Literature Of Ireland Research Articles

An Irish Dante, Part I: Possible Precursors to the Commedia

An Irish Dante, Part I: Possible Precursors to the Commedia Daragh O’Connell (bio) 2021 marked the septicentennial celebrations of Dante’s death in Ravenna. Despite the restrictions brought about by the global pandemic, scholars and creative practitioners around the world ensured that the anniversary did not pass unnoticed, with online and in-person conferences, seminars, readings, performances, adaptations, translations and dialogues taking place on a daily basis. In Ireland too Dante’s anniversary was marked by a series of initiatives both scholarly and creative: the establishment at University College Cork of the Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland foregrounded a series of activities and research initiatives, including the Dante Dialogue Series of 2021;1 the Irish artist Liam Ó Broin exhibited his Dante-inspired 100 lithographs, Dante’s Divine Comedy, at Dublin Castle; and the musician and composer Elliot Murphy premiered his Dante’s Inferno on 30 September 2021.2 Though the Florentine poet never once mentions Ireland in his masterpiece, which he called simply the Commedia (the ‘Divine’ appellation is a much later addition), there is a curious sense in which Ireland played a not-insignificant role in both the poem’s rich imaginary landscape and in its afterlife in the creative sphere, providing an Irish Dante via Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Heaney that ‘achieves things that are beyond the grasp of the English or Americans’.3 Why Dante and Ireland? What links Dante to this island specifically? Let me state from the outset that Ireland’s relationship with Dante is uniquely special; our experiencing of Dante is one that is protean, indeed vital to the creative energies of our best artists, mostly the literary ones. In Part II of this essay, I will trace the presence of Dante in Irish literature of the twentieth century and after. First, however, in Part I, I must turn to the rich Irish medieval tradition of vision literature, which in some cases predates Dante by several centuries, to see possible direct and indirect influences emerge. In some cases these texts stand as eloquent precursors to Dante’s poem. Since our very earliest literature in Ireland, the afterlife – its representations and configurations (Navigatio Sancti Brendani; Visio 125 Tnugdali) – [End Page 125] has exerted an enduring hold on the Irish imagination and indeed influenced European cultural expression in the Middle Ages. But let’s start in purgatory – St Patrick’s, that is. Umbiferi prefazi (Paradiso, XXX, 78) – Shadowy prefaces Legend states that while St Patrick was on Station Island he had a vision of the afterlife in a cave on the island. Station Island is an island in Lough Derg, in County Donegal. Legend attributes the colour of the lake (‘Red Lake’ in Irish) to the blood of a monster-serpent killed by St Patrick. Station Island has long been a place of Catholic pilgrimage. In 1184 a monk, who signed himself ‘H’ at the monastery of Saltrey near Cambridge, wrote about the experiences of the Irish knight Owein during his visit to Lough Derg: the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii.4 Some forty years before H penned his story, Owein was allowed to enter the cave on the island and soon found himself surrounded by demons and cast into the fire. He was delivered by calling on the name of Christ. After multiple periods of torture, the knight finally made his way across a narrow bridge over hell and entered an earthly paradise, where souls await their entry into heaven. Owein returned to the world to tell others of his ordeal. Various versions and translations of the story became widely read across Europe. No one knows the source of Owein’s visions. One possibility is that medicinal (‘purgative’) herbs were burned in the cave. Some of these could have led to hallucinations. Ireland has evidence of ancient ‘sweathouses’ that were likely used in this way. The idea of St Patrick’s purgatory became famous, and Lough Derg soon became a popular place of pilgrimage. The Tractatus became arguably the most popular vision of purgatory in the Middle Ages and was quickly disseminated across Europe through vernacular translations. There is clear evidence in Italy of this identification of St Patrick with purgatory. One of...

Eglantina Remport, Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre: Art, Drama, Politics

The impact of the Irish Literary Revival on the development of English and Irish language literature in Ireland and on modern literary criticism cannot be overestimated. Albeit challenging to quantify in its totality, critical appraisal of the Revival and its key figures are wide-ranging. They take the form of biographies on the life and work of individual artists and thinkers: Roy Foster’s tome on W. B. Yeats (W. B. Yeats, A Life, vol. II, The Arch-Poet, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003...

Staging the Authentic and the Theatre of Universality in J.M. Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen

This paper argues that J.M. Synge’s [1] The Shadow of the Glen can be used to sharpen our understanding of the relationships between regionalism, universality and the authentic in dramatic literature. My suggestion is that the key component in that tension is Synge’s presentation of what was to be considered authentic, since literature in Ireland was real exercise in fostering national consciousness. I argue that Synge’s representation of the regional drifts from issues of “authenticity” not because it is not a factual account of real events, but because it is not so heavily and so self-consciously authenticated. As shall be argued below, The Shadow of the Glen is concerned with the local, presented with a universal interest. Synge universalizes the characters’ experiences as he revisits the golden past of the Gaelic culture. This is not to suggest that the playwright was not authentic, but instead that his play shows the author’s self-awareness about how literary constructions of the authentic function. He understood that the representation of the regional to a metropolitan audience will always require a negotiation of the relationship between reality and audience’s expectation. Synge managed that tension not by asserting the authenticity of his narrative but by insisting on the authenticity of his own outlook as an artist. This self-consciousness in the presentation and reconstruction of the clash between the regional and the global is an example of how we can think of Synge as a modernist writer.

Learning from the Literature on Social Work and Social Care with Children: The Utility of a Jansson Framework of Policy-Practice

ABSTRACT This article presents critical commentary on the relationship between wider policy in Ireland for children, and the practice of social workers and social care workers who work with children on the ground level. An overview of the current policy context for children is achieved through a focused commentary on the literature. This operates around three broad themes. First, the pervasive influence of a children’s rights paradigm on policy in Ireland must be accounted for. Second, policy that is manifest as a feature of regulation, audit, accountability and compliance culture is considered. Finally, an overview of key policy related to specific areas of practice with children in Ireland is mapped out. Following a review of the literature, the utility of a Jansson ([2017]. Empowerment series: Becoming an effective policy advocate (8th ed.). Boston: Centage Learning) Framework of Policy-Practice is explored for practitioners who seek to make better links between policy and their practice in the field. The proposition is that the Framework offers one theoretical mechanism for practitioners who are concerned with strengthening policy and practice links. The discussion in this paper is timely and relevant in the context of increasing external regulation defined by a cultural shift towards audit, compliance and accountability, and related processes of professionalisation. To date, development of literature in Ireland for social professionals on the relationship between policy and practice remains broadly neglected.

Electronic literature in Ireland

Electronic literature in Ireland

Thorns and roses: The international dimension of ‘Old English’ literature in Ireland

AbstractThe amount of extant early modern “Old English” literature written in Ireland in English is scant and little referenced by modern scholars, and its historical and political dimensions are often ignored. This paper surveys the important place of the Old English community in early modern English and Irish letters. The modern, international, often Catholic, and renaissance dimension to Old English art, life, and letters in the Pale and beyond is emphasized. The Old English always looked beyond Ireland and England while directly or subtly referring to their own tumultuous affairs in their writing.

Carleton, Kavanagh and the South Ulster Landscape c. 1800 — 1950

The short stories of William Carleton and the novels and poetry of Patrick Kavanagh are examined for the light they throw on the personality of the south Ulster landscape. Carleton wrote about the region in the prefamine decades; Kavanagh for the years before the second world war. Both writers, therefore, were witness to changes in society and landscape in one of the most formative periods in the making of modem Ireland. Irish geographers might profitably focus their attention on analyses of the sense of place and regional literature in Ireland.

Modernist Violence

Sarah Cole argues that violence in modernist literature challenges aesthetic, rhetorical and formal practices to both spur innovation and invigorate convention. Presenting violence, modernists negotiated between the poles of disenchantment (materialist reduction) and enchantment (idealist plenitude). The book addresses a variety of texts from the international dynamite novels of the fin de siècle to independence literature in Ireland and war writing in Britain. At the Violet Hour supplements trauma theory, arguing that violence elicits creativity, presenting itself as an origin story, a raison d’être for writing. Cole argues that violence and literary form “intersect and produce one another,” suggesting that violence elicits a literary kind of communication and that this literary expression itself produces another kind of violence. Not since Richard Slotkin’s monumental Regeneration through Violence has a literary critic so effectively expanded our understanding of literary violence.

Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives by Martin Dowling

Reviewed by: Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives by Martin Dowling Katherine O'Callaghan (bio) TRADITIONAL MUSIC AND IRISH SOCIETY: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES, by Martin Dowling. Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishers, 2014. xvii + 350 pp. $119.96 cloth, $47.96 paper. James Joyce's interest in the history of Irish music is evident in his "Early Commonplace Book," a notebook in which he collected information and quotations between 1903 and 1912.1 Under the four categories of verse, biography and history, fiction, and speeches, Joyce lists hundreds of texts relating to Ireland and Irish culture. Evidently he was gathering information on traditional Irish music, since there are references to many sources including Patrick Weston Joyce's Ancient Irish Music and Song: A Collection of Songs in the Irish Language Set to Music, Alfred Perceval Graves's The Irish Songbook, With Original Irish Airs, and George Sigerson's Bards of the Gael and Gall.2 From the evocation of "the old Irish tonality" in his short story, "The Dead," to the "native Doric" of Ulysses to the cyclical form and thematic concerns of Finnegans Wake, the imprint of his knowledge of traditional Irish music is apparent throughout Joyce's writing (D 210, U 11.991). While his many allusions to Irish song, and to the melodies that Thomas Moore created by penning English words to old Irish airs, are well known, the overall art form of traditional Irish music has been something of an absent presence in Joyce criticism. It has received considerably less attention than classical, opera, vocal, and music-hall traditions. This disparity stems in part from the critical lens of the early responders to Joyce, who placed his work, in particular, the extraordinarily innovative writing of Finnegans Wake, in the context of the European avant garde, often at the expense of recognizing the influence of an Irish cultural heritage on his linguistic and formal experimentations. The lack of critical attention to the topic may also reflect the gap that developed between the fields of traditional music and the study of literature in Ireland. Contextualizing Joyce's work in a truly comprehensive Irish cultural [End Page 456] framework, including a broad musical overview, in fact, remains a task to be undertaken. For this reason alone, a book promising to place Joyce within the historical and cultural framework of Ireland is welcomed. The scope of Martin Dowling's Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives is extremely ambitious; he traces the historical and socioeconomic events that influenced the development of traditional Irish music from the eighteenth century to the peace process in the North of Ireland in the last decades of the twentieth. Dowling brings the perspective of both a practicing musician and a historian to the field, which distinguishes his book from existing work on traditional music; in it, he sets out to demonstrate that "[t]raditional music is not the survival of some ancient and timeless manifestation of the essence of Irishness or the Celtic spirit, but rather a modern pursuit that kept time with the dramatic and sometimes violent modernisation of Irish society in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (12). Despite the chronological span of the book's remit, one of the five chapters is devoted to "James Joyce and Traditional Song," while the preceding chapter discusses music at the time of the Irish literary revival, another context that has been inadequately explored in Joyce studies. Given its front-cover image of Joyce playing a guitar, Dowling's book promises more in this area than it can be expected to deliver. The discussion of Joyce is limited to two stories from Dubliners, "The Dead" and "A Mother," and to the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses. This is not to suggest that some of the issues raised in the Joyce chapter do not have value in the wider debate on the role of traditional Irish music in Joyce's works. For example, Dowling weighs in on the issue concerning the absence of a "highly developed" art music in Ireland (179). The process whereby an indigenous musical tradition was quarried so as to provide the bones of inspiration for a new art music in the European classical...

News, Awards, and Announcements

Probably, you are enjoying the wonderful summer by reading books, books, and more books. We, too, are busy reading and enjoying summer so the news this time around is brief.In June, Barbro Lindgren was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial award at the Stockholm Concert Hall. This award, founded in 2002 by the Swedish Arts Council, is the world’s largest award for children’s and young adult literature at 5 million SEK (about $700,000 CAD). If it sounds suspicious that a Swedish writer with the same surname as the Swedish award’s Swedish namesake has won, rest assured that it truly is open to the world. In fact, Barbro is the first Swede among the 14 recipients (12 other countries represented). The selection process begins 15 months before the award with nominations coming from very select nominating bodies in various countries.ALMA: http://www.alma.se/en/Nominating bodies: http://www.alma.se/en/Nominations/Nominating-bodies/Did you know about Ireland’s Laureate na nÓg (Children’s Literature Laureate)? Eoin Colfer, best known for his Artemis Fowl books, is the third laureate to hold the 2-year term. He will continue the project’s aims of introducing and raising the profile of high quality children’s literature in Ireland. According to Wikipedia, the only other Children’s Laureate equivalents are in the UK and the USA but it does look like Australia has one as well as Sweden in the non-English world (somebody should update wikipedia entry …).See: http://childrenslaureate.ie/Previous Laureate na nÓg: http://childrenslaureate.ie/laureate-na-nog/We are proud that our very own Coutts Education Library at the University of Alberta recently launched their newly renovated Canadian Children’s Book Centre (CCBC) collection. It is “one of 5 regional collections of Canadian children’s and young adult materials” with the others in Toronto, Vancouver (UBC), Winnipeg (UManitoba), and Halifax (Mt. Saint Vincent Univ.).Launch Photos and Blog post: http://blogs.library.ualberta.ca/ednews/index.php/2014/07/02/2765/CCBC collections: http://www.bookcentre.ca/library/regional_collections/Also in the Coutts education library’s CCBC, Deakin editor Robert Desmarais had an opportunity to interview Jill Bryant during the 2014 TD Canadian Children’s Book Week. See the interview here (6:53 duration): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtdX4fj-CB4And yet one more CCBC-related note, the call for submissions for the Spring 2015 edition of “Best Books for Kids & Teens (BBKT) is out. The deadline is October 1, 2014. http://www.bookcentre.ca/news/call_for_submissions_best_books_kids_teens_spring_2015It struck me recently that a main source of summer reading for many Canadians is the biannual Cross Country Checkup Book List episode on CBC radio. So, I wondered if there were suggestions this summer for our readers. While most of the recommendations are for adults, there are a few that recall childhood reads (e.g. “Anne of Green Gables,” and “Who has seen the wind”) and a few suggestions:- "I think every high school student should be given a copy of Chester Brown's Louis Riel" (recommended by guest Craig Taylor)- “Anything by Charles De Lint ...pretty much the creator of Urban fantasy and intertwines stories of street kids with Gaelic and Aboriginal mythology” (from listener D. Price)http://www.cbc.ca/checkup/book-lists/2014/07/03/june-29-2014-summer-book-list/Have a great summer reading in the yard, on the couch, at the beach, in the family car, on a hammock, or wherever your summer reading finds you.David SulzDavid is a Public Services Librarian at University of Alberta and liaison librarian to Economics, Religious Studies, and Social Work. He has university studies in Library Studies, History, Elementary Education, Japanese, and Economics; he formerly taught in schools and museums. His interests include physical activity, music, home improvements, and above all, things Japanese.

Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South by Kathryn Stelmach (review)

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South by Kathryn Stelmach Sarah Dyne Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South. By Kathryn Stelmach Artuso. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2013. 206 pp. $70. A cursory glance at the contents of practically any journal or CFP listing reveals increasing scholarly interest in cultural and literary exchange around the globe. By applying the lens of transatlanticism and reading texts in conversation rather than isolation, we are often rewarded with new understandings of how these exchanges complicate or broaden our perceptions of national identities and important moments in time. In Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South, Kathryn Stelmach Artuso contributes to this ever-expanding dialogue by considering historical and literary connections and exchanges between the US South and Ireland. She draws parallels between the Irish Literary Revival, “which pitted the rational, mature, and masculine Saxon against the sentimental, childish, and feminine Celt,” and the Southern Literary Renaissance, driven by a desire to “subvert the idealizing fiction that perpetuated the ‘moonlight and magnolias’ myth of the Old South, the plantation legend of paternal-istic masters, happy slaves, and medieval gallantry,” opposing the “oppressive outside influences of the North” (xiv). This project ultimately seeks to reassess regional or “minor literature” in order to raise “new questions of gender and genre in Irish and southern literature,” focusing on “the women writers and the literary forms often ascribed a minor role in their region’s revivals” in order to examine how their contributions challenged dominant patriarchal systems (xvii). The first chapter of Artuso’s book, “Minor Literature Comes of Age,” offers an impressive, sweeping account of the historical parallels and connections between the southern United States and Ireland, ranging from Irish involvement in Caribbean colonies and rebellion to ancestral ties between Ireland and the US, and later friendships and intellectual exchanges between writers like Mark Twain and Lady Augusta Gregory, William Faulkner and James Joyce, and Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen. Artuso adopts an interdisciplinary strategy in constructing her critical framework, addressing seminal texts on the subject not only by literary [End Page 169] scholars, but also historians and linguists, including Grady McWhiney’s controversial Cracker Culture, Kieran Quinlan’s Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South, and works by David N. Doyle and Kerby Miller, Patrick Sims-Williams, and David Gleeson. This critical overview would prove especially useful to those who are new to conversations about the intimate relationship between Ireland and the US South, as Artuso succeeds in constructing a well-rounded yet concise discussion of cultural exchange without denying the unique qualities of each region. The chapters that follow are thoughtfully organized so that the reader is lead from the plantation-era South of Gone with the Wind, to the transformative world of Ireland, and finally to Harlem via Ireland. In “Transatlantic Tara: Irish Maternalism and Motherland in Gone with the Wind,” Artuso responds to critics who see Gone with the Wind as a nostalgic and romanticized depiction of the antebellum era. Artuso instead aligns the “under-valued” Margaret Mitchell with high modernism, arguing that the novel was actually written “as a specific critique of this ‘moonlight and magnolias’ myth” and claiming that critics too often overlook “the truly volatile, anti-nostalgic, and revolutionary nature of the novel, in which an Irish anti-heroine, both magnetic and repulsive, disrupts colonizing dynamics and evaluates subordinate terms” (xxi, 41, 44). The third and fourth chapters are by far the most convincing sections of Transatlantic Renaissances, as Artuso reveals her intimate knowledge of and genuine interest in the works and lives of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen. “‘A Child of this Century’: Rites of Passage in the Friendship and Fiction of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen” serves as a bridging chapter between the South and Ireland, as it explores a relationship that proved mutually influential and beneficial. Artuso’s thoughtful and thorough discussion of the intellectual and affectionate relationship between the two authors is where her project most clearly applies a transatlantic approach, while “Anglo-Irish Revivals: Doubling and Defamiliarization in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day and The House in Paris” offers a skillfully written close...

Healthcare professionals' experiences of the implementation of integrated care pathways

The purpose of this paper is to report on a study that explores healthcare professionals' experiences of the implementation of integrated care pathways (ICPs). This study used a phenomenological research approach with a purposive sample of ten multi-disciplinary healthcare professionals across two acute hospitals in Ireland. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews and analysed using Colazzi's framework. The findings of the study are presented under four themes: buy-in from all disciplines, multidisciplinary communication, service-user involvement, and audit of ICPs. These themes emanated from the questions asked at interview. The limitations of the study include the small sample size and the use of two different interviewers across the sites. The inexperience of the interviewers is acknowledged as a limitation as the probing of some questions could have been improved. In addition the themes of the findings were predetermined by the use of the interview guide. Changes in existing institutional structures and cultures are required when introducing ICPs. It is necessary for senior management in organisations to lead by example. They also need to identify where support can be offered, such as in the provision of an ICP facilitator, education sessions in relation to ICPs and the development of strategies to improve multi-disciplinary buy-in and participation. The findings of this study respond to a gap in the literature in Ireland on the experiences of healthcare professionals who have implemented ICPs. Key findings of the study are the perception that the doctor is pivotal in driving the implementation of ICPs, yet the doctor was not always interested in this responsibility.

The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism (review)

Brown, Terence. The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. $78.00 he. $29.99 sc. 281pp.Irish cultural and literary studies are fraught and contested fields of inquiry. In the 1970s, the 'revisionist' debate about the objectivity and effects of historiography divided practitioners and audiences. More recendy, feminist approaches and postcolonial studies have josded for position within the academy, prompting divergent analyses and stimulating exchanges. In his engaging introduction to The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism, Terence Brown positions this study and his broader body of work, eschewing theoretical lenses and perspectives. His earlier contributions Studies include books on Louis MacNeice.W B.Yeats, and poetry, but is best known for the ground-breaking Irefond: A and Cultural History (1981), a seminal text where Brown's pioneering disciplinary perspective situated Hterature in its social and poHtical texts. The book under review comprises a coUection of twenty-one essays on a range of mosdy canonical authors, dating from 1990 onwards. includes essays on poets such as Louis MacNeice, Patrick Seamus Heaney, John Hewitt, Michael Longley, Brendan KenneUy, Muldoon and Derek Mahon. Other essays focus on the fiction of McGahern, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien and John whue the plays of Brian Friel are also considered. Remaining essays the Literary Revival, writing and World War I, modernism in 1930s, the Irish Dylan Thomas, Hubert Butler, and the Irish Shakespeare.While The Literature of Ireland situates both authors and literary texts the context of political and artistic developments in Ireland and aUy, what is most pleasing about these essays is Brown's attentiveness to expHcation of individual prose passages and poems. Indeed, when notes of Seamus Heaney that he has known from the beginning that the peculiar power of poetry is to offer a kind of Hberating music, a lyric occasion which can seem free of all moral motions, secure in its own (190), could as easuy be describing his own critical work in this book. Brown is strikingly insightful and at his most engaging when offering close readings of, for example, the influence of the Puritan tradition in the poetry of Louis MacNeice or on that poet's response to World War II. Brown's evident delight and his nuanced of selected extracts provide lucid and informative readings for his readers. In addition, in his introduction, Brown highfights his settled sense that the study of literature and culture necessitates awareness of developments in the neighboring island (11). His consideration of writers in the context of cultural and political developments in Britain and the rest of Europe aUows him generate interesting and contextuafized readings.Early on in The Literature of Ireland, Brown distances himself from the force field of postcolonial interpretations that has recently dominated studies; however, his summary of this field does not suggest a thorough engagement with the possibUities of this critical framework within the context. Later, his reading of Daniel Corkery as expounding a nationafist ideology that accommodated certain modernist concerns seems precisely a site where an additional postcolonial lens would prove illuminating and enriching. By articulating his exclusion of postcolonial theory in the intraduction, the limiting effects of non-engagement can seem more difficult to argue with in the subsequent essays; but these effects are constraining nonetheless. …

The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism (review)

Reviewed by: The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism Terence Killeen (bio) The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism by Terence Brown. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 281 pp. $78.00. This volume raises in an acute and interesting way—perhaps without really intending to—the issue of a national literature. What is it? How is it defined? Is it just a matter of a number of writers who are born in the same country over an extended or a restricted time span (Bloom’s “the same people living in the same place”—U 12.1422-23), or is there something more meaningful involved, some unifying force and shared historical circumstances that make of these writers more than just the total of their individual contributions? The current dominance of postcolonial theory in Irish literary studies is due in part to its explanatory force in the face of the heterogeneous collection of texts that constitutes Irish literature.1 Postcolonialism provides a unified field theory that accounts for all these diverse phenomena. Even writers who do not fall under such a banner can be recruited to it negatively, as giving voice to the ideology of the opposite side, of the oppressor. While one may have reservations as to some of postcolonialism’s emphases, it has certainly put Irish studies generally on a new and more secure footing. The Literature of Ireland is an interesting example of what can happen when a critic decides to dispense with that or any other [End Page 656] explanatory paradigm—while still wanting to address the full range of twentieth-century Irish literature. It is a collection of twenty previously published essays by Terence Brown, and one previously delivered lecture, on some sixteen Irish writers. The essays succeed one another, each one intelligent, well argued, and well written. But one feels the absence of any connecting thread or link that would make of these pieces—or these writers—something more than the sum of their parts. As a counterbalance to the postcolonialist emphasis, Brown does stress the British dimension of some the writers he discusses, but this amounts to rather less than a critical program or position. In a fascinating introduction, Brown, Fellow Emeritus and former Professor of Anglo Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin,2 goes far to explain the theoretical agnosticism that characterizes his position. It could be said to follow on a crisis of religious faith, whereby Brown lost belief in the evangelical Protestantism of his Northern Irish upbringing.3 This event was accompanied by a complex crisis of political faith: having broken with the unionism that had also characterized his background, he became equally disillusioned with left-wing politics over the British Labour government’s craven surrender to the forces of right-wing extremism in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. (This is a position those of us around at the time will understand.) Because of these and other experiences, Brown is suspicious of postcolonialism (much of the introduction is spent rebutting an apparent attempt to identify him with it, and the first essay engages with it systematically) without substituting any other explanatory paradigm in its place. The absence of a central guiding thread is not merely a matter of theory; there is no writerly spirit presiding over the work either. Emphatically, James Joyce does not fulfill such a role here: just one essay is devoted to his work, though he does loom large in two others. Brown’s Joyce essay does at least demonstrate that he is not averse to using history in his texts, while refusing to draw any political or theoretical lessons from it. Thus, “Joyce’s Magic Lantern” (an essay that first appeared in this journal4) uses the episode of the alleged apparitions of Our Lady at Knock, County Mayo, in 1879,5 to throw a prospective light, as it were, on Mr. Kernan’s aversion, in “Grace,” to the “magic-lantern business” involved in the Gardiner Street retreat on which he is about to embark (D 171). The two other essays not directly on Joyce do explore important facets of the writer’s work and influence. “Music: The Cultural Issue” devotes much discussion to Thomas Moore’s Irish...

Comparative Literature in Ireland and Worldwide – An Interview with Professor Declan Kiberd

Professor Declan Kiberd is Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin, where he has taught for many years after having taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury and Trinity College Dublin. He is a director of the Abbey Theatre. He has been Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College Cambridge, and a visiting professor at Duke University and the Sorbonne. He has also been Director of the Yeats International Summer School (1985-7), Patron of the Dublin Shaw Society (1995-2000), a columnist with The Irish Times (1985-7) and The Irish Press (1987-93), the presenter of the RTÉ Arts programme, Exhibit A(1984-6), and a regular essayist and reviewer in The Irish Times, TLS,London Review of Books and The New York Times. Professor Kiberd is the author of many books including his seminal Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1995), Irish Classics (2000), and The Irish Writer and the World (2005), as well as Ulysses and Us, published just this year, and he was also the editor of the Penguin edition of theAnnotated Students’ Ulysses (1992). He is one of the most important voices in Irish Studies. Beyond that, he is also a prominent public intellectual, and he continues to be an inspirational figure for generations of students. In this interview, we discussed the relevance of the comparative approach to Irish Studies and the future of Comparative Literature in Ireland and worldwide.

The Politics and Poetics of Irish Children's Literature (review)

Reviewed by: The Politics and Poetics of Irish Children's Literature Jeanette Roberts Shumaker (bio) The Politics and Poetics of Irish Children's Literature. By Nancy Watson. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. In his foreword to The Politics and Poetics of Irish Children's Literature, the distinguished Irish critic Declan Kiberd observes that "Nancy Watson is not exaggerating when she suggests that the re-examination by our younger contemporary historians of painful themes in Irish history, from the Great Famine to the Easter rebellion, was rehearsed first of all in books" for children (vii). Based on the first doctoral dissertation about children's literature ever produced at University College Dublin, Watson's fascinating book is "helping to open up the academic study of children's literature in Ireland," according to Kiberd (viii). Watson explains why she focuses on novels for children and young adults written during the second half of the twentieth century. She contends that before 1950, Irish authors writing for adults—such as Yeats, Joyce, Synge, and Beckett—were subversive enough that children's authors didn't need to be (166). In addition, Watson refers to critics who argue that the children's book market in Ireland was too small before 1950 for authors to rely on it; as a result, early Irish children's writers targeted readers in the United Kingdom and the United States. In 1946 Kenneth Reddin said writing for a foreign market forced those books to become "completely stage-Irish" and, hence, of limited interest today (Watson 165). Drawing mainly on postcolonial theory and the Frankfurt school, Watson discusses realist, historical fiction and fantasy novels by Eilis Dillon, Marita Conlon-McKenna, Cormac MacRaois, Mark O'Sullivan, Siobhan Parkinson, and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne. She also devotes a chapter to poems for children by Matthew Sweeney. Watson starts by discussing childhood; she asks how it differs from adulthood and briefly surveys Irish writers' such as Joyce and Frank McCourt's attempts to represent childhood. Watson analyzes Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's 1999 novel The Dancers Dancing, contending that in the wild raspberries scene the novel manages "to recapture the authentic sensation and the emotion of that moment for the child in it"—a rare achievement of poetic language (14). The child's Wordsworthian freedom from convention will be the basis for Watson's argument throughout her study that recent Irish children's novels contain revolutionary ideas. Eilis Dillon sets her books in post-colonial Ireland; Watson posits that "just as most of the child protagonists in Eilis Dillon's stories are on the threshold between childhood and adulthood, so the new Irish state at the time … is learning how to move from dependence to independence, from nationalism to true liberty. The nation too is growing up" (20). In The Sea Wall (1994), the islanders of Inisharcain are reluctant to bring in an engineer to repair the old sea wall: "Colonialism has become so ingrained that they have difficulty adapting to a new way of living and are prepared to put their island at risk" (21). In novels such as The Cruise of the Santa Maria [End Page 405] (1991) and The Singing Cave (1992), Dillon tries to "reconcile for Irish children their European identity with an understanding and admiration for their own Irish identity" (31). Marita Conlon-McKenna's Under the Hawthorn Tree (1990) concerns children trying to survive the Famine of the 1840s. Watson argues that the novel deviates from the traditional view of peasants as victims of Anglo-Irish and English landowners; Conlon-McKenna thus "encourages Irish children to change from being the victims of Irish history to being the authors of it" (46). Watson compares Eily as the novel's "main focalizer" to Huckleberry Finn, since both children stimulate the reader to form a nontraditional perspective on controversial events (48). In Wildflower Girl (1992), the sequel to Under the Hawthorn Tree, Eily's younger sister Peggy emigrates to the United States to become a maid, as many thousands of women did around the time of the Famine (57). Watson points out that Conlon-McKenna celebrates Irish women's history that scholars often overlook (58). Conlon-McKenna's final book in her trilogy, Fields of...

'To Vary the Timehonoured Adage': Ulysses and the Proverb

Ulysses contains over 130 locutions from the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs , but this abundance of proverbial sayings and familiar sayings has received relatively little direct critical attention. This essay examines the importance of proverbs to Ulysses , paying particular attention to Joyce's repeated habit of varying or adapting the form of the proverbs he quotes. These alterations have, it is argued, significant implications for our understanding of the proverb as a form and Ulysses itself. By misquoting and misattributing proverbs from a variety of literary and non-literary sources, Joyce raises important questions about linguistic agency, about the distinctions between high literature and low popular culture and about the politics of literature in Ireland. The authorship of proverbs, their relation to individual utterance and collective wisdom is shown to be as complex and richly ambiguous as Joyce's stylistic achievement.

The oral tradition and literature in Ireland and Scotland: Popular culture in Robert Burns and Charles Maturin

In a much recounted anecdote, the writer James Hogg recalled a meeting between Sir Walter Scott and Hogg’s mother. Responding to Scott’s interest in whether a particular song she had sung had ever been printed, Mrs Hogg scolded Scott’s interest in printing what were orally transmitted ballads: [There] war never ane o’ my sangs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel’, an’ ye have spoilt them awthegither. They were made for singin’ an’ no for readin’; but ye hae broken the charm noo, an’ they’ll never sung mair. The anecdote serves perfectly to show the uneasy relationship between the enthusiastic antiquarian, eager to ‘preserve’ remnants of an oral culture, and an actual practitioner of that culture, suspicious of someone who transposes, and thereby destroys, songs from an oral culture into a textual one.

Memory and Belonging: Irish Writers, Radio, and the Nation

When Seamus Heaney accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, his address in Stockholm, Crediting Poetry made explicit a connection between radio and literature in Ireland. Heaney's charming evocation of the earliest ; intrusion of the outside world into the small secure world of his farmhouse childhood in County Derry begins and ends with the radio as sound. When he refers to an aerial wire attached to the topmost branch of the chestnut tree we immediately recall the emblematic chestnut tree in the poem Clearances and the deft transition from radio to literature is complete. Heaney specifically links his earliest radio memories in Crediting Poetry to World War II, a time which brought enormous advances in technology? nearly all of which, incidentally, were aural: sonar and radio, radio telegraphy and telephony, and radio itself. In his address, Heaney quickly progresses to a discussion of the basis of most aural communication?spoken language. As the radio dial spun, foreign languages flickered to life, as dialects of his own language which, he suggests, offered?a stability conferred by a musically sat isfying order of sounds:

:The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature

The literature of Ireland displays an exceptional richness and diversity - whether in Irish or English, by native Irish and Anglo-Irish writers or by outsiders like Edmund Spenser whose works were deeply imbued with the country in which he lived and wrote. In over 2,000 entries, the Companion to Irish Literature surveys the Irish literary landscape across some sixteen centuries, describing its features and landmarks. Entries range from ogam writing, developed in the 4th century, to the fiction, poetry, and drama of the l990s; and from Cu Chulainn to James Joyce. There are accounts of authors as early as Adomnan, 7th century Abbot of Iona, up to contemporary writers such as Roddy Doyle, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, and Edna O'Brien. Individual entries are provided for all major works, from Tain Bo Cuailnge - the Ulster saga reflecting the Celtic Iron Age - to Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, O Cadhain's Cre na Cille, and Banville's The Book of Evidence. The Companion also illuminates the historical contexts of these writers, and the events which sometimes directly inspired them - the Famine of 1845-8, which provided a theme for novelists, poets, and memoirists from William Carleton to Patrick Kavanagh and Peadar O Laoghaire; the founding of the Abbey Theatre and its impact on playwrights such as J. M. Synge and Padraic Colum; the Easter Rising that stirred Yeats to the 'terrible beauty' of 'Easter 1916'. It offers a wealth of information on general topics, ranging from the stage Irishman to Catholicism, Protestantism, the Irish language, and university education in Ireland; and on genres such as annals, bardic poetry, and folksong. The majority of entries include a succinct bibliography, and the volume also provides a chronology and maps.