Irish Writers Research Articles

‘There’s No Return Route, Is There?’: Conor O’Callaghan’s After-Irish Diasporic Aesthetic

In this article, I examine Conor O’Callaghan’s poetry in the context of post- or after-Irishness and migration. The idea of a traditional Irish national literature has diminished in importance and relevance in recent years. Irish writers are now more sensitized to alternative modes of identification, unbound by the constraints of a singular concept of ‘Irishness’. This is especially significant for migrant writers, who are geographically removed from Ireland. O’Callaghan (born 1968) is himself a migrant: having lived in America, he now lives in England. Drawn from his experiences of transnational migration, O’Callaghan explores the different locales that he has known. He also feels free to write about suburban life, love, and the internet in an often quick-witted vernacular. What then is O’Callaghan’s aesthetic response to the experience of migrancy? Does O’Callaghan’s poetry exhibit an after-Irish diasporic aesthetic? Although O’Callaghan’s poetry is imbued with a diasporic multi-locatedness, both intellectual and geographical, his sense of Irish identity remains strong, and his poetry also often expresses a desire for rootedness.

Themes and Techniques in James Joyce’s Clay

James Joyce, a prolific Irish writer of his age. ‘Clay’ from Dubliner is known for its varied themes and techniques. It renders captivating opportunities for the readers to present his/her own perception of symbolism to ‘Clay’. Joyce has displayed a double level of symbolism structure which he explicitly managed to handle paradoxical symbolic element simultaneously. The title ‘Clay’ itself has a symbolic meaning – in the human world it has less worth but this unworthy element has the capacity to mould to any given shape. Maria, the protagonist is a symbolic representation of Clay at one level and Mother Ireland at another level. Themes of poverty, triggered social relationships are shown through the technique of symbolism.

Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography ed. by Aïda Hudson

Reviewed by: Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography ed. by Aïda Hudson Heather Cyr (bio) Aïda Hudson, ed. Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography. Wilfred Laurier UP, 2018. Edited by Aida Hudson, Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography is a beautifully designed book that collects together a wide range of essays on geographies in literature for young people, adding to the larger conversations, perspectives, and challenges within this fertile area of criticism. The four main sections of the text—"Geographical Imaginaries," "Gardens and Green Spaces," "Fantasy Worlds and Re-Enchantment," and "Space and Gender"—give [End Page 345] an idea of how varied readings that proceed from the interrelated foci of space/place and landscape can be and what rich ground children's literature is for the spatial turn. Many edited collections that examine place and space within children's literature focus on a specific location, geographical topos, or specific theoretical framework as a guiding point: for example, Padraic Whyte and Keith O'Sullivan's Children's Literature and New York City (2014), Mary Shine Thompson and Celia Keenan's Treasure Islands: Studies in Children's Literature (2006), and Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd's Wild Things: Children's Literature and Ecocriticism (2004). Indeed, there have been several entries in the last few years digging quite deeply into the function of mapping in children's literature, such as the special issue of Children's Literature in Education edited by Anthony Pavlik and Hazel Sheeky Bird (2017) not to mention Stefan Ekman's important work on maps and settings in fantasy literature (2013). However, this collection, perhaps to its detriment, takes a different tack, focusing instead on a broadly imagined conception. Hudson's introduction starts with a breakdown of the word "geography" as "imaged earth writing" (1) and then draws upon Edward Said's definition in Orientalism (1978) of "imaginative geographies" as a dualistic concept of familiar-unfamiliar or "our land-barbarian land" (54). Starting with the "universal practice" that "Every individual whether young or old has been exposed to familiar and unfamiliar places . . . whether in life or literature" (4), Hudson shows how widely Said's conception of "imaginative geography" applies. She demonstrates a short "worlding" of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, folds in concepts from environmentalism (specifically environmentalist Gerald Buell's "place attachment," in which she sees Said's influence), turns backward to Tolkien's definitions of myth and the grounding of fantastic Middle Earth in Tolkien's very real experiences of war, and moves toward contemporary Indigenous Literature, giving examples of novels that "may reflect the anger of peoples who have been dispossessed and displaced, but they also often evoke rootedness in the land and an affirmation of Indigenous culture" (12). The introduction casts a deliberately wide net that goes on to define the collection's many varied imagined geographies; however, the collection may have benefitted from both a tighter focus and more interaction with recent children's literature scholarship about place and space. As Hudson's introduction acknowledges, the collection is mostly focused on the Northern Hemisphere: it includes essays on Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling's Britain, Irish writers both at home and within the Irish diaspora, Kenneth Grahame's Edenic England, and Ursula K. Le Guin's fantastic Earthsea. As Hudson is co-editor of Windows and Words: A Look at Canadian Children's Literature in English (2003), it is no surprise that much of [End Page 346] the collection focuses on Canadian children's literature and other works that examine the North. In the first section, an intriguing entry is Cory Sampson's essay "Pullman and Imperialism: Navigating the Geographic Imagination in The Golden Compass," which interrogates the imperial foundations of Lyra's steampunk world, arguing that the genre relies on imperialist tropes to generate wonder. This is placed side-by-side with Colleen M. Franklin's "Nineteenth-Century British Children's Literature and the North," which examines the "sublime quest" of British explorers in the Canadian north that "became a trope for self-conquest" (Hudson 15) that continues through to Pullman's work. An enriching aspect of the collection is the move from these British-centered conceptions...

Oscar Wilde and Contemporary Irish Drama: Learning to be Oscar’s Contemporary by Graham Price

Reviewed by: Oscar Wilde and Contemporary Irish Drama: Learning to be Oscar’s Contemporary by Graham Price Eamon Maher Oscar Wilde and Contemporary Irish Drama: Learning to be Oscar’s Contemporary, by Graham Price (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 248 p., paperback, $59.99) Oscar Wilde is undoubtedly a literary figure of high standing, particularly in the area of dramatic production. That he should continue to exert an influence on contemporary Irish playwrights will not come as a surprise to many. However, what Graham Price achieves in this impressive monograph is to trace this influence on some of the best-known twentieth-century Irish playwrights: Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy, Frank McGuinness, and Tom Murphy. Such an undertaking is hugely ambitious, but then Price adds to his task by including a section on twenty-first-century writers Martin McDonagh and Mark O’Halloran, which was not a particularly judicious decision in the opinion of this reviewer. The Introduction attempts to justify the choice of subject and begins with a discussion of the exclusion of Wilde from The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) by the editors Seamus Deane and Christopher Murray on the premise that he was not really “an important Irish writer.” The irony of this position is not lost on Price, who detects a clear “trend towards Wildeanism” in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, arguably the best-known play by one of the founders of Field Day, Brian Friel. Price attributes some of the rehabilitation of Wilde as an Irish writer to the work of Declan Kiberd, who in one particular essay contended that Wilde’s “aesthetic of lying,” among other characteristics, “proved to be highly influential for colonial and postcolonial writers in Ireland in the twentieth century.” Kiberd also saw Wilde as a committed Irish nationalist, “whose work aims to deconstruct essentialist, British-inspired notions of Irish weakness and British strength.” Other notable features of Wilde’s dramaturgy according to Price include “a profound commitment to radicalism and subversion”; his vision of the role of the artist “as being focused on making the world rather than just imitating it in a realistic mode”; and his particular form of dandyism, which constitutes “an important precursor of the doctrine of camp.” The major obstacle Price needed to overcome was to demonstrate a lineage from Wilde through five twentieth-century playwrights and right up to some practitioners associated more closely with the twenty-first century. Would this be achieved through intertextuality, tracing the “anxiety of influence,” the thematic choices, or stylistic similarities? The answer seems to be through a combination [End Page 151] of all of these, a gargantuan undertaking. It may have been wiser for Price to concentrate on just two comparators, Friel and McGuinness, as these chapters are where the analysis is most surefooted. One has to admire the mountain of primary and secondary material he was required to read in order to cover such a large canvas. To his credit, he rises admirably to the challenge he sets himself and is clearly very knowledgeable about the eight writers he discusses. But the focus is not always as tight as it might be, and the result is an inevitable drop in intensity at various points. This unevenness may also be attributable to the fact that the Wildean influence is not always apparent, and one senses occasionally that the methodology has been retrofitted to suit the thesis that Price is anxious to prove. The chapter on Frank McGuinness works well precisely because there is a shared fascination with “liminality and undecidability in relation to life, subjectivity and reality in general” in the work and lives of the two writers. Price attributes this in part to McGuinness’s Donegal roots. He quotes from an interview with Tony Roche in which McGuinness admitted: “I never found a sense of place an easy thing to grasp and I certainly never found it an easy thing to celebrate. I’m not at ease anywhere. But I have no doubt where I absolutely belong and where I come from, and that is Donegal.” Price sees a real shared struggle in coming to terms with “home” in both writers. Wilde was someone who did not...

Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture ed. by Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien

Reviewed by: Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture ed. by Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien David M. Reimers Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien, eds. Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2018. Pp. 280. Hardcover $65, paper & ebook $34.95. ISBN 9780815635611, 9780815635796, 9780815654261. Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien have brought together twelve pieces focusing on the relationship of Irish and Jews. A recent outpouring of essays about Jews in Ireland prompted the authors to note that Ireland and Israel (Jews) share, in part, a common history. Both nations were dominated by others (read English and Western powers as well as Arabs for Jews, and English for the Irish) during their long history. Not until the twentieth history did Ireland achieve independence; Israel followed in 1948. After becoming new nations both countries found little peace. For Ireland it was first a civil war, then "the troubles" after World War II. For Israel it was considerably different: four wars with their Arab neighbors have been followed by West Bank settlements that are the center of contention today. Ireland of course borders Northern Ireland, but this conflict is considerably less violent than the Israeli wars against the Arabs surrounding Palestine. For Israel no easy solution is in sight. Indeed, in many ways Israel lives as an armed nation, looking to the United States for its main support. For Ireland the present situation is less dire but it is not clear what the future holds for Ireland with Brexit looming: it is uncertain what the impact on the border will be if Great Britain withdraws from the Common Market. It is important to keep in mind the major differences between the two nations as well as the fact they share a common history. The history outlined above forms a background for this volume of essays, with the focus being almost entirely on Ireland. Israeli or Jewish voices are generally missing; it would have been interesting if more of them had been included, but the center of the book is Ireland and the voice of the Irish. It is not possible to deal with all twelve essays in a review; the exclusion of an essay in this review is not a reflection of quality. The editors surely had a difficult task limiting the number to twelve. They first include a brief history of Jews in Ireland, providing necessary background. The size of the Jewish population at any one time is important, but the Jewish population in Ireland has never been large. Still, some Irish writers were focused on Jews. For example, one of the more interesting essays was Trisha Oakley Kessler's piece on Jewish refugee factories in the 1930s, even though their numbers were not large. These refugees were driven to Ireland by the rise of Nazi [End Page 125] Germany; Kessler describes the desperate plight of Jews who sought a new home in Ireland and other nations. A question emerges: was Ireland like so many countries that were unwilling to accept more refugees? The essays in Part I deal with antisemitism in part, and to understand this bigotry it is crucial to know how many Jews were in Ireland, where they settled, how they made a living and their relationship with the Irish at various times. According to the traditional histories there was little such bigotry in early Irish history, but religious references were acute in the early days. In view of Christianity's role in Western antisemitism I wonder if the Catholic Church was really so free of antisemitism in Ireland. This issue needs more study and research. According to essayist R. M. Douglas, antisemitism grew strongly after 1900. It does appear that Ireland shares much of Western Europe's prejudice regardless of the fact that the Jewish population was small. Or in Douglas's words, "the Irish were not so different after all." (31) Peter Hession adds to the debates in his excellent essay on Jews in Ireland from 1880 to 1914. To complicate matters, Natalie Wynn discusses the lack of clear standards and definitions in the discussions of Irish antisemitism. Several essays in Part II compare aspects of the...

James Joyce: A Literary Companion by James F. Broderick

Reviewed by: James Joyce: A Literary Companion by James F. Broderick Christine Smedley (bio) JAMES JOYCE: A LITERARY COMPANION, by James F. Broderick. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2018. 182 pp. $39.95. In this slim volume, James F. Broderick opens up the writings of James Joyce to a new generation of readers, clearing a path through what he deems the overcomplicated glut of critical commentary generated by scholars of the Irish modernist. Broderick, an Assistant Professor of Journalism and English and the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction, has not previously published on Joyce. He [End Page 439] therefore approaches Joycean scholarship as a bemused outsider, referring warily to the obsessive and sometimes off-putting "zeal" of "academic dons" who "pore over every scrap of Joyceana" (3, 5). With his accessible, sometimes humorously colloquial language, streamlined plot outlines, and an undeniably contagious enthusiasm for Joyce, Broderick offers himself as a lively traveling companion for novice readers, deftly navigating the broad contours of the Joycean oeuvre. Broderick's guide is in no way comprehensive, nor does he make such claims. The book is under two hundred pages, and its formal discussion of Joyce's major works, including Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as the epic Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is compressed to under one hundred full pages. After a brief introduction, Broderick progresses to a biographical timeline of the Irish writer, synopses of the major works, a rather random collection of selected Joycean topics in his "A-Z Literary Companion," an "Appendix A" which includes an annotated bibliography of an admittedly idiosyncratic selection of eighteen works of Joycean scholarship, and an "Appendix B" which summarizes six filmic interpretations of Joyce's writing. In his "Introduction" (3-8), Broderick announces that the aim of his book is to "provide something of value to everyone interested in Joyce—no matter the degree of familiarity—offering an overview of Joyce's life and works helpful to those encountering Joyce for the first time as well as information and interpretations for those readers more conversant with this enigmatic Irishman" (1). The audience for Broderick's text, however, is primarily the lay reader and undergraduate. Broderick does indeed provide "something of interest" with his straightforward summaries interwoven with some useful biographical details and snippets of historical context. But, overall, the guide offers very little interpretive commentary, too often focusing on the raw scaffolding of plot and structure, while frequently smoothing over the quintessentially Joycean complexities and ambiguities of language and meaning. In his introductory blurb on Ulysses, Broderick acknowledges that "I have generally tried to avoid treading over interpretive ground—that's a pleasure for every individual reader" (56). Yet this sidestepping of exegesis in deference to the rather flattening chronicling of plot has its limitations, especially when such concerns recede to the background in Joyce's later works. In the introductory paragraphs to Broderick's chapter on Dubliners, the standard frameworks for the short stories are provided. The overarching theme of paralysis is usefully, if somewhat simplistically, fleshed out. Joyce's deployment of the stages of life as an organizing principle for the collection is described (with stories arranged progressively, narrated from the perspective of childhood through adolescence and maturity and then to "public life"), and the tumultuous [End Page 440] publication history of the works is duly noted. Broderick also includes a discussion of Joyce's concept of the secularized epiphany that caps many of the tales' most climactic moments, where a character experiences a transformative moment of self-revelation or unintentional self-exposure. Broderick writes that "the stories of Dubliners are filled with epiphanies, moments of stark and bitter realization among the characters that sometimes strike with the force of a hammer blow" (14). Approaches that center the interpretive task around deterministic "epiphany hunting" are certainly passé.1 Nevertheless, the epiphanies undergird much of the deep architecture of Joyce's writing, especially in Dubliners, Stephen Hero, and A Portrait, and remain crucial to an understanding of the character's self-awareness or lack thereof. In his analyses of the short stories, Broderick's identification of the epiphanic moment is often...

Five Irish Women: The Second Republic, 1960–2016 by Emer Nolan

Reviewed by: Five Irish Women: The Second Republic, 1960–2016 by Emer Nolan Conor Carville Five Irish Women: The Second Republic, 1960–2016, by Emer Nolan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, 232 p., hardcover, €80) The Irish literary studies turn to theory that began in the 1990s has seemed somewhat to stall over the last decade, in Ireland as elsewhere. There are many reasons for this change: the so-called war on terror and the felt need to respond to it, neoliberal restructuring of the university, the imposition of austerity, and not least the opening up of many important literary archives—all combined to encourage a return to more securely historicizing, often Marxian, ways of thinking. Indeed in recent years the heady discourse once dismissed by Edna Longley as a fashionable cocktail of Derry and Derrida sometimes seems like a blip that has been succeeded by business as usual. There are many who would like to think so. Emer Nolan is not one of them. She is well known for her groundbreaking work James Joyce and Nationalism (1995) and more recently for her retrieval of several fascinating Irish writers from the nineteenth century in Catholic Emancipations (2007). Her newest book, Five Irish Women: The Second Republic, 1960–2016, carries a bold historical claim in its subtitle. But it is still a remarkable contribution to the theoretical analysis of contemporary Irish writing, clearly building on her previous work. The great strength of this survey of the life and work of Edna O'Brien, Sinéad O'Connor, Bernadette McAliskey, Nuala O'Faolain, and Anne Enright is the lightness with which it carries its conceptual tools. It is an exemplary case of an academic translating hard-won ideas into accessible, elegant prose, finding well-known, easily recognizable, yet radical figures to analyze. The fact that all five such figures are women, and that it would be well-nigh impossible to find five men upon which to successfully carry out a similar operation is significant in itself. Each chapter examines one of the women listed above, and the book proceeds in a broadly chronological fashion, beginning with O'Brien and ending with Enright. One of the ways in which Nolan continues the preoccupations of earlier Irish cultural criticism is by examining what it means to speak from a particular subject position, or as a particular identity, or with a particular voice. In Irish Studies, as has often been pointed out, the position, identity, or voice is often understood first and foremost as Irish, at the expense of other factors, such as whether the voice is that of a woman, or a rural laborer, or a person of color. And yet the attempt, by a critic, to hear that voice as black or working class has its own problems and unexamined assumptions. In her introduction Nolan addresses this issue head-on, saying that in the book she is drawing on Simone de Beauvoir's universalism, as filtered through Toril Moi, rather than the particularism of second-wave feminism. That is to say the book posits—implicitly for the most part—what must be a neutral ground or frame on or in which more discrete identities inscribe themselves. [End Page 153] One slight niggle is that the nature of this ground or frame is never made clear. Are we talking, as the reference to de Beauvoir in the introduction implies, about the bedrock of a shared "humanity"? Or is it something more rarefied and fluid than that, a kind of constitutive gap or absence that frames performances of identity? The first essay, on Edna O'Brien, seems to suggest the latter. Nolan unsparingly attends to the contradictions and controversies surrounding some of the writer's pronouncements, and draws on Judith Butler to see these as a kind of chaotic and ambivalent performance of female identity. On the other hand, for Sinéad O'Connor there is, according to Nolan, an attempt to escape from feminine identity and the expectation that she sing "as a woman" in order to "transcend the category of woman." One wonders in what this transcendental space consists. The longest chapter is on Nuala O'Faolain, which is apt, for Nolan teases...

MERGING SOCIAL CRITICISM WITH IRISH CULTURAL HERITAGE IN THE SHORT STORY COLLECTION THE UNTILLED FIELD BY GEORGE MOORE

The paper analyses the short story collection The Untilled Field by the Irish writer George Moore (1852-1933) with the aim of establishing the subversive potential of these stories in the context of the criticism of the overpowering dogmas within the Irish society at the beginning of the 20th century. With this long neglected short story collection, George Moore reveals a darker, silenced side of Ireland, hidden from the public discourse of the socio-political mainstream of the period. His social criticism is primarily focused on some neuralgic aspects of the Irish society of the time, namely on the dominant influence of the Irish Catholic church on the collective ethos of the nation and, subsequently, on the spiritual and moral paralysis of the Irish people as well as on mass emigrations of the Irish to America. By pinpointing these, in his view, destructive social forces and the complex sociopolitical situation in Ireland during the formation of the modern Irish state, George Moore identifies a state of collective moral lethargy characterised by total absence of any possibility of individual affirmation through artistic agency. The importance of this short story collection, from the point of view of scientific research, lies in the foregrounding motivation behind it. In other words, in George Moore´s intention to dig deep into the relentless existence of the Irish people at one stage in the country´s history and to re-shape the well- established colonial representations which favoured falsely pastoral visions of Ireland. It was not until the second half of the 20th century that the stigma of ´un-patriotic´ and ´subversive´ was lifted from this short story collection giving it, though still limited, well-deserved attention and recognising its literary and artistic importance for Irish national culture and for its literature.

Representation of Youth in the Young Adult Fiction of Farhad Hasanzadeh

Representation of Youth in the Young Adult Fiction of Farhad Hasanzadeh Farzaneh Aghapour (bio) and Farideh Pourgiv (bio) Farhad Hasanzadeh1 is a renowned Iranian writer of children's and young adult (YA) literature who has published more than eighty books in the past thirty years. He has been awarded many prizes in Iran and was a shortlist candidate for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2020 and a candidate for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2017 and 2018. Hasanzadeh has introduced a variety of innovative forms and challenging themes in children's and YA literature. Young adults and their concerns play a prominent role in his work; hence, in this article, we analyze his portrayal of adolescence, youth, and adolescentadult confrontations within different social and political contexts. Click for larger view View full resolution Hasanzadeh presents young adults in the contexts of abnormal situations and digs deep into their interactions with gender constructs, society, war, revolution, and peers. His young characters are usually exposed to and affected by different familial, social, and economic hardships and trauma, as they go through their adolescence during unusual circumstances. In all of Hasanzadeh's works for young adults, the focus is on the youth, their feelings and actions; psychological, behavioral, and physical characteristics are represented in his narration, which is sometimes intertwined with irony (Khodabin, Mirhosseini, and Abazari). His narrative techniques and use of irony have been discussed by critics of children's literature in Iran (Parsaee). His ability to engage with difficult subjects is also admired: "Hasanzadeh courageously presents challenging topics, addresses taboos, and moves beyond boundaries to artistically show the conditions of Iranian children and young adults. He manages to be creative rather than didactic, bold rather than meek, yet never loses hope" (Pourgiv 18). [End Page 48] Multilayered Characteristics of Adolescents The implied reader of Hasanzadeh's young adult fiction is brave, inquisitive, and exploring. The author focuses on dialogic relationships between teens and adults, and hence his fiction has two types of audience. The different layers of his text communicate with the adolescent but also attract the adult, especially when he places adolescent characters in the 1970s and '80s. He has portrayed various types of adolescents living in three distinct periods (the Islamic revolution in Iran; the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran; and the postwar, present period), exploring the place and development of young adults in Iranian society. Most of these realistically portrayed characters are from the lower classes and are exposed to harm. They do not have any grand aspirations other than to be accepted and to enjoy ordinary life; in most of Hasanzadeh's narratives, poverty, parental divorce, revolution, and war hinder these modest desires. His characters are ordinary young adults who are divested of basic rights and lack safety, education, life within a family, and proper food and clothing. Sometimes they are sexually and physically abused. This article discusses some aspects of Hasanzadeh's concerns about young adults in Iran. Click for larger view View full resolution Rebels and Victims Hasti, the female character in a novel of the same name by Hasanzadeh, is one of the most norm-breaking characters in Iranian YA literature. She is living in a traditional family in Khorramshahr and is in constant conflict with her father. Her family is forced to move to another city because of the war, and Hasti plays an important role in this move as she helps her father, riding a motorbike she borrows from her uncle. They move to a camp in south Iran and live in dire poverty. Hasti insists on returning the motorbike to her uncle, but her father ignores her, so she dresses in men's clothes and rides the bike back to Khorramshahr. Her father retreats from his previous harsh actions. He goes after her to Khorramshahr, accepting his daughter's identity and taking her back to the camp. Hasti is one of the most colorful and carnivalesque characters ever created in Iranian YA literature. She challenges a restricting traditional society, her father being the hand of unwritten cultural laws. At the same instance, war, migration, and settling in a camp lead her to identity crisis with regard...

Dubliners 1914–Dubliners 100 (2014): Local Histories of Troubled Sexuality?

<em>In twenty-first-century Dublin, it is difficult to see what caused all the fuss that delayed the publication of Joyce’s Dubliners for so long, but part of the problem was his – actually rather subtle - treatment of sexuality.</em><a title="" href="file:///C:/Users/koukera/Desktop/vol_5_issue_2_december%202019/submissions/02_print_ready/articles/01Michael_Kane/kane_v5i2_2019.docx#_ftn1">[1]</a> <em>In</em> <em>Dubliners, Joyce examined a colonial culture dominated, as Marilyn French argued, by popular Catholicism and ideas of propriety, both of which resulted in the repression of ‘the sexual’ along with ‘the sensual and sensuous’. Dubliners 100 (2014) is a collection of rewritten versions of Joyce’s Dubliners by contemporary Irish writers, using the same titles and showing several parallels with the original stories, but set in early twenty-first-century Dublin, many around the time of the financial crisis of 2008. Sexuality features in many of these stories too, but in ways that illustrate some of the changes in attitudes to sex and the social and cultural context of sexuality in Ireland since the late nineteenth century. Some of the contemporary stories also reveal a culture in which the expression of the sexual, the sensual and the sensuous is still dominated and constrained, if by different powers than in Joyce’s day. This article will compare a selection of Joyce’s stories (‘Araby’, ‘Eveline’, ‘The Boarding House’, and ‘Clay’) with the contemporary versions, specifically in terms of the treatment of sexuality.</em><div><br clear="all" /><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div> <a title="" href="file:///C:/Users/koukera/Desktop/vol_5_issue_2_december%202019/submissions/02_print_ready/articles/01Michael_Kane/kane_v5i2_2019.docx#_ftnref1">[1]</a> According to Ellmann, one of the passages printers objected to was a line in ‘Counterparts’ referring to a ‘woman’s changing the position of her legs often and brushing against a man’s chair’. Richard Ellmann, <em>James Joyce</em> (Oxford, London…: Oxford University Press, 1982), 220. </div></div>

TOM PAULIN'S POETRY OF TROUBLES

This paper is part of my PhD thesis. It examines contemporary Northern Irish Literature written in English with the help of the theoretical approach of Irish Studies. It aims to introduce and make a critique of poetry written by Tom Paulin, a contemporary British poet who is regarded one of the major Protestant Irish writers to emerge from Ulster province. The thread pursued in this analysis relates to an investigation of how ideological discourses and the issues of identity are represented in the poet’s work. The author’s critical evaluation of existing ideologies and identities and his attempt to respond to them will also be analyzed. Four poems from three different collections are investigate. Paulin’s poems function as testimonies, denouncement and criticism of the Irish history.

Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Marguérite Corporaal and Christina Morin

Reviewed by: Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Marguérite Corporaal, Christina Morin Mary L. Mullen (bio) Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Marguérite Corporaal and Christina Morin; pp. xv + 258. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, €103.99. Representations of Irish people in the nineteenth century often emphasize their love of the land and attachment to home. In Vanity Fair (1847–48), for instance, William Makepeace Thackeray mocks Mrs. Major O’Dowd for comparing various European sites unfavorably to her Irish homeland. In the middle of the Battle of Waterloo, O’Dowd prattles on about the various Irish locations from her youth—Ballinafad, Glenmalony, Dublin—suggesting that Irishness is place-bound and provincial, even when it travels. Given this tendency to define Irishness as a static attachment to place, Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century is a welcome collection. As the editors Marguérite Corporaal and Christina Morin explain in their introduction, these essays provide an important supplement to accounts of the Irish diaspora that focus on famine migration and Irish dislocation by exploring Irish people and Irish culture on the move before, during, and after the Great Famine. What results is a picture of Irish cosmopolitanism, as many of the essays explore voluntary travel and transnational aesthetics. In some essays, the phrase traveling Irishness means Irish travel narratives: Anne O’Connor, Peter Gray, and Joachim Fischer consider the ways in which Irish writers interpret Italy, Germany, and County Clare. Because scholars are more likely to read travel narratives about Ireland than travel narratives by Irish writers, studying this somewhat neglected genre is interesting, in part because Irishness both appears and does not appear in these texts. Irish travel narratives often address English readers, use English and Irish reference points, and speak on behalf of a British identity. Yet precisely because the Irishness of these texts requires interpretation, Fischer argues, they capture the contradictions and hybridity of Anglo-Irish identity. It is a very provocative point: namely, that Anglo-Irish identity—an identity position most frequently associated with literary genres such as the big house novel or the gothic, which dramatize a resistance to history and a troubling commitment to staying put—can best be understood through Anglo-Irish narratives about other cultural locations. Other essays study genres on the move. Tracing William Orpen’s contributions to the foundation of the Dublin Municipal Gallery, Anne Cormican demonstrates the importance of French and international art to the development of an Irish school of painting in the midst of the Irish Revival. Corporaal considers Irish local-color narratives translated for continental European readers, suggesting an interesting relationship between regional identity and transnational circulation. Jason King shows the ways in [End Page 663] which the national tale travels to the United States and Canada in order to consolidate distinctly different diasporic identities. While Irish-American narratives favor romance and tend to celebrate republicanism and revolution, Irish-Canadian authors dramatize the dangers of revolution and romance: when this so-called national genre travels trans-nationally, it is made to serve distinctly different political ends. Many of the essays show the importance of considering publication and book history when studying Irish literature. Morin spends the most time on this point, explaining the ways in which many Irish writers moved to England in order to pursue a writing career. Studying Irish authors who published with Minerva Press alongside better-known writers like John Banim, Gerald Griffin, and Maria Edgeworth, Morin suggests that the travel of authors and texts helps us better understand the travel in texts. Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail’s fascinating account of Thomas O’Connor, a Cork scribe who worked as a tailor in London, shows the ways in which literature written and translated into the Irish language travels through handwritten books. In turn, Jim Shanahan and Matthew L. Reznicek focus on representations of travel in novels. Shanahan offers a useful taxonomy for understanding travel in Charles Lever’s novels, which depict “soldiers of fortune,” “civilian tourists,” and “Irishmen in reverse” to grapple with Lever’s own feelings of exile (165). Reznicek provides a new reading of the role of the Théâtre François in Maria...

The impact of cultural factors on attachment dynamics: a view from Irish society

In this article I examine aspects of the relationship between mothers and sons from an attachment perspective in an Irish context. Through the works of Irish writers such as Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, and Colm Tóibín, I focus on particular aspects of this relationship, which fails to support the developmental processes of separation and individuation in the many men who come to me for psychotherapy. I illustrate key points concerning this attachment dynamic through the use of clinical examples of my work with two men from my practice. While acknowledging that many other cultural factors play a significant role in the emotional development of children, integrating the work of our poets, novelists, and scholars with an attachment perspective

Maeve Kelly: Women, Ireland, and the Aesthetics of Radical Writing

This article considers the work of Irish writer and feminist Maeve Kelly arguing that she has been not only a radical and, to some extent, seminal voice within modern Irish writing, but an author whose work self-consciously reflects upon the production and mediation of Irish women's writing within British and Irish culture. While Kelly is not unique in adopting a feminist approach in her writing, aspects of her fiction are somewhat discrete within modern Irish literature in terms of how they express, delineate, and resolve the challenges – material, psycho-cultural, aesthetic – attendant upon the representation of feminist political thought and occluded Irish female experience. Particularly within an Irish context, Kelly's writing provides a significant case study of the aesthetic problematics of politically radical fiction. Her oeuvre represents a vital contribution to Irish writing of the twentieth century as well as to the history of women in post-war Ireland.

Un tema y tres variaciones: el caso Albert Nobbs

A partir de la teoría de Linda Hutcheon sobre la adaptación, me propongo llevar a cabo una revisión de la novella “Albert Nobbs” (1918 y 1927), del escritor irlandés George Moore, como una fuente que fue adaptada para el ámbito teatral por Simone Benmussa (en 1977), y para el arte cinematográfico por Rodrigo García (en 2011). El análisis se centrará en las estrategias y variantes de caracterización relacionadas con el personaje central de la historia, y en cómo, a partir de ello, el tema de la identidad de género adquiere matices significativos que se tornan posibles gracias a los recursos de cada uno de los medios artísticos involucrados, la visión de los creadores que se apropian de la historia, y las distancias cronológicas, lingüísticas y culturales vinculadas con cada recreación.

The Rooted Dweller: Paradoxes of Exile and Homecoming in the Poetry of Derek Mahon

Exile is not a singular phenomenon but rather a varied and a heterogeneous one. The term exile generally denotes displacement which refers to a movement out of one’s original place, be it imposed or by one’s choice. The theme of exile is pervasive in Irish literature reflecting the isolation felt by Irish writers who regarded themselves displaced at their very home and uprooted from earth per se. Many critics maintained that this intense sense of un-belonging to any place is translated into the logic of ‘colonial aphasia’ from Derek Mahon whose poetry is conditioned by various types of exile. Failing to take a stance of what was happening in his homeland and to elucidate his cantankerous, dissociated feelings, Mahon’s decision was to sever himself entirely from any home no matter what this ‘home’ incarnates. In one of his interviews, however, Derek Mahon expressed utter disapproval of being seen as an exile and made it explicit that this should not be the way to interrogate his writing. Even though much of his poetry testifies that he is a displaced writer in exile, deeper readings of his works would showcase various attempts at connecting with the world he seems to reject. This paper attempts to examine Mahon’s occult sentiments towards his homeland, his people, and his vocation by delving into some of his major poems to illustrate his endeavors at association even if the poems reflect detachment and disconnection. In every poem, there is a sense of belonging - to a place, a people, or to one’s self - despite the sweeping motifs of division and aloofness.

Home and Away: The House in Exilic Narratives

This article examines the ways in which two Irish writers use the setting and symbol of the house to depict traumatic rupture and the collapse of a sense of self as a result of loss. In both texts — Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, and Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke’s I Could Read the Sky — dissolution of self occurs due to the movement away from the childhood domicile to England. If home can be defined as ‘a sense of belonging or attachment’, then ‘[m]ovement may necessitate or be precipitated by a disruption to a sense of home’. Emigration can result in the formation of an alternative diasporic, transnational community and support network in the absence of immediate familial ties, yet it can also foster a sense of ‘displacement and loneliness’ as well as ‘self‐perceptions of being exiled’. Emigration, whether forced or not, constitutes a form of exile, one which, as Edward Said argues, is experienced as ‘an unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home’, and which results in a ‘crippling sorrow of estrangement’. That traumatic loss is conveyed in both authors’ use of the house (as setting and symbol).

LEXICAL COHESION IN SADEGH HEDAYAT’S LETTERS: THE EFFECT OF BIPOLAR MOOD DISORDER

This paper makes an attempt to investigate the effect of bipolar mood disorder on the basis of using the lexical cohesion elements (that is, repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and collocation) in a case study approach based on the fact that approximately one percent of people suffer from this kind of affective disorder. Specifically, a large number of artists are afflicted by the very disorder presumably due to their creativity. The private letters of Sadegh Hedayat, mostly known as an Iranian eminent writer suffering from bipolar mood disorder, to Shahid Nourai, one of his friends, are selected as the material of the study. The addressee is kept fixed noticeably to remove the effective linguistic features. Sadegh Hedayat’s letters have been studied regarding mentioned linguistic elements in terms of two major bipolar mood disorder episodes (that is to say, hypomanic and depressive). In the study, all the letters related to hypomanic and depressive episodes are investigated using the elements of lexical cohesion. Furthermore, all the words on the basis of the elements with respect to various ties, i.e. immediate, mediate, and remote, are counted and the averages are evaluated using SPSS with the aim of finding any noteworthy result to discover whether specific psychological mood affects the use of certain lexical cohesion elements or not. Moreover, it explores whether there is any significant difference between bipolar mood disorder and schizophrenia on the basis of previous studies. The statistical analysis shows a highly significant difference concerning antonymy and hyponymy between hypomania and depression. No significant difference is found with respect to repetition, synonymy, and collocation. In addition, the results suggest that the text analyzed in the research is cohesive as regards bipolar mood disorder in contrast to those studies conducted related to schizophrenia.

A Persistent Interest in the Other: Gerry Mc Donnell's Writings on Irish Jews

A Persistent Interest in the Other: Gerry Mc Donnell’s Writings on Irish Jews Shai Afsai For the past five years, sponsored by an annual grant awarded to my Providence synagogue, Congregation Beth Sholom, I have interviewed and photographed members of Jewish communities in different parts of the world, afterward sharing my experiences in Rhode Island and with readers elsewhere. I have looked at Judaism in Israel,1 Nigeria,2 the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine,3 Cuba, Poland and Ireland.4 In preparing for my 2018 summer visit to Ireland, I came across a March 2012 programme produced by Dublin City University’s School of Communication and Inter Faith Centre that featured Zalman Lent, rabbi of the Dublin Hebrew Congregation, as its guest.5 Asked by one of his interviewers about places of Jewish significance in Ireland, Lent highlighted Dublin’s synagogues and its Jewish museum, and then added that the city’s old Jewish cemetery in Ballybough was a noteworthy place to visit, too. He went on to refer to ‘a book of poems … I think it’s called Elegy – Mud Island Elegy – that was written about the graves in the Ballybough Cemetery’, which he described as ‘quite interesting’. Curious about this, I searched online for the book and information about its author. Though out of print, I succeeded in procuring a copy of Mud Island Elegy (2001), once owned by University ollege Dublin’s library, and found it was composed by the contemporary Irish poet and Dublin resident Gerry Mc Donnell. Now a retired civil servant, the sixty-nine year old Mc Donnell, who is a member of the Writers Guild of Ireland and the Irish Writers’Union, subsequently wrote a number of other Jewish-related works put out by the Belfast-based Lapwing Publications. Mc Donnell’s Lapwing oeuvre includes Lost and Found (2003), an extended poem about Mono, a homeless Jewish man living in Dublin’s Phoenix Park and intimated to perhaps be one of the thirty-six righteous ones that, in rabbinic lore, ensure the continued existence of the world; James Joyce: Jewish Influences in Ulysses (2004), a poetry and short essays Shai Afsai Studies • volume 108 • number 431 298 Studies_layout_AUTUMN-2019.indd 66 21/08/2019 09:14 chapbook revolving around Joyce’s choice to give Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of his sprawling stream-of-consciousness novel, an ethnically Jewish background; and I Heard an Irish Jew (2015), a collection of poems and prose with Jewish content. Having in due course become acquainted with several of his works, I hoped I might be able to see Mc Donnell when I arrived in Ireland, but my initial emails to him were all returned undelivered. Eventually, with the help of Lapwing’s Dennis Greig – who shares Mc Donnell’s curiosity about the Jewish people – I was able to inform Mc Donnell of my desire to connect in Dublin and discuss his work. ‘I’ve received your correspondence from Lapwing Publications. I would like to meet you’, Mc Donnell informed me in an email. ‘I was thinking of the Westin Hotel on Westmoreland Street near Trinity College. I haven’t been in it recently but my memory of it is a spacious and quiet hotel. We should be able to find a suitable spot in which to talk’. First encounter On the agreed day, I made my way to the Westin Hotel from Trinity College’s Manuscript and Archives Research Library, adjoining the famous Long Room, to which I had been granted access during my stay in Dublin in order to gain information on Theodore Lewis, the Dublin-born and Trinity Collegeeducated rabbi who moved to Rhode Island and then served as spiritual leader of Newport’s Touro Synagogue for thirty-six years.6 The Westin Hotel is indeed spacious. After I located Mc Donnell – whitebearded , bespectacled, wearing a blue fedora, blue shirt and blue slacks – we found a quiet spot to sit. I had been looking forward to a pint of beer or a shot of whiskey with the author following my research at Trinity College’s library, but he informed me that he gave up alcohol years ago. We ordered coffee and cookies. I had...

‘fountains frozen o'er’: Samuel Beckett's Atavistic Translations

Increasing importance has been placed on Samuel Beckett's work as a translator in recent years. Here I look at his translation of the French surrealists into English in the Surrealist Issue of the avant-garde journal This Quarter, and develop the argument made in Pascale Sardin and Karine Germoni's excellent 2011 study, ‘Scarcely Disfigured: Beckett's Surrealist Translations’, from which I take many cues. In what follows, I propose a theory of Beckett's translation: that literary atavism, models of arrested development and recursive strategies were central to the Irish writer's work, and that he developed these in his translations, in the ways that he preserved the past in his surreal translations, learning to become what André Breton called ‘the silent receptacle of many echoes’.