Modern Irish Research Articles

Early Modern Irish miscellanea

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/ERIU.2019.69.8 Ériu lxix (2019) 155–170 Royal Irish Academy EARLY MODERN IRISH MISCELLANEA DAMIAN MCMANUS* Department of Irish,Trinity College Dublin (A) DIL nemdaid ‘a dweller in (possessor of) heaven?’: a ghostword The following quatrain is found (as qt. 18) in the poem Fersaighecht an tempuil thall published without translation by Meyer (1913, 172–5) from Laud 615 p. 7: Nem abus 7 nem tall in Coimdi cia da tabrann as é as nemdaidh uile dā nem d’fagbāil d’ēnduine.1 Citing only the first three lines of this quatrain, DIL (s.v. nemdaid) offers the meaning ‘a dweller in (possessor of) heaven?’, with a query for nemdaidh, apparently taking it as nemdae ‘heavenly’ + the agent suffix -aid.This interpretation was presumably suggested by the context,possibly by the first line, which speaks of a heaven here and a heaven beyond/above, whence perhaps the idea of a complete (uile) ‘heaven dweller’ being someone who enjoys both. Whether that be the case or not, the proposed sense ‘heaven dweller’ presents a number of problems. In the context, a translation along the lines suggested might be a possibility were the last line to read énduine do-gheibh dá nem ‘anyone who attains to two heavens’,but it is difficult to see how nemdaidh in the sense suggested works with the attested verbal-noun phrase,dā nem d’fagbāil d’ēnduine‘that anyone attain two heavens’ .2 Furthermore, a formation nemdaidh ‘dweller in heaven’ would be a little unusual in that the Old Irish agent suffix -id is generally attached to verbal nouns or, secondarily, to participles (see GOI§267), and a hypothetical nemdae ‘heavenly’ + -aid is not in line with that, nor is it likely that our word belongs to the cotarsnaid ‘adversary’ a (1) after (i)s ‘and’, and (2) in the combination (i)san ‘in the’ in some Early modern irish manuscripts12 (1) The article after (i)s ‘and’ In section (B) above it was frequently necessary to supply the nasal of the second definite article in collocations of the kind an flaith ’s a[n] féinnidh Knott 1910, 214–5). Or agan: An sagart bocht bhíos go glan / cuiridh le beagán briathar / acht go ria a anál uime / Dia a n-arán na habhluinne (ABM 388.9) ‘As soon as his breath comes upon it, with a few words the poor, sinless priest puts God into the communion bread.’ 10 I have emended MS gan an, of which I can make no sense. 11 The entry in DIL s.v. 1 on ‘blemish, stain on one’s reputation’ does not give sufficient support to the sense ‘disruption, interference’ of activity, as here. Other examples might be: As sin dúin-ne go hÁth Cliath / go múr Amhlaoidhe na n-órsgiath / bámur an lá-sin gan on / san múr fionn ag fleadhughadh (ABM 305.18) ‘From there we went to Áth Cliath, to the fort of Amhlaoibh(?) of the golden shields; there we spent the day feasting without interruption/ interference in the fort’; I acknowledge that this poem is said to be a camdhán composed by a duine ainbhfheasach! Similarly, Dealbh dhíobh an tsíoth nach garbh gné, / is dealbh dhíobh an urnaighthe, / dealbh dhíobh an aoine gan on, / an déirc fhíre así an seachtmhadh (Ó Cuív 1965) ‘One of those forms (the Holy Spirit takes) is peace not harsh; another is prayer; another is unbroken fasting; true charity is the seventh’ . See also Dinneen’s tromshuan gan on ‘unremittent slumbers’ (Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla, s.v. on). Of course, a sense ‘without blemish’ (that is, without being assaulted) is possible, but an bhean gan on with the sense ‘without blemish ’ would normally mean ‘a noble woman’ or the like in the poetry. 12 The following is an investigation of a phenomenon I have not seen discussed elsewhere. Though limited to a relatively small number of sources, I hope it will stand the test of rigorous examination and represent a modest but important contribution to the history of the article in...

Shaw and Modern Irish Drama

Shaw and Modern Irish Drama

Adolescence in Modern Irish History. Edited by Catherine Cox and Susannah Riordan

This edited collection emanated from a 2011 workshop and represents the first volume to address the history of youth/adolescence in modern Ireland. With this is mind, the editors have wisely chosen to provide a solid and expansive introduction charting the development of the historiography in Ireland, the conceptualization of adolescence, and the trajectory of the volume from “affective revolution,” to the emergence of the teenager. To date, the historiography has tended to focus on the history of education, child welfare, “juvenile delinquency” and criminality, and the emergence of youth culture in the sixties. It has been an urban history primarily, with significant gaps in the rural experience. Institutionalization has been a central trope, due in part to the scandals that emerged in the 1990s surrounding Ireland’s industrial and reformatory school system. The nine chapters in this volume and the introduction go a sufficient way to address this neglect. Many of the themes in the collection are referred to in the final chapter by Mary E. Daly, which provides a broad contextual framework for the preceding work. Daly argues that Ireland is distinctive in certain ways when looking at the history of youth/adolescence. She highlights two issues in particular—the lack of an industrial revolution (and as a result the primacy of the rural/family economy) and the impact of war and revolution from 1914–23. Ireland’s demographics are also referred to—an exceptionally low rate of marriage and high birth rate, as well as the continued emigration of thousands of young men and women until the 1960s. By 1973 when Ireland became a full member of the European Economic Community (EEC), compulsory schooling, urbanization, and outside cultural influences meant “the lives of Irish adolescents were not noticeably dissimilar from those of adolescents in other EEC member states” (213).

Between languages. On bilingual issues in modern British and Irish drama

The article concentrates on tensions between centres and peripheries in modern British and Irish drama. The research material encompases plays by GB Shaw, WB Yeats, JM Synge, Peter Shaffer and works by immigrant contemporary playwrights (e.g. H. Khalil, H. Abdulrazzak, and T. Štivičic), whose work introduces new perspectives to British stage. Among the topics that are scrutinised, the following seem important: London-based model of theatre as opposed to the models emerging from other cultural centres; British and Irish theatre traditions and their interrelations with artistic innovations arriving from the continent; literary and theatre conventions; relations between playwrights, directors, actors, and other theatre makers. The overall argument is presented from the perspective based on Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics.

Dynamicity in the construal of complex events in Irish English and Modern Irish

In this study we take an ‘above the clause’ perspective on the conceptualisation of complex events of Irish English and Modern Irish within a functional Role and Reference Grammar perspective, using corpus based data. Functional models of language generally assume some layered structure of the clause, the noun phrase and the word. (Nolan 2012a, 2012b; Van Valin 2005). While excellent work has heretofore been achieved at clause level, the description of important linguistic phenomena above the clause has often been somewhat neglected. In this regard, a central part of the grammar of every human language is the encoding of events and their participants in a clause. This motivates an ‘above the clause’ perspective to characterise the balance between uniformity of encoding and variability in encoding within and across languages. In the functional-cognitive paradigm, form and meaning are not separated into self-contained components. Instead, syntactic structures of varying degrees of complexity and abstraction are paired with their corresponding semantic structures. We argue that the interaction of semantic relations with the hierarchy of clausal linkage is at the strongest pole with the semantic relations covering phase and modifying subevents. We also argue that light verb constructions are formed pre-syntactically in the lexicon using and defend this by applying certain criteria as a diagnostic. The function of light verbs in these constructions is to modulate the realisation of event and sub-event semantics into syntax. We provide evidence of the dynamicity in conceptualising a complex event, considered as complex predication across constructions, in Irish English and Modern Irish.

The neo-liberalization of strategic spatial planning and the overproduction of development in Celtic Tiger Ireland

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the role of the planning system in the overproduction of development during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger needs to be analysed as instructive of contemporary neo-liberal transformations of strategic spatial planning. Leaning on a Foucauldian governmentality perspective, the genealogy of modern Irish planning practice is explored to elucidate how neo-liberal rationalities became embedded in institutional norms through consensus-driven partnership governance. The central premise is that the turn to ‘strategic spatial planning’, particularly with the publication of the National Spatial Strategy in 2002, was usefully exploited to mask the spatial politics of the ever-increasing need for the state to facilitate capital switching into built environment formation in order to maintain conditions of high economic growth. Using the empirical case study of housing development in the ‘Upper Shannon’ region and large-scale commercial development in County Meath, it is argued that this contributed to a destabilization of the planning system and an abandonment of basic planning principles. The paper concludes that, in the context of the new and deeply uneven economic geography of post-crisis Ireland, there is an urgent need for a repoliticized critique of normative interpretations of strategic spatial planning practice in order for more progressive practices to emerge.

Ireland and the British Empire, 1916-1937: A Relationship Reflected in Law Journals

The purpose of this article is to assess the value of law journals as sources for the analysis of modern Irish history. It examines how two periods of obvious political transition in Irish history are reflected in law journals. The article covers the period between 1916 and 1922, which saw the secession most of the island of Ireland from the United Kingdom, and the period between 1922 and 1937, which saw the gradual secession of the Irish Free State from the British Empire. It examines how military conflict, partition and the 1921 Anglo Irish Treaty influenced the content, nature, and editorial policies followed by Irish law journals. Important non-Irish law journals, in particular the Canadian Bar Review and the Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, are also examined in the context of the constitutional relationship between the Irish Free State and Dominion status. These examples are used to support the conclusion that law journals remain important sources in charting and evaluating political transitions in early twentieth century Ireland.

Three Kings: Migrant Masculinities in Irish Social Practice, Theoretical Perspective and Theatre Performance

This article examines deprivedmale migrants’ conceptions and performative expressions of hegemonic masculinity in Ireland.It explores their widespread propensity to develop hypermasculine self-images based on ideals of cultural loyalty and economic prosperity that are, in fact, compensatory for their sense of emasculation, marginalization and social failure as a result of economic difficulties within their host societies.The first section surveys perceptions and preconceptions about migrant men and young male immigrants in a variety of Irish media, political and social discourses. The second section considers recent research and the development of theoretical perspectives about migrant masculinity in Ireland. In the third section, it is argued that these broad discourses and preconceptions are accentuated and encapsulated in a corpus of Irish theatre and film productions, such as Jimmy Murphy’s play about Irish emigrants in London,The Kings of the Kilburn High Road (2001), which was subsequently adapted by Tom Collins in the Irish language film Kings (2007). Bisi Adigun’s Arambe Productions has appropriated and complicated the Kings of the Kilburn High Road storyline in turn. Adigun reenacted the play withWest African immigrants rather than Irish emigrants in London (2006). He subsequently adapted its storyline to a contemporary London setting in Home, Sweet Home (performed in Lagos, 2010), and then he reset the play in Dublin with an African-Irish immigrant cast in The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013). In these different versions of the Kings plotline, ideals of migrant masculinity, the image of the “alien” and the meaning of the play/film perceptibly shift depending on whether it is performed by an English-speaking Irish cast, a cast of Irishlanguage speakers, or an African immigrant cast in Arambe’s productions. Yet, together, these works suggest that immigrants to Ireland and returning Irish emigrants, as well as marginalized Gaelic speakers, face similar gender specific constraints in achieving recognition and gaining acceptance in modern Irish society. Each version is based on competing conceptions and performances of hegemonic masculinity that come into conflict at the culmination of the plot’s development. Both on stage and on screen, they give expression to migrant masculine ideals in Ireland that are defined by wider political and social tensions which they seek to resolve in their respective performances.

Modernism, Empiricism, and Rationalism

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.

Capitalising on the Irish land question: land reform and state banking in Ireland, 1891–1938

Land reform and its financial arrangements are central elements of modern Irish history. Yet to date, the financial mechanisms underpinning Irish land reform have been overlooked. The article outlines the mechanisms of land reform in Ireland and the importance of land bonds to the process. Advances worth over £127 million were made to tenant farmers to purchase their holdings. These schemes enabled the transfer of over three-quarters of land on the island of Ireland. The article introduces a new database on Irish land bonds listed on the Dublin Stock Exchange from 1891 to 1938. It illustrates the nature of these bonds and presents data on their size, liquidity and market returns. The article finds a high level of state banking in Ireland: large issues of land bonds were held by state-owned savings banks.

A Portrait of the Rebel as an Artist: Deconstructing Post-coloniality in Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H

The historically ‘interrogative’ nature of the modern Irish novel introduces post-independence Ireland as a locus that is torn between social double standards and political extremes. Rebellious and critical voices channelled through the dialectical discourse of the novel and at once critiqued a State-sponsored voice of internal othering and narratives of decolonization. To sustain its relevance as a medium of criticism the modern Irish novel replaced the classical structure of the novel with narratives that tend to deconstruct the State’s politics of formation. These narratives, this paper suggests, are inherently personal and structurally biographical, enabling the Irish to revisit the past and restructure their perception of critical concepts such as national identity, ideological intolerance, and individual formation. By examining Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H (1971), and John McGahern’s The Dark (1965), firstly I will identify these resistant voices, which challenged and subverted the socio-political, and educational boundaries. Secondly, I will explore a dividing line that appeared between such critical voices, splitting them into critics who sought a liberated definition of Irishness rooted in the principles of the men of 1916, and rebels who demanded social recognition and political and commercial success. It is the latter group, I argue, that instead of enhancing the standards of life in Ireland became a threat to its very foundation.

‘Groaning wicked like a maddening dog’: Bestiality, Modernity and Irishness in J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the

In J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, anxieties brought about by Ireland’s colonial modernity are given an especially powerful expression through an extensive recourse to animal imageries. This article proposes to read these imageries as indexes of (pre-) modernity, and as markers of the divide between rural and urban areas that modernity accentuated. It argues that the animal-like behaviour that Synge’s play calls for may be considered as a form of resistance to a hegemonic and early twentieth century conception of modernity. Alongside the trained, performing, modern Irish body that emerged in the theatre of the early 1900s there survived vestiges of a radically different form of embodiment associated with, for example, rural performance traditions such as faction fighting or keening. It was these other expressions of corporeality - less easily legible and more beastly - which piqued Synge’s interest and which, in Playboy, offer traces of an inexpungible and co-existing alternative to the modernity of the (Abbey) theatre as an institution.

Book review: Modern Irish Competition Law

Book review: Modern Irish Competition Law

The Politics of Remembrance: Commemorating 1916

In remembering critical events, history; memory; and commemoration often cause confusion and dissention. In this decade of centenaries, seminal events in modern Irish history contend for pre-eminence, but 1916 is clearly the most important. Scholars are competing with journalists and politicians for control of the agenda for establishing the meaning and importance of the Rising 100 years later. The continuing problems associated with commemorating 1916 are at least partly caused by the fact that partition has hindered nationalists from achieving their aspirations of a 32 county republic. We contend that it is this failure that accounts for much of the conflict in Ireland over the last century and which is now highlighted by the politics of commemoration of 1916. Despite the inevitable efforts of politicians and parties, the Easter Rising should be understood in the context of larger and broader movements that began decades earlier: the quest for Home Rule and the search for Irish identity.

The Judas Kiss: Treason and Betrayal in Six Modern Irish Novels by Gerry Smyth (review)

Reviewed by: The Judas Kiss: Treason and Betrayal in Six Modern Irish Novels by Gerry Smyth James Alexander Fraser The Judas Kiss: Treason and Betrayal in Six Modern Irish Novels. Gerry Smyth. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Pp. x + 248. $105.00 (cloth). The study of betrayal seems to be a growth industry. Gerry Smyth’s Judas Kiss is a worthy addition to a critical literature—including Kristina Mendecino and Betiel Wasihun’s Playing False (2013), James Heffernan’s Hospitality and Treachery in Western Literature (2014), and my own forthcoming Joycean Betrayal—that has increasingly recognized betrayal as not merely a recurring theme but as a fundamental part of the way we think (and write) our relation to those around us. This near universality is, of course, both a boon and a burden to any academic study, and at times The Judas Kiss is caught between two desires: to explore betrayal in its most general and in its most specific formations. So though Smyth explores betrayal specifically in the “modern Irish novel,” the book is framed by an awareness that “Betrayal is everywhere: in the books we read, the films we watch and the music to which we listen” (14). If betrayal is indeed “everywhere,” then the process of selecting and refining the contents of any book on betrayal is necessarily fraught. Smyth’s subtitle announces his intentions cautiously: rather than the potentially hubristic “Treason and Betrayal in the Modern Irish Novel,” he chooses the more literally descriptive “Treason and Betrayal in Six Modern Irish Novels.” But despite the title, the author is not at all reticent to tackle the bigger questions. Smyth sets his stall out clearly and early: “I want to reject at the outset the idea of some kind of inherent Irish proclivity for or susceptibility to treachery” (3). This is an obvious point, but one that nevertheless needed making. Irish history really does appear at times to be unusually rife with accounts of treachery and betrayal, and any commentator needs to carefully consider what has caused this particular narrative to accumulate. Smyth, at least, reads the role of betrayal in Irish history as partly self-selecting (Irish history is full of betrayal because, from early on, it was being read and written with betrayal in mind) and as partly a response to the unusual (though by no means exceptional), real-life range of opportunities for treachery in Ireland’s complex history. In this sense, this book is, without ever really saying so directly, a postcolonial critique, since it is specifically Ireland’s history of colonial occupation and subjugation that drives the kind of split loyalties on which betrayal thrives. Few, I imagine, would be eager to disagree with this basic approach, though I wonder whether more time could have been spent considering the implications of the opposite argument. Smyth briskly (and rightly) dismisses as a “propagandist” Gerald of Wales, who wrote in 1185 that the Irish “above all other peoples … always practice treachery” (3). Yet for very different reasons James Joyce makes essentially this same argument repeatedly in his fiction and non-fiction, suggesting memorably in “Fenianism: The Last Fenian” that “in Ireland … an informer always appears.”1 However, the key point is that regardless of any spurious racial or cultural propensity to “break oaths,” Irish history, with its “faction and strife,” is a “context primed for deception.” The argument, simply put, is that a history of suppression, of mixed and competing loyalties constantly redrawn, of disappointingly regular failures, is bound to take something that is implicit in communal life—betrayal—and make it an unusually constituent part of that history. Smyth’s point is not so far removed from those made by Seamus Deane, who has depicted Irish history as an “inescapable category,” as something that “happened to” the Irish subject in an endlessly repeating series of re-enactments of violence, disappointment, and suffering—a “nightmare,” as Stephen Dedalus would have it, from which one must try to awake. Irish culture, in its broadest sense, can be seen to return repeatedly to betrayal as one particularly appropriate way to express this experience of powerlessness and fatigue. The fatigue of a nation of people for whom...

Folklore and Modern Irish Writing ed. by Anne Markey and Anne O’Connor

Reviewed by: Folklore and Modern Irish Writing ed. by Anne Markey and Anne O’Connor Chad Edward Buterbaugh Folklore and Modern Irish Writing, edited by Anne Markey and Anne O’Connor, pp. 250. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2014. Distributed by International Specialized Book Services, Portland, OR. $34.95. Folklore and Modern Irish Writing takes a contemplative look at the patterns of Irish vernacular expression appearing in print formats from the early nineteenth century to the present. Editors Anne Markey and Anne O’Connor arrange the collection of sixteen essays to track the journey of folklore from the voice of the people, to the cultural byword of the new republic, to the source material for Irish writers who are at work today. Through its content and format, this volume emerges as a treatise for understanding folklore as a multimodal form of human communication that becomes more authoritative, for better or worse, when expressed through the printed word. The diverse case studies span several generations, political ideologies, and artistic movements, but their uniting message is that folklore cannot be contained or completely understood by studying books alone. In the early years of the modern Irish nation, for example, folklore was the target of the many collectors sent out into Ireland’s remotest landscapes to gather the wisdom and stories of the people. Kelly Fitzgerald notes that, as a project of the emerging republic, this sort of activity was intertwined with the political project of establishing a national heritage by means of the Irish Folklore Commission—and, further, that elements of this perspective influence how folklore is understood even now. It is not enough for today’s researchers to [End Page 152] consider the archive of the National Folklore Collection; they must also account for the political climate that brought it into being. John Dillon beckons scholars’ attention away from the page through his analysis of folkloric materials collected by Yeats from the seer Mary Battle, his uncle’s housekeeper. Dillon allows that the textual format of these collections encourages readers to view them as a form of literature, but he also frames them as products of a much more nuanced and open-ended social interaction—that of the real-life relationship between Yeats and Battle, in which folkloric utterance played a central role. Dillon’s discussion gestures toward the performance-centered approach to folklore, which has been a key orientation in North American folkloristics for several decades. Similarly, Irene Lucchitti claims the life of Peig Sayers as just that—a life, and not a mere collection of folkloric narrations printed and distributed throughout Ireland and beyond. Lucchitti makes this point in light of Peig’s pivotal role in the curation of a distinctly Irish culture in the twentieth century. Although her memoirs established a base for the use of Irish folklore in literary contexts, the woman herself was somewhat forgotten in this process. Her emblematic identity came to subsume her true identity, even though “the sun did come up and go down on her stories, her songs and her prayers.” Lucchitti encourages contemporary readers to view Peig’s words as snapshots of a larger biography, and to view folklore as a useful tool for mortaring her story together. Commentaries like these nudge readers to consider Ireland’s wealth of printed folklore in more fluid terms. Though the bound text includes a clear beginning and end, it also inhabits a broader, more chaotic network of expression that encompasses words that are printed, spoken, and thought, as well as the nonverbal, semiverbal, and paraverbal systems of material culture, folk custom, folk belief, and the like. In the case of Ireland, this means considering the tremendous output of the Irish Folklore Commission in light of the political circumstances that inspired many of its collectors and, by extension, its content. And in any case, this means studying printed folklore—whether in memoirs, novels, or collections—in the context of the antecedent lives and performances that originally inspired their words. To study folklore in any sort of meaningful way is to study multimedia expression. Inevitably, this book is also an example of the very thing it studies. Several chapters devote hundreds of words each to written synopses...

Invoking Joyce, Avoiding Imitation: Junot Díaz’s Portrait of Nerds in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

There are several hints in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) that Junot Diaz has been more influenced by the Irish modernist James Joyce than he declares. As a modernist, Joyce emphasized the importance of detachment and disobedience in imagining the ethos of a modern artist. For Joyce, it is significant for an artist to innovate his own language not only because it invites new aesthetic styles but it engenders political resistance to a dominant culture. Joyce’s 1916 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man provides an exposition of how an aesthetic pursuit coincides with a political rebellion against British imperialism. This study argues that Joyce remains a formidable precursor for Diaz due to the above reasons. Reading Diaz’s 2007 novel alongside Joyce’s 1916 fiction, this study offers textual sites which imply the precursor’s influence on Diaz. In doing so, I seek to demonstrate that Diaz values and inherits literary expectations of Joyce while he modifies certain modes of the precursor. Focusing on the link between Diaz and Joyce can expand our awareness of Diaz, placing a new emphasis on Diaz’s drive for creativity to be acquired through receiving and challenging the precursor.

“A harp in the hallway”: Edna O'Brien and Jewish-Irish Whiteness in <em>Zuckerman Unbound</em>

On 19th of March, 2013, Irish author Edna stepped onto stage of Newark Library auditorium and gave a stirring introduction to her long-time friend, Philip Roth: Feared and revered, plagiarized, envied, hermit and jester, lover and hater, foolish but formidable, too adorable for words, a very great friend, and undoubtedly, one of Yeats's Olympians (Roth@80). Her at Roth's eightieth birthday and de facto retirement celebrations served to underscore her curious absence from Roth scholarship. Though Roth has interviewed O'Brien, prefaced her work, and quoted her in epigraph, she rarely appears in Roth criticism.1 Yet where she is mentioned she provides stimulating perspectives on Roth's oeuvre, as, for example, when Debra Shostak cites epigraph to The Dying Animal (2001)-The body contains life story just as much as brain-as proof of Roth's continued preoccupation with how self comes into consciousness of itself within and through its fleshly habitation (60). Likewise, Darren Hughes astutely notes that in his 1984 interview with O'Brien, Roth could be conducting another of his self-interviews (267). This recalls David Gooblar's contention that presence of Franz Kafka and Anne Frank in Roth's fiction [often] tells us more about Roth himself than about those ostensible subjects (59). Roth's speaking of and to other writers can thus be read as a displaced commentary on himself. An important corollary to this insight can be extrapolated from when Roth writes of another cultural group, he is also writing about American Jews. These suppositions frame this paper and its consideration of of in Roth's fiction.Though by no means as immediately tangible as that of Frank and Kafka, O'Brien's in Roth's work was revealed at Roth@80, when she teasingly proposed herself as a likely model for Caesara O'Shea in Zuckerman Unbound (1981). Just as Zuckerman shares significant biographical data with Roth, Caesara does so with O'Brien. As Roth summarizes, was born in isolated reaches of Ireland, raised on a lonely farm in shadow of a violent father and educated by nuns behind latched gate of a provincial convent (A Conversation with Edna O'Brien 42). Caesara grows up in an identical milieu, rural confines of Connemara, under a father who drank whiskey and beat her mother (190). More significantly, both Caesara and share with one another (and with Zuckerman and Roth as well) experience of being ostracized from their communities as a result of their vocations.2 Caesara thus in many ways offers an Irish female counterlife for Zuckerman, as might be said to do for Roth. Just as Roth employs Kafka and Frank to delve into parallels between Jewish experience in Europe and America, he engages to examine equivalences between Jewish and Irish cultural identity. In doing so, Roth uses example of Irish as a warning to Jewish Americans against blindly supporting a mythologizing nationalism abroad and falling into an unaware ethnic whiteness at home. Brett Ashley Kaplan has already explored how Race figures in Zuckerman Unbound in ways that echo tension between identification and anxiety, looking specifically at blackJewish interrelations in America (45). Meanwhile, Scott W. Klein unearths traces of James Joyce in 1980s Zuckerman books that highlight Roth's use of Irish modernist writer to investigate national difference (154). Building on these foundations, this essay adds another layer of interpretation to Zuckerman Unbound's complex analysis of race by focusing on its representation of Irishness-and specifically on Caesara, the very heart of Ireland (187).Caesara is introduced to reader through a letter she has left for Zuckerman: I was so sad to leave without saying goodbye. But when Fate changes horse rider is carried along [. . .] Vague memories, nothing but memories (186). …

The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature by Cóilín Parsons

Reviewed by: The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature by Cóilín Parsons Kiron Ward (bio) THE ORDNANCE SURVEY AND MODERN IRISH LITERATURE, by Cóilín Parsons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xiv + 247 pp. $90.00. In popular British usage, the term "ordnance" bears little of the resonance of its full meaning. Offer the word to anyone who has been through primary-school geography lessons, and the response will be "survey?" The words collocate in a memory of poorly photocopied maps layered densely with once-memorized symbols, connoting none of the deadly heft of the phrases like "ordnance and artillery," "unexploded ordnance," or "Massive Ordnance Air Blast." One of the many things that Cóilín Parsons's compelling monograph on the relationship between the British "Ordnance Survey" and Irish literature does is to reassert that meaning—to make visible the implied violence of the "Ordnance Survey," the British Army's Board of Ordnance's project for mapping British territories, which began in the late eighteenth century and was brought to Ireland in 1824, in the shadow of the 1800 Act of Union. As Parsons clarifies, this is not to say that the Ordnance Survey of Ireland was "at bottom a military exercise," but to affirm that "it was also, indisputably, an exercise in colonial management—an effort to gather information to allow the effective [End Page 207] control and administration of the colony" (12). The Ordnance Survey, for Parsons, is a technology that at once rationalizes the local while abstracting it into the national—and by understanding this "defining point in the cultural history of Ireland" as a "signal modern project," he is able to outline a story about the emergence of Irish modernity that sees the continuity between its different "expressive dimensions," to borrow Susan Stanford Friedman's phrase (2).1 In this, Parsons's narrative of "the emergence of modernist form" in Ireland casts the Ordnance Survey as nothing less than an "originary point" for the period's literary modernism, and the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Revivals that appeared were its supposed antitheses (2, 34); indeed, Parsons's study offers a richly sourced elaboration of Terence Brown's contention that the Revivals were "contiguous with modernism rather than merely concurrent."2 Parsons's argument appears in three sections. First, "Archives" pairs studies of two nineteenth-century writers whose work was shaped by the Survey: John O'Donovan, a little-examined but prolific writer of letters while employed by the Survey, and James Clarence Mangan, whose poetry he reads as coexisting dialectically with the Survey's archive. Parsons finds in O'Donovan's letters a narration of the Survey's attempts "to recover and preserve the meanings embedded in the landscape, to turn memory into history, and to allow for the rationalization of the national space," thus creating an archive that "oscillates between a Foucaultian absolutism and a Derridean ambivalence," which Mangan goes on to respond to in his poetry by producing an anti-archival and anarchic "anarchive" (38). These studies frame the following section, "Scales," in which Parsons pairs chapters on the arch-Revivalist John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands and Joyce's Ulysses.3 Both Synge and Joyce, he contends, are in dialogue with the Survey's attempts "to account for local scale in an increasingly non-localized world" (39), and while, for the former, the effort is reparative, for the latter, it is part of an ironic encyclopedism. In the study's final section, Parsons turns to Samuel Beckett's abstract landscapes in his pre- and post-war fiction, which he posits as "the logical conclusion of a story about the Survey's efforts to represent a rapidly changing landscape of modernity, recovering meaning even as it is being destroyed" (39). There is a lot throughout Parsons's study that will be of interest to Joyceans working to reframe or reappraise the historical and literary contexts of his work. That said, his chapter on scale in Ulysses is of particular note. Parsons argues that Ulysses's "experimentation with scale is its most direct engagement with the concerns of the Ordnance Survey," focusing specifically on "Wandering Rocks" and "Ithaca" (157). Through deft...

The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature by Cóilín Parsons

Reviewed by: The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature by Cóilín Parsons Vivian Valvano Lynch The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature, by Cóilín Parsons, pp. 247. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. $90. Cóilín Parsons effectively broadens the scope of the British Board of Ordnance’s Survey (1824-1846), which mapped Ireland on the unprecedented scale or representative fraction of six inches to one mile, to yield a novel study of emergent modernism in Irish literature. Mindful of the iconic status of the Ordnance Study maps and declaring his “story” to be “the relationship between a modern mapping project and the emergence of modernist form,” Parsons argues that this signal modern project—the abstraction of landscape so that it could be made to fit the demands of scientific representation … is a defining point in the cultural history of Ireland, and its imprint was felt for decades after the initial survey was completed. In the sphere of literature, responses and challenges to the Survey and its mode of cartographic representation enliven and invigorate Irish writing as subsequent generations of writers grapple with the challenges of representing the geography of an island undergoing rapid and shocking change. Apart from an occasional overreliance on a few literary theorists—a move that slows down his “story” and could largely be condensed and moved to foot-notes—Parsons acquits himself admirably in this project. Parsons’s preamble to handling his four selected literary figures (James Clarence Mangan, John Millington Synge, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett) demonstrates an ability to present the fruits of exhaustive research into the initiation and progress of the Ordnance Survey. He dissects many of its abundant maps, letters, and memoirs. Together, he avers, these items “present a complex dialectic of change and stasis; loss and preservation; image and text; representation and reality.” Turning to the four authors, Parsons reads the poetry written by Mangan when he was employed by the Survey as a worker on placenames. He points to poetic evidence of Mangan’s growing frustration with Britain as he participates in the imperial scientific venture, particularly noticeable in his reliance on dinnseanchas, the lore of placenames, in his translations. Mangan becomes a commentator, mindful of both the modern venture of the colonizer and the real experience and imagined history of the colonized. The chapter on Synge and The Aran Islands is superb and will serve as a lasting addition to Synge scholarship, and of great value to university classrooms. Parsons painstakingly contends that despite Synge’s evident romantic gaze at Irish peasant life, at “the primitive other,” his repeat visits to the islands yield a [End Page 152] more multifaceted reporter. He writes: “with each passing year [Synge] recognizes the more complex interaction between the islands, the mainland, London, and the world, and gradually the lamentations over the loss of pristine primitiveness cease.” Meticulous examinations of several passages in The Aran Islands in which Synge employs the modernist technique of parataxis deserve attentive reading. One such passage juxtaposes the primitive and the civilized, age-old fishing methods and factory production. Such juxtapositions are delivered stylistically and syntactically through parataxis: Parsons remarks, “Parataxis, with its absence of markers of primary or subordinate statements, refuses to identify scale, to mark the size and shape of the gap between the local and the global—it refuses to identify the relationship between elements, even at times denies the existence of any relationship.” This chapter serves as a fulcrum for Parsons’s story, and he concludes, “Synge’s text, with its fragmented plots and narratives, its sustained attention to scale and geography, and its peripatetic principal characters not only looks backward to the challenges of the Survey, but it could also almost be a scale model for Ulysses, produced earlier and elsewhere.” The transition to Ulysses proceeds with a respectful glance at “Aeolus,” a pertinent discussion of “Wandering Rocks,” then a focus on “Ithaca” as Joyce’s experiment with scale that most directly engages with the actions of the Ordnance Survey. “Ithaca,” of course, mentions the Survey, but Parsons probes much more deeply into the encyclopedic nature of the episode, showing how it “presents a cascade of information, ostensibly...