Ulin (review)

Reviewed by: Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature by Julieann Veronica Ulin Martin L. Warren Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature, by Julieann Veronica Ulin, pp. 216. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. $95. Jennifer Veronica Ulin’s study opens with the 1890 obituary of the landlord and politician Arthur McMurrough-Kavanagh (misidentified in the original obituary as Alexander), whose misfortune was to be born without arms and legs. Harold Frederic, the obituary’s author, identifies McMurrough-Kavanagh’s bodily misfortune as emblematic of a curse laid on the MacMurroughs for sowing the seeds of the English colonization of Ireland when the twelfth-century Diarmuid Mac Murrough invited English forces to aid him in regaining his position as ruler of Leinster. Diarmuid Mac Murrough’s fateful bringing of the English to Ireland took place between 1152–72, and in Ireland’s collective memory, those twenty years came to be characterized as the source for the modern English presence. This narrative is the origin story, the foundational colonial story, that lies at the center of Ulin’s Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature. Ulin’s study examines how writers as varied as Lady Gregory, James Joyce, Sean O’Faolain, Brendan Behan, and Jamie O’Neill employ the origin story “in order to disrupt the [End Page 154] causal relationship between the series of events in 12th-century Ireland and its modern condition, to portray modern Ireland’s entrapment within medieval narrative cycles believed to prefigure the present, or to imagine what escape might be possible from the modern legacy of the medieval period.” Ulin posits that by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers began to question the inherited narrative regarding Ireland’s misfortunes: “In inviting the medieval into the modern texts, writers over the last century and a half disrupted rather than simply preserved or revered the historical narrative, thereby dismantling and reimaging the national story.” The impetus for this questioning, according to Ulin, begins in the late nineteenth century with newly translated sources that allowed for challenges to the most influential account events seven centuries earlier, Giraldus Cambrensis’s History of the Conquest of Ireland. Ulin asserts that her book provides the first full account of how the reimagining of events disrupts “the received causal narrative of Irish history, to reframe a range of present conflicts in light of that history and to invite alternative conceptions of the modern nation.” Cambrensis’s account had established a causal relationship between the abduction of Dervorgilla and the Norman invasion. In the first chapter, “Modern Disruptions,” Ulin meticulously outlines how the nineteenth-century translation of such histories as The Annals of Clonmacnoise, The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, The Annals of Loch Cé, and The Annals of Ulster led to scholarly debate over the significance of Dervorgilla’s abduction in precipitating the Anglo-Norman invasion. Having laid the foundation, Ulin goes on to demonstrate how this scholarly debate has acted as a catalyst, down to the present day, for Irish writers to examine the origin story in their own texts. For example, in chapter one she analyzes how two early novelists understood the causal narrative of Irish history in differing ways. Charles Gibson’s 1857 novel, Dearforgil: The Princess of Brefney, A Historical Romance of 1152–1172, strongly reinforces the traditional understanding of the origin story by linking Dervorgilla’s abduction to Henry II’s appearance in Ireland in 1172, while Anna Scanlan’s 1895 novel, Dervorgilla, or the Downfall of Ireland, challenges the “gender blame game” of the origin story that portrays Dervorgilla as an Eve who brings about the fall of Ireland. Using these and other texts, Ulin demonstrates the disruptive force of such literary re-imaginings. The next chapter, “Medieval Cycles,” establishes with great skill how Yeats and Lady Gregory, among other Irish writers, employed the medieval origin story to reframe a range of conflicts present in their own times. Ulin analyzes Yeats’s 1919 play, The Dreaming of the Bones, and Lady Gregory’s 1907 play, Dervorgilla, each of which foreground the significance of Irish medieval history to the narrative construction of its modern colonial conflict. Gregory’s play centers “on the aesthetic construction of this history, focusing not...

Contrary Regionalisms and Noisy Correspondences: The BBC in Northern Ireland circa 1949

This essay examines the limits and possibilities of the mid-century broadcasting field in Northern Ireland, by attending to the dynamic interplay at the BBC's Belfast station of three competing regional formations: the political regionalism of the Northern Irish state; the cultural regionalism of a coterie of Northern Irish writers and intellectuals; and the broadcasting regionalism instituted as part of the BBC's policy of national programming. These contrary regionalisms each had different and, at times, competing criteria for what constituted particular and typical details of life in the North, and broadcasters had to negotiate the inexact correspondences among them with ears tuned to the political relations triangulated by Belfast, Dublin, and London. Beginning with a consideration of how broadcasters in Northern Ireland produced forms of mediated actuality both in and beyond the studio, the essay concludes with Sam Hanna Bell's This is Northern Ireland (1949), a feature that explores the tension of overspill and containment effected less by the partition of Ireland than by the contradictions inherent to the broadcasting field.

“You Ought to Take Up Writing”: Story, Place, and Gender in the Fiction of Mary Lavin

To be considered an Irish writer is to invite any number of expectations of identity: rural or urban, nationalist or (post-) colonialist, a Tomas O’Crohan or a Samuel Beckett. While the complexity of these expectations only adds to the vitality and richness of Irish literature, it can also add an unspoken demand on the author’s work: either to participate in the observed tradition or to stand out through a distinction of style. Critics have long attempted to codify the essence of Irish literature with varying degrees of success, and the “Irishness” of the author is ultimately used as a kind of cultural capital toward the creation of an aesthetically defined Ireland, a trend initiated by Yeats and the other Irish Renaissance cultural nationalists. As many scholars have noted, though, this particular Ireland is a feminized concept with Cathleen ni Houlihan as the most recognizable avatar. The aesthetic re-imagining of the country as a coherent and identifiable whole, furthermore, like the authors’ characteristics that shape it, reveals a desire for commodified art and artists through which “Irishness” is negotiated. Within this context, it is no surprise that Mary Lavin’s fiction plays such a complicated and understated role. In a field dominated by male authors and capitalist demands, Lavin’s writing engages the gendered expectations underlying this translation of art into capital. One of her earliest stories, “A Story with a Pattern,” a response to Lord Dunsany’s suggestion that her fiction show more of a “well-defined plot,” presents a female author faced with the demand of a reader for stories that have discernable plots and tidy endings. The critic’s clear equation of a sense of plot with masculine writing places the narrator in the uncomfortable position of being unable to justify her participation in the literary world

Romanian Joyce: From Hostility to Hospitality, by Arleen Ionescu

Reviewed by: Romanian Joyce: From Hostility to Hospitality, by Arleen Ionescu Ágota Márton (bio) ROMANIAN JOYCE: FROM HOSTILITY TO HOSPITALITY, by Arleen Ionescu. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014. 267 pp. $69.95. In the past decade, there has been a significant upsurge in Joyce's reception histories from particular national critical responses (such as Robert K. Weninger's The German Joyce or Patricia Novillo-Corvalán's Borges and Joyce: An Infinite Conversation1) to comprehensive critical surveys of Joyce's heritage in Europe and beyond (including the two volumes of Joyce's reception in Europe and TransLatin Joyce: Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature2). Arleen Ionescu's Romanian Joyce comes into this field as the first book-length study of Joyce's literary heritage in Romania. It is a special treat for Joyceans interested in a lesser-known angle of Joyce's legacy: "the long enduring history of Romanian hos(ti)pitality towards the Irish writer" (17). The book cover presents a sketch of Joyce's portrait in half black and half white by Alicia Milesi-Ionescu to represent the ambivalent responses to Joyce in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Romania. Ionescu argues that Joyce's reception in Romania can be best understood through Jacques Derrida's notion of "hostipitality," which incorporates both a hostility and a hospitality towards the guest: in this case, Joyce's texts.3 She explores this ambivalence of "hos(ti)pitality" to discuss questions of critical reception, translation history, and Joycean influence. Romania and the Romanian language become the Irish writer's hosts and guests (just as Joyce is both a host and a guest), a reciprocity which Ionescu carefully examines in the four chapters of her book. She positions Joyce's texts in a complex web of critical and creative rewritings, providing a closely argued and compelling account of "Romanian Joyce." By bringing key Romanian figures (Ion Biberi, Mircea Eliade, Mircea Cărtărescu, and Adrian Oțoiu, among others) to the attention of Anglophone readers, Ionescu discusses Romanian literary history and Joyce's reception in the context of European modernisms and postmodernisms. In the first chapter, she presents a clear and accurate picture of Romanian cultural and political realities from the early twentieth century to the post-communist age. Ionescu draws on and redefines Gabriela Omăt's classification of modernism found in Omăt's recent anthology Modernismul literar românesc în date (1880-2000) şi texte (1880-1949) (Romanian Literary Modernism in Dates [1880-2000] and Texts [1880-1949]) and Eugen Lovinescu's 1937 Istoria literaturii române contemporane (History of Contemporary Romanian Literature),4 offering an alternative critical framework for the study of Romanian modernism. The three phases of Romanian modernism according to [End Page 726] Ionescu's timeline were influenced by "French symbolism between 1880 and early 1900s, then [Marcel] Proust and [André] Gide, and to a minor extent the Anglo-Modernism of Joyce and [Virginia] Woolf" (25). Ionescu also explains that Romanian critics' opinions about Joyce were largely determined by the French literary scene, both linguistically and critically. Moving on to post-war Romania, Ionescu outlines communist political hostilities, propagandistic literature, and cultural isolation—essential in understanding Romania's hostipitality towards Joyce—and ending the chapter with the 1980s and the "death of communism in Romania" (75). The second chapter focuses on the changing critical attitudes towards Joyce's work, illustrating Ionescu's astute observation that, in the 1920s, Joyce was first met with hostility in a "culturally prosperous and politically stable environment," and "after the Second World War," he was greeted in "a thoroughly hostile political context" (17). Due to Romania's Francophilia explained in the previous chapter, Joyce was mostly read in French translation, as well as interpreted in relation to French novelists and in the light of French criticism. Thus the "first gesture of welcoming Joyce" (77) was the translation of Valery Larbaud's review of Ulysses in three literary journals and several immediate responses to Larbaud's essay. Ionescu contends that critics valued Ulysses mostly for its literary techniques (particularly the interior monologue) and rejected it by rehearsing western pronouncements about Ulysses's obscenity and incomprehensibility.5 She goes on...

Writing Beyond Iran: Reinvention and the Exilic Iranian Writer

Despite the losses that have come with leaving behind their homeland, their society, and their reading audiences, Iranian writers in exile have also creatively overcome many challenges and, in the process, have reinvented themselves. They are no longer simply Iranian writers, or Iranian writers in exile, but have become “world writers.”

Writing Beyond Iran: Reinvention and the Exilic Iranian Writer

Despite the losses that have come with leaving behind their homeland, their society, and their reading audiences, Iranian writers in exile have also creatively overcome many challenges and, in the process, have reinvented themselves. They are no longer simply Iranian writers, or Iranian writers in exile, but have become “world writers.”

At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland by Sarah Cole, and: A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing by Adam Parkes

At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland by Sarah Cole, and: A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing by Adam Parkes

The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle ed. by John Walker (review)

Reviewed by: The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle ed. by John Walker Arnd Bohm John Walker, ed., The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle. London: Legenda, for Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2013. xii + 204 pp. A festschrift honors someone or some event and also recognizes the celebrants, the members of a select community. The person being celebrated here is Nicholas Boyle, immediately familiar for his magisterial Goethe biography, of which two volumes have appeared so far. He is less well known for his concerns about the current state of the world of learning—and of the world—as signaled by his Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney (1998) and by his 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis (2010). The wide range of Boyle’s interests does not exceed the capable reach of the fifteen contributors to this volume, although the whole does demand sturdy readers, ranging as it does across German literature from the Baroque to Thomas Mann but also including Shakespeare, Les Murray, and Seamus Heaney. More than half of the contributions deal directly or tangentially with Goethe. John A. McCarthy’s “Cognitive Mapping: Adam, Venus, and Faust” is a complex discussion that brings together the most recent neuroscience with paintings by Michelangelo and Giorgione to shed light on Faust. The short essay by T. J. Reed, “Goethe as Secular Icon,” is part of a long-standing disagreement with Boyle’s interpretation of Goethe the poet. It is a supplement to the critical review of the biography Reed published in 2001; he proposes that Goethe’s stance was marked by “delighted assent” (47) and not just by absences. Charlotte Lee’s contribution is “Mignon and the Idea of the Secret.” Regina Sachers shows unexpected parallels between Goethe’s “Urworte. Orphisch” and Mörike’s “Besuch in Urach.” Ritchie Robertson touches on, among other things, Egmont and Die natürliche Tochter in assessing Goethe and Machiavelli. Martin Swales compares Iphigenie auf Tauris and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in “The Human Epiphany.” Christoph Jamme in “Enlightened Mythology: Thomas Mann and Myth” and John Walker in “Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and the Site of Literature” deal with a question that remains alive for modern literature: namely, what the role of myth can or should be. Walker connects this with Boyle’s concern for “the theological and cultural meaning of the secularization of the Christian tradition” (109). The triangulation of the relationship between theology, literature, and mythology continues to be a pressing issue. What is the connection between [End Page 318] faith and knowledge? That the question is not of recent origin is shown by Helen Watanabe O’Kelly in her all-too-brief “Ways of Knowing: Blaise Pascal, Angelus Silesius and Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg.” The inclusion of two poets who might be unfamiliar to Germanisten can only be a benefit. Ian Cooper focuses on one poem by Les Murray, Australia’s great poet. He elucidates him via Roland Barthes and Caravaggio, placing him at the center of European tradition. Seamus Heaney is revealed to have been anything but a marginal Irish writer in Eamon Duffy’s “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism.” Duffy reads Heaney’s career and works, tracing the move from minority status in Northern Ireland to the struggle to reconcile the tensions between poetry and faith in troubled times. Boyle’s convictions as a citizen of his country as well as of the republic of letters are foremost in H. B. Nisbet’s “‘Just One Damned Thing after Another?’ Some Reflections on the Philosophy of History,” in Mark Ogden’s “Christian Humanism and Higher Education,” and in Paul Connerton’s “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Nisbet’s reflections on the rise of history are thoughtful, as always. Mark Ogden grapples with the thorny issue of whether universities today can resist commercialization and can sustain ethics. It remains for Connerton to draw attention to the importance of forgetting in our modern consciousness as he surveys types of nonremembering. His few telling paragraphs on how the Germans managed...

James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future by Liam Lanigan

Reviewed by: James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future by Liam Lanigan Michael Rubenstein (bio) JAMES JOYCE, URBAN PLANNING, AND IRISH MODERNISM: DUBLINS OF THE FUTURE Liam Lanigan. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 243ix + pp. $90.00 cloth, $85.00 paper $69.99 eBook. There are a lot of references to the city in the writings of James Joyce. Liam Lanigan’s James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future goes deeper into the archive of Irish revivalist fiction and urban and town-planning than most literary studies of its kind, and by doing so it makes an original contribution to an otherwise well-established tradition: reading James Joyce’s modernism as inspired by the eccentric modernity of the city he always wrote about, Dublin. In this tradition of Joyce criticism, Dublin tends to become exemplary of urban modernity by way of its colonial exceptionality, and Joyce appears to be exceptional among his Irish contemporaries by way of his focus on urban Ireland as opposed to rural Ireland. Lanigan goes along with Dublin’s eccentric status as—to borrow a term from Joseph Valente—a “metro-colonial” city,1 but he argues against setting Joyce’s work too far apart from other Irish writing in the modernist period (23). Lanigan observes that, “rather than regarding Joyce as uniquely positioned to invent an Irish urban literary sensibility,” we should instead acknowledge that “Irish writing at this time [was] more generally engaged with the problem of the city” (39). Lanigan begins polemically: Joyce is not as exceptional as the “machinery of Joyce scholarship” would, by force of its own gargantuan momentum, seem to demonstrate (1). The paradox of this claim, made as it is in a book with “Joyce” in the title, and containing four of eight chapters dedicated to Joyce’s writing, is that in the end it contributes to the machinery of Joyce scholarship. And though Lanigan does reveal a mostly unnoticed continuity between Joyce’s writing about Dublin and Revivalist writers’ writing about Dublin, he nevertheless maintains Joyce’s exceptionality as the only Irish writer of the period successfully to imagine “what the Irish city might become,” as opposed to remaining mired in “the limitations of the present” (101). But the value of Lanigan’s book lies less with its general claim than with the archive it assembles and the readings it offers. Chapters 2 and 3 offer the reader a fascinating assortment of other less-well-known texts about Dublin, many of which may have been influences on Joyce’s characterization of the city as “a center of paralysis” (1).2 His [End Page 157] second chapter reads George Moore’s 1886 novel A Drama in Muslin as a scorching indictment of Dublin’s failures as a city, attributing them to a generalized “failure of the imagination” (52).3 According to Lanigan, however, Moore’s novel ends at a brutal impasse: “City and people decay together, and that is all” (63). Several of Moore’s stories are treated in chapter 3, alongside James Stephens’s 1912 The Charwoman’s Daughter and Seumas O’Sullivan’s 1917 Mud and Purple: Pages from the Diary of a Dublin Man.4 Lanigan’s readings are nuanced and detailed; the texts he presents are all revelations in themselves, as well as being tremendously useful to Joyce scholars who might otherwise remain unfamiliar with some of them. But the verdict Lanigan delivers on them is, nevertheless, quite damning: they all falter “at the moment of imaginative necessity” (94). Enter Joyce. In chapter 4, Lanigan shows how Dubliners continues in this tradition of Irish writing about Dublin: decrying the paralysis and lack of imagination there, but failing—at least until the final story, “The Dead”—to imagine its way out of the impasse.5 For Lanigan, it is not until we meet Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that we find a protagonist who “is not alienated from the workings of the city” and who therefore presages Joyce’s attempt to “render the reality of city life” a few years later in Ulysses (152). For Lanigan, it is the “Wandering Rocks” episode...

Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity ed. by Kamran Scot Aghaie and Afshin Marashi (review)

Reviewed by: Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity ed. by Kamran Scot Aghaie and Afshin Marashi Farhang Rajaee Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity. Kamran Scot Aghaie and Afshin Marashi, eds. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. Pp. iv + 357. $55.00 (cloth). This is an important anthology of more than a dozen takes on the socio-cultural life of Iran by a combination of the new generation of Iranian and non-Iranian scholars focusing on the country’s politics and history. The title suggests that the focus is on “Iranian Nationalism,” but I feel the book is broader, some chapters focusing on specific issues while others addressing more general concerns. They cover the historiography of Iranian nationalism, many aspects of Iranian cultural history, the place of religion in the Iranian public sphere, the influence of Islam on Iranian identity, as well as some other contemporary dilemmas. Fifteen articles, organized into three sections, shape the content of the book. The four essays in part 1 explore the historiography of Iranian nationalism through a rethinking of the existing [End Page 219] scholarship on the subject. While the section is important and useful, it is somewhat detached from the stated focus of the book on Iranian nationalism. The other two parts study real issues that have either shaped or influenced nationalism, under the broad rubrics of ethnicity, geography, and religion. Part 2 focuses on Iranian self-definition. Chapters by Kia and Amin focus on two important intellectuals who have left their mark on Iranian thinking on the issue, namely Azar and Mas’udi respectively. The former is a poet responsible for an eighteenth-century cultural history of the Persianate world, constituting a commemorative compendium of more than eight hundred poets of the time. Azar has focused on issues beyond the individual writers and is known for his demonstrative ethnographic research on the region. The latter’s work also includes accounts of women poets, and deals with gender issues and the multifaceted nature of nationalism. Chapter 8 focuses on Mas’udi, a journalist known for his American travelogue, which reveals the account of an Iranian observer admiring the American way of life, economy, politics, and culture and comparing it to “the chaotic condition of Iran” (165). Has he shaped a form of defensive, or even self-resenting, nationalism among Iranians, considering also the far-reaching popularity of the newspaper Ettela’at, on which he served as founding editor? I think he has. As to the other two chapters in this part of the book, even though well researched, the chapter on the failed Arab movement in Khuzistan did not help me understand Iranian nationalism. The same goes for the well-documented chapter on the state of U.S.-Iranian relations before any formal diplomatic relationship was established in the late nineteenth century. With seven chapters, part 3 comes very close to treating the claimed objective of the book by offering a sophisticated portrait of the volatility of Iranian nationalism. In fact, I was delighted by the way the chapters complemented each other and sustained a dialogue with one another. In chapter 9, Aghaie’s essay on Islamic-Iranian nationalism could have been turned into an independent monograph, treating the theory of religious nationalism before focusing on Iran as a case study. Religious nationalism shows no animosity towards the idea of exercising loyalty to, and/or solidarity with, the state, but it rejects the idea of the nation as the foundation for such feelings of belonging. Nonetheless, the author shows that, while religious nationalism rejects certain forms of the paradigm (e.g. liberal, Marxist, etc.), it still upholds nationalist values—and sometimes very strongly—“without calling it nationalism” (199). Vejdani’s article (chapter 10) follows the same theme, but looks at Iranian historiography between the two world wars and shows how, “contrary to prevailing wisdom,” at the time religion was seen as part of the national identity, one “not articulated against Islam, but within it” (212). In chapter 11, Atabaki takes the discussion to a complicated interplay of ethnic groups and nationalism, and focuses on an attempt to construct a particular identity. He zeroes in on the work of an Iranian writer from Azerbaijan province, who...

Study The Process Of Nostalgia In Simin Behbahani's Poem

Simin behbahani is the contemporary Iranian writer and composer lyric. She is well-known to mima's lyric, due to compose the persian lyric at unique rhymes. Simin behbahani is one of the most impressive and innovative poets in the field of contemporary lyric. She began to poetry since aduitood with composing lyrics and classic and romantic quarapoems, and mostly they were containing lovely contents and female true faith feelings and philan thropic feelings. This essay is a research about nostalgia (grief and being away) in the Simin Behbahani's poem. This subject was considered as one of unconscious behaviors in the pome of Simin Behbahani. After finding the origins and defning this term view to cultures and with help of psychologiec views, then it is refered to reason that made the grief and being away and then the relationship of nostalgia and rememberance was considered. The issue of nostalgia concerning to being away from sweetheart was considered in the part of personal remembrance and the matter of poem lonelinos was considered in the section of collective remembrance with mentioning poetry instances.

Table of Contents, Masthead, and Editor's Note

WorldLiteratureToday Essays 10 Olivier Schrauwen and the Physiognomy of Style by Bill Kartalopoulos 20 The Swan Song of a Departing People by Galsan Tschinag 26 Haitian Literature as a Model for World Literature by Michael W. Merriam 30 The Politics of Crime South Africa’s New Socially Conscious Genre by J. L. Powers Fiction 12 Bacon’s Chicken by George Zebrowski Crime & Mystery 16 A Mind for Murder The Passing of P. D. James by J. Madison Davis Poetry 17 What Would You Call It? by Linda Hogan 19 Three Poems by Lan Lan 29 Two Poems by Susan Rich Q&A 22 Haitian Is My Language” A Conversation with Frankétienne by Michael W. Merriam cover feature 34 Writing Beyond Iran Four Voices in Exile Featuring Mana Neyestani – Interview Mohsen Emadi – Poetry Omid Fallahazad – Fiction Moniro Ravanipour – Interview Guest-edited by Persis Karim about the cover This untitled image is part of a series entitled “Listen” by Iranian photojournalist and documentary photographer Newsha Tavakolian. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and exhibits . She is the current laureate of the Carmignac Gestion Photojournalism Award. Learn more at newshatavakolian.com. Contents In Every Issue | 03 Editor’s Note | 05 Notebook | 53 Editor’s Pick | 54 World Literature in Review | 80 Outpost MARCH – APRIL 2015 17 30 48 “ flickr photos : ( top ) jen rickard blair ( bottom ) vanessa rudloff / shevaun williams photography worldliteraturetoday.org Web Exclusive Join the WLT community Join us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, GoodReads, and Flickr to share ideas, view photos, and read book reviews. Facebook facebook.com/ worldlittoday Twitter @worldlittoday Pinterest @worldlit GoodReads goodreads.com/ worldlittoday Visit worldliteraturetoday.org for exclusive content you won’t want to miss, including web exclusives, photo galleries, blog posts, and much more. Bilingual audio poems by Mohsen Emadi, plus his interview with Persis Karim @OnlineCrsLady THANKS again for sharing so much great stuff, perfect for my classes. @worldlittoday is best social I know at OU! @wwborders We love these videos of live Ethiopian poetry performances in Addis Ababa via @worldlittoday #Ethiopia @unpoetaloco Love @worldlittoday’s new look. Love even more being part of the first issue with the new design. @tweedsmag Love works in translation as much as we do? @worldlittoday has a list of the best 75 from 2014! #LUNCHLIT @PaulMMCooper Thanks to @wwborders, @worldlittoday and @asymptotejrnl for bringing brilliant world #literature updates to my feed in 2014! @riffle You can’t go wrong with these picks from @worldlittoday:“2014 Holiday Gift Guide: A Book for Every Bibliophile” @samarov Happy to have contributed a bit of art & writing about @Nelson_Algren for January’s @worldlittoday @bethbachmann Rd & you might not look at Twitter’s bird the same way again: @worldlittoday ”Protest, Poetry, & Twitter’s White Bird” @commapress Great interview with Jonathan Wright, translator of Hassan Blasim, to start the new year! Tweets Online Extras Look for these icons throughout the issue for information about exclusive content found online at worldliteraturetoday.org. web exclusive photo gallery audio video Web Exclusive Find us on Flickr flickr.com/wltonline An excerpt from Fernando Morais’s The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, forthcoming from Verso Books A new translation of Forough Farrokhzad’s poem“Another Birth,” plus a bilingual recording “Transmutations of/by Language,”an essay by Iranian writer Raha Namy Web Exclusive Web Exclusive ‫دپت‬ ‫و‬ ‫تعاس‬ ‫یمن‬‫دپت‬. ‫یاش‬‫د‬ ‫نیمه‬ ‫سایق‬ ‫هداس‬ ‫گیم‬‫تف‬ ‫ارچ‬ ‫بود‬‫هرا‬ ‫هب‬ ‫تعاس‬ ‫هاگن‬ ‫یدرک‬. Have a comment, critique, or inspiration you’d like to share? Let us hear from you via the feedback link on the WLT website, Tweet us @worldlittoday, or email the editor in chief at dsimon@ou.edu. WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 3 editor’s note IN A RECENT OP-ED for Mother Jones, Ted Genoways laments the declining cultural influence of university -sponsored literary magazines, many of which have been faced with dwindling readerships—and forced budget cuts—since the recession (“The Death of Fiction?” Jan. 2010). Tracing the rise and fall of lit mags during the postwar era, Genoways lays part of the blame on universities for churning out writers in MFA mills but failing to cultivate a concomitant culture of reading. Most of his spleen, however, is directed at American writers themselves, who “seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues,” he contends, “as if giving two shits about the world has gotten...

Old Irish <em>cuire</em>, its congeners, and the ending of the 2nd sg. middle imperative

The 2nd sg. imperative of fo-ceird, -cuirethar ‘puts, throws’ has two forms in Old Irish: the expected cuirthe and an apparently irregular form cuire. The form cuire has attracted very little attention, and (as we shall see) its traditional explanation does not stand up to scrutiny. From manuscripts datable to the Old Irish period we find variation between the expected cuirthe and irregular cuire: thus while at Ml. 56c5 iecta (sic) is glossed cuirthe, in the glosses on Bede tolle is glossed cuire huait at BCr 32c11 as well as in the parallel BV(i) 4b1.70. The agreement of these two manuscripts indicates that the form cuire stood in the archetype of the Bede glosses, which may have been roughly contemporaneous with Ml. The form cuire is common in later manuscripts, for example at LU 4784 (cure) and 10821 (quoted below), and persists through typically Middle Irish writings, for example at SR 1561 (cuiri, Breatnach 1994, 298).

Lines of vision: Irish writers on art

Lines of vision: Irish writers on art

Roddy Doyle’s the Commitments: A New Musical by Roddy Doyle, and: Teenage Kicks: A Punk Musical by Colin Bateman (review)

Reviewed by: Roddy Doyle’s the Commitments: A New Musicalby Roddy Doyle, and: Teenage Kicks: A Punk Musicalby Colin Bateman Mary Jo Lodge RODDY DOYLE’S THE COMMITMENTS: A NEW MUSICAL. Book by Roddy Doyle. Directed by Jamie Lloyd. Choreographed by Ann Lee. Palace Theatre, London. 3November 2013. TEENAGE KICKS: A PUNK MUSICAL. Written by Colin Bateman. Directed by Des Kennedy. Choreographed by Jennifer Rooney. Co-produced by the Millennium Forum and the Nerve Centre. Millennium Forum, Derry, Northern Ireland. 6November 2013. In the autumn of 2013, two new stage musicals that explored the intersections of Irish identity in the 1980s with popular music, The Commitmentsand Teenage Kicks, premiered in the UK. Both experimented with the ways in which popular music forms rarely seen on the musical theatre stage—soul and punk—can be modified for dramatic performance. While the adaptation of popular music for the stage is as old as the art form of musical theatre, it is sometimes a tricky business, particularly when the adapted, nondramatic music is used to advance the plot, as it was in one of these new shows. The much higher profile of the two shows was the stage musical version of The Commitments, based on the popular 1987 novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle, who also co-wrote the screenplay for the successful 1991 film of the same name and serves as book writer for the stage musical. The Commitmentsmusical, directed by Jamie Lloyd, opened on the West End in London on 8 October 2013 and featured the same catalog of soul music made famous in the film. I attended the production on Sunday, 3 November, and while there were no fewer than four understudies appearing that night, including Thomas Snowdon in the role of Jimmy (normally performed by Denis Grindel) and Ian McIntosh, who played the demanding role of Deco every Sunday evening (played otherwise by Killian Donnelly), it was an enjoyably entertaining evening, although it often felt more like a musical revue than a book musical. The Commitmentsmusical follows the same plot as the previous film and book, exploring the lives of impoverished, working-class, young white men and a few white women from the rough northside of Dublin. It centers on Dubliner Jimmy Rabbitte’s formation of a band he dubs “The Commitments,” one that will exclusively play American soul music, typically associated with African American musicians, even though the entire band is white. The musical is not especially plot heavy and the story is told almost exclusively in the brief book scenes rather than through its adapted soul music. As in the film and book, The Commitments achieve a small degree of success in Dublin, much of which is depicted in a single concert that makes up the bulk of act 2, but their internal struggles with personality conflicts, romantic entanglements, and outsized egos eventually overwhelm the band. The show is primarily a musical celebration that includes an extended character study, particularly of driven band-manager Jimmy, as well as of Deco, the arrogant and difficult lead singer, and Joey “The Lips” Fagan, the philandering veteran musician who joins the young band. Unlike The Commitments, the other, smaller scale new UK musical, Teenage Kicks, premiered in Derry, Northern Ireland, on 1 November 2013 and was billed a “punk musical.” Teenage Kickswas written by Irish novelist and television writer Colin Bateman and featured punk music from the 1980s, particularly songs drawn from the catalogs of English band The Stranglers and Northern Irish bands Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones. It was created as part of the inaugural yearlong UK City of Culture celebration, which was held in Derry in 2013. During its first week I attended the show in Derry, and while the production lacked the big-budget punch of The Commitments, the talented cast offered strong performances, in spite of occasional script problems. Teenage Kicks, which attempted to use its adapted punk music to advance and develop its plot, is set in both Derry, Northern Ireland, and then Iowa, in America, in 1981. The Troubles—as the conflict in Northern Ireland between the Loyalists, who were mostly Protestant, and the Republicans...

The Canonical Debate Today: Crossing Disciplinary and National Boundaries

The Canonical Debate Today: Crossing Disciplinary and National Boundaries

Eco-Joyce: the environmental imagination of James Joyce

This collection introduces and examines the overarching ecological consciousness evinced in the writings of James Joyce. Reading Joyce with a keen attention to the manner in which the natural and built environment functions as context, horizon, threat, or site of liberation in Joyce's writing offers an engaging and fruitful way into the dense, demanding, and usually encyclopedic formation of knowledge that comprises Joyce's literary legacy. Scholars working within Irish studies draw on a wide variety of critical outlooks, including cultural studies, post-colonial studies, transnational studies, gender studies and, of course, modernist studies; this book will help that community become better acquainted with how ecocriticism elucidates the work of Irish writers, and will encourage further research in this direction. Even writers like Joyce, who are usually regarded as primarily urban, exhibit a strong ecological dimension in their work, and there are many other Irish writers who have produced work that directly engages issues in ecology and environmental studies. Eco-Joyce covers a multitude of disciplines in an attempt to serve as a point of entry into Joyce and ecocriticism, of course, but it will also suggest ways in which Irish studies and modernist studies could gain energy from this relatively new and vital approach.

The Changing Face of Irish Ireland: Séamus Ó Grianna's and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's Fictions of the Donegal Gaeltacht

Séamus Ó Grianna and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, whose lifespans overlapped only briefly, rank among the most prolific Irish writers of the twentieth century. Their bilingualism, moreover, offers them access to two languages, cultures, and viewpoints. Their shared interest in the Donegal Gaeltacht during the revivalist period, and their use of fiction to explore and represent it, provide their readers with a remarkable insight into the changing ideologies of twentieth-century Ireland, and particularly Irish-Ireland, touching on broad issues that are linguistic, cultural, political, gendered, and spatial. This essay begins by analyzing the narrative similarities between Ó Grianna's Mo Dhá Róisín and Ní Dhuibhne's Hiring Fair Trilogy, and proceeds to examine how both writers negotiate historical fact, the Irish language, the performance of Gaelic culture, the burgeoning women's movement, and the chasm between rural and urban Ireland of the revival. Through this approach, the essay demonstrates that the fictions of these two writers reveal as much about their own agendas and the dominant ideas of the epoch in which they were writing, as they do about life in the Donegal Gaeltacht in the early twentieth century.

‘Trust Not Appearances’: Political and Personal Betrayal in James Joyce's Ulysses

Literary historians such as Tony Tanner have speculated that adultery, with its assault upon the patriarchal institution of marriage and its potential for family drama, is the principal theme of the bourgeois novel that evolves in Europe during the nineteenth century. Joyce's famous work was heir to the great nineteenth-century novel of adultery – a tradition which includes the likes of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1873–77), Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), and Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1867). An act of marital betrayal lies at the heart of the story, an act which Joyce explores in all its emotional and moral complexity. Other critics (such as David Lloyd) have argued that his condition as an Irish writer obliged Joyce to develop an ‘adulterated’ form of writing – one which refused the precepts of patriarchal authorship, and in so doing contributed significantly to the emergence of the cultural sensibility known as Modernism. This article addresses Joyce's imagination of personal and political betrayal as explored in both the thematic and formal aspects of Ulysses.