Irish Writers Research Articles

Re-imagining Contemporary Irish Writing

Re-imagining Contemporary Irish Writing

Comparing “Wandering through a Garden, Waking from a Dream” and “Ulysses” in Consciousness Stream Techniques

. “Ulysses” is one of the representative works of Irish writer James Joyce, and also a masterpiece of the writing technique known as “stream of consciousness,” which has had a significant impact on the world literary arena. “Wandering through a Garden, Waking from a Dream” is a novella created by Taiwanese writer Bai Xianyong which delicately exhibits the entire emotional flow and inner conflicts of the protagonist, Lady Qian, during her attendance at the banquet hosted by Lady Dou through the use of stream of consciousness technique. This paper compares these two classic works from the perspective of stream of consciousness, and analyzes the inspiration and creation of Bai Xianyong’s “Wandering through a Garden, Waking from a Dream” from “Ulysses”. The paper seeks to more profoundly unearth the profound literary value and social significance beneath the unique narrative style of “stream of consciousness” in the former. Based on his proficient mastery of Western stream of consciousness technique, Bai Xianyong fully exerts the creativity of an outstanding writer, forming a distinctive and unique Eastern stream of consciousness writing style rich in Chinese charm.

The Harp and the Eagle: teaching Irish Poetry in Mexico

Ireland and Mexico share a long tradition of intercultural relationships. The Latin American nation has received significant influence from the mind-frames and oeuvre of Irish or Irish-descended thinkers, and authors. In the field of literature, the presence of Irish writers in Mexico has been equally relevant. A number of them are constantly referenced in middle- to higher-education institutions as paradigmatic examples of the Anglophone belles lettres. Nevertheless, and with the possible exception of Yeats, limited academic and pedagogic attention has been paid to Irish poetry, almost exclusively in English, until comparatively recent times. As of the mid-2000s, the School of Philosophy and Literature (FFyL) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has witnessed a surge in academic efforts to promote the verse production of Anglo-Irish poets in the country. With the publication in 2003 of the anthology Una lengua injertada [A Grafted Tongue] and, more recently, with the establishment of the Contemporary Anglo-Irish Literature Research Project, FFyL-UNAM have inaugurated a new era for the study of (Anglo-) Irish verse in Mexico and Spanish-speaking America. This article will explore the critical and pedagogical approaches with which FFyL-UNAM have tackled the teaching of (Anglo) Irish poetry over at least one decade.

CEYMS COYS AZƏRBAYCAN ƏDƏBİYYATŞÜNASLARININ GÖZÜ İLƏ

James Joyce Through the Eyes of Azerbaijani Literary Critics Summary Great interest has been shown to the works of the Irish writer James Joyce, who is one of the prominent figures of modernism, as well as to the study of his works in Azerbaijani literary studies. The main reason for this was to clarify the features of the modernism literary trend by analyzing the writer's creativity, and presenting his works to a wide audience. From this point of view, the article analyzes the research of literary critics who studied James Joyce's work, and presents their attitude to the writer's creative activity. The articles written by Javida Mammadova, Irada Musayeva, Azer Turan and Javanshir Yusifli on the topic are investigated in the research. Key words: modernism, comparison, symbolism, character, article

Reading W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney in a Postcolonial Context: Exploring Landscape and Identity

This article critically examines Ireland's postcolonial position, with a specific focus on the poetic works of influential Irish writers William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney. The exploration begins by delving into Ireland's historical and cultural context as a colonized nation, shedding light on the profound impact of English domination and the complexities of Irish history. Furthermore, the article draws parallels between the Irish experience and anticolonial movements in Third World countries, emphasising on the similar struggles in resisting colonization. The central argument posits that, having endured colonialism, both Yeats and Heaney actively contribute to the postcolonial discourse by employing themes of landscape and identity as distinct forms of resistance. Yeats, driven by a personal interest in mythology, mythologizes resistance against the colonizer through the revival of heroic deeds in his poetry. Conversely, Heaney engages in a subversion of the “us vs them” dichotomy, responding to the Empire through his works. The imagery of earth, depicted in his poetry, symbolises the connection between physical landscape to Irish identity. By situating Yeats’ and Heaney’s poetry within a postcolonial framework, this article seeks to acknowledge their collective contribution as a form of "writing back to the Empire," thereby enriching the discourse surrounding Irish postcolonialism.

Adaptation as Means of Revising Gender Relations in Brian Friel’s A Month in the Country

The aim of the present paper is to investigate Brian Friel’s A Month in the Country, in which the Irish writer refocuses attention to enhance the psychological nature of the drama and to allow space to the female voice that is given less emphasis in the original. To reveal the differences between Turgenev’s play and the adapted version of it, I will try to answer the question of to what extent the changes introduced by Friel contribute to the debates on gender relations in contemporary Irish society.

P. B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of ‘The Sensitive-Plant’

This essay investigates the literary exchanges between the Irish poet and agronomist George William Tighe and Percy Bysshe Shelley in Pisa, where the former lived with Margaret King Mount Cashell, alias ‘Mrs Mason’, a radical Irish writer and former pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. After moving to Pisa in 1820, Shelley began daily visits to the Mason-Tighe household, sourcing from Tighe's library a wealth of reading material on agricultural chemistry and botany, alongside Irish political and historical titles. Tighe's previously unexamined papers showcase his interests in Irish and Italian literature, republicanism, botany, and agriculture and reveal his links with the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Taking as a case study the first poem Shelley composed in Pisa, I argue that Tighe's agricultural pursuits shaped Shelley's political and botanical imagination in ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ and exerted a significant influence on Shelley's later poetry as a whole.

The Personal Experience of Systemic Violence, Social Stigma and Structural Vulnerability in The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan

This article aims at examining how systemic violence is connected with social stigma and structural vulnerability in the social novel The Spinning Heart, which was published by the Irish writer Donal Ryan in 2012. This much lauded work describes the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and its devastating effects in a small rural town in Ireland from multiple viewpoints. Although there are twenty-one first-person narrators, one per chapter, Bobby Mahon stands out among them. In fact, the story of this construction foreman connects with the trajectories presented by the other characters. Through all of them, Ryan denounces the practices and procedures that powerful and privileged institutions, groups and individuals resort to in contemporary Ireland in order to assert control or authority over other less favoured members of society, thus fostering a climate of violence. Attention is drawn in this article to the nature of the patterns of aggression and hostility developed by the main characters in the novel but also to the adverse impact these unjust, oppressive and stigmatising patterns have on vulnerable subjects by burdening them physically, psychologically, culturally and financially. Michael Staudigl’s theories on systemic violence in Phenomenologies of Violence (2014), Imogen Tyler’s notions on social stigma in Stigma. The Machinery of Inequality (2020), Judith Butler’s ideas on structural vulnerability in Vulnerability in Resistance (2016) and Pierre Bourdieu’s views on patriarchy in Masculine Domination (2001) inform this work.

100 years of James Joyce’s women: wife, daughter and friend

ABSTRACT One hundred years after the publication of Ulysses (1922), the novel that would immortalize James Joyce, his ouvre continues to attract readers, intellectuals and artists as much as his private life still fascinates Joyceans, writers and a general public. The present contribution analyses three recent additions to the so-called ‘Joyce industry’, studying a series of fictional texts that feature the allegedly inexhaustible topic of the Irish writer’s complex relationship with women. Annabel Abbs’s The Joyce Girl (2016), Nuala O’Connor’s Nora (2021) and Kerri Maher’s The Paris Bookseller (2022) are the focus of the present contribution, three biofictions of, respectively, Joyce’s daughter, his wife Nora and of Sylvia Beach, the woman who published Ulysses in book form. It is our intention to assess the extent to which these narratives offer a retrieval of three women’s stories, to study them in the context of recent vindications of biofiction as a subgenre that must be distinguished from both biography and historical fiction and, above all, to account for the undeniable interest and even popularity of women related to Joyce among Joycean scholars but also among average readers.

Post-catastrophic Irelands in contemporary fiction

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between neoliberal late capitalism and the climate crisis in Irish writing. It focuses on the imagined post-climate change Ireland of Danny Denton’s novel The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow (2018), which shows a feudal society clinging to a Dublin sunk below rising waters. This analysis posits that The Earlie King employs “weird” methodologies to imagine an Ireland so wracked by environmental destruction that the transactional structures of capitalism which catalysed this destruction are rendered inoperable by it. It draws upon Mark Fisher’s work on “eerie” and “weird” modes of writing, and the partially overlapping theorisation of the “New Weird” fiction movement by participating authors Steph Swainston and China Miéville. Other fictional Irelands ravaged by the aftermaths of crisis are proliferating, in texts such as Sara Davis-Goff’s Last Ones Left Alive (2018), Oisín Fagan’s Nobber (2019) and David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014). Collectively, these texts display a direct inheritance of the 2008–9 financial crash. Luke Gibbons writes that Irish modernists “did not have to await the twentieth century to undergo the shock of modernity.” This is echoed today, in post-crash Irish writers’ lived experience of the depth of suffering which follows capitalist collapse.

Making St Brigit real in the early middle ages

Abstract: Brigit of Kildare is the first Irish saint to be celebrated in detail by Irish writers. Her cult enjoyed great depth and popularity. Nevertheless, Brigit's very existence has been doubted; she has been recast as a pre-Christian goddess despite an overwhelming disparity in evidence. This paper reframes our approaches to the origins of her cult through examining how the earliest writers understood her and made her real for their audiences, real through shaping her sanctity, her historicity and her family relationships. They placed Brigit along a gender continuum where sanctity intersected biology. Yet, Brigit has been treated differently to Irish male saints, becoming a secondary character in her own biographies, reductively overshadowed by a barely attested goddess. It is time for a revitalised appreciation of Brigit as an actual woman, depicted by her first hagiographers as pushing against the grain of an elitist and patriarchal society.

Making St Brigit real in the early middle ages

Brigit of Kildare is the first Irish saint to be celebrated in detail by Irish writers. Her cult enjoyed great depth and popularity. Nevertheless, Brigit’s very existence has been doubted; she has been recast as a pre-Christian goddess despite an overwhelming disparity in evidence. This paper reframes our approaches to the origins of her cult through examining how the earliest writers understood her and made her real for their audiences, real through shaping her sanctity, her historicity and her family relationships. They placed Brigit along a gender continuum where sanctity intersected biology. Yet, Brigit has been treated differently to Irish male saints, becoming a secondary character in her own biographies, reductively overshadowed by a barely attested goddess. It is time for a revitalised appreciation of Brigit as an actual woman, depicted by her first hagiographers as pushing against the grain of an elitist and patriarchal society.

Kicking Back: Negation of Enlightenment in Brian Dillon’s Objects in This Mirror

In this article I will examine aspects of the work of the Irish writer Brian Dillon which allow us to propose the continuing relevance, from an Irish perspective, of a strain of critical discourse which engages with the legacy of the Enlightenment. Specifically, I look primarily at Dillon’s 2014 essay collection Objects in This Mirror as well as his 2017 collection Essayism, with a view to establishing some key characteristics of his artistic project, while showing their compatibility with the cultural materialism of key scholars of the Frankfurt School, before finally making explicit the compatibility of Dillon’s work with the values which underpin the Irish Field Day project which has influenced Irish studies since the 1980s.

Tides of Influence: Bernard Shaw, the Irish Writer, and World Literature

Bernard Shaw occupies an unusual position in relation to Irish literature – his bona fides as a major world literary figure are acknowledged but his importance to Ireland remains ambiguous. Shaw himself admitted his resistance to narrow views of national identity: ‘I am a tolerably good European in the Nietzschean sense, but a very bad Irishman in the Sinn Fein or Chosen People sense’. Yet because of how he was influenced by and celebrated writers from elsewhere and his successful determination to leave his imprint on and to change the direction of global culture, Shaw is a fascinating case study for the myriad manners and processes by which the Irish writer joins the currents of world literature. This essay argues that Shaw's place in world literature has been misunderstood and seeks to reconsider how both Shaw and other Irish writers have been conceptualized in this context.

The Stylistic Features of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the Perspective of Corpus Stylistics

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was Irish writer James Joyces first published novel. The novel tells the story of the protagonist Stephen grow from a little child to an artist. Although Joyce uses third-person narration in the novel, he describes the surrounding society from Stephens point of view everywhere. When Stephen grew up, his thoughts gradually matured, and he gradually changed from obedience to rebellion. The stylistic features of the novel also changed a lot in this process. Corpus stylistics is a scientific stylistic research method which combines qualitative research with quantitative research. With the support of corpus stylistics, the author studies and analyzes the stylistic changes in the novels during Stephens childhood, adolescence and youth, and explains the causes of the corresponding characteristics. Through profound analysis, the author finally draws the conclusion: With the growth of the protagonist, the vocabulary of the novel becomes increasingly difficult and rich, the use of sentence grammar gradually becomes mature, and the difficulty of the text gradually increases. The style of the novel is closely related to the growth of the characters and the theme of each stage.

Anthony Trollope: an Irish writer

Anthony Trollope: an Irish writer

Posthumanism and Trauma: The Non-Anthropocentric World of Grief and Objects in Elena Ferrante and Catherine Dunne

ABSTRACT A popular author in Italy since the late 1990s, Irish writer Catherine Dunne, like Elena Ferrante, has engaged with topics of female emancipation, resistance to patriarchal values, and the mother-daughter relationship, among others. The popular and critical acclaim Dunne’s narrative has received in Italy — with her debut novel predating Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002) and her subsequent work anticipating many Ferrantean themes — begs for a thorough comparative appraisal of these two authors’ oeuvres. In this article, Ferrara first shows how Dunne’s debut novel In the Beginning and her second novel A Name for Himself anticipate important themes and tropes explored by Ferrante in her narrative, including the concept of smarginatura or dissolving margins. Secondly, Ferrara identifies the central place that grief and grievability play in both authors’ non-anthropocentric, anti-patriarchal poetics and in the construction of their female subjects. Through the lens of trauma studies and posthumanist theory, the paper reveals how Dunne and Ferrante’s characters overcome abandonment and loss through a productive interconnection with nonhuman objects and entities that are signifiers of grief, such as photographs, dolls and stuffed animals. The analysis concludes with a comparative case-study of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels (2011–2014) and Dunne’s The Years that Followed.

Irish Writing in Context

Review of Mária Kurdi (ed.), Critical Anthology for the Study of Modern Irish Literature (Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, 2003)

Displaced Geographies and Uncomfortable Truths: Unveiling Anglo-Irish Silenced Past in Bram Stoker’s “The Judge’s House” (1891)

Abstract Irish history and literature are plagued with silenced discourses and untold stories. The discourse of dominance, which maintained the Anglo-Irish élite in their ruling position for centuries, was built on the silencing of the repression exerted on the Catholic population. Fin-de-siècle Irish literature encapsulates, and portrays, such silencing, which the Anglo-Irish exerted through their dominance and abuse of the judiciary, the religious and the political statements. Postcolonial reinterpretations of these writings have helped unveil the perceptions of Irish society at the time, and how different Irish writers attempted to criticise this corruption. Bram Stoker’s Gothic story “The Judge’s House” (1891) explores how the past, albeit silenced, always returns to haunt the present, exposing Anglo-Irish anxieties over the return of the repressed native Catholic population, simultaneously denouncing the one-sided abuse conducted by an élite. This paper explores how narrative technique is used to convey the idea of the perennial return of the unsolved, guilty past. Silence over historical past continuously actualises the unresolved conflicts of the Anglo-Irish, generating the ghosts that haunt them.

‘My name is Death/But be na' fley'd’: Bishop Percy and the Ghosting of Robert Burns in Ireland

Recent decades have seen much scholarly exploration of Robert Burns’s impact on Irish writers, particularly those connected with the province of Ulster. Less explored is the antagonistic and opportunistic response to Burns in Ireland by a number of poets, editors and patrons. This article will chart Thomas Percy (1729–1811) and his literary circle’s responses in the Dromore area of County Down to Burns’s roles as poet, song collector and literary celebrity. It will argue that Percy and his associates reacted to Burns’s work and literary afterlife with a two-pronged strategy. First, they sought to emulate Burns through publishing or providing financial assistance to a number of texts of poetry and song. Secondly, they sought to establish a network of patrons and authors who employed literature as a means to portray a stable and loyal Ireland after the Union of 1800/1. As well as a heavily revised edition of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1795), the group created platforms for a variety of poets including Thomas Stott, Hugh Porter and Patrick Brontë. This strategy sought to invoke Burns directly as an influence, but also implicitly to exclude his legacy from shaping the writing of the circle. This article suggests that the strategy was not fully successful. Despite the generally good reception of Percy’s fourth edition of the Reliques, the other authors in the circle did not always receive praise for their work, and writers like Stott were criticised for their weak, sycophantic verse. It will claim that for some of this circle, such as Hugh Porter, Burns’s influence played a major role in shaping the promotion of their writing careers. However, for many, there was an attempt to manage the trajectory of the writer’s work and career that minimised the agency and reach of the author. Ultimately, notwithstanding the attempts to quell and minimise Robert Burns’s impact in County Down, his inspiration remained powerful and difficult to contain.