Modern Irish Research Articles

Representations of the Jew in the Modern Irish Novel since Joyce

This study reads the Semitic discourse in five modern Irish novels – Francis Stuart's Black List Section H (1971), Robert MacLiam Wilson's Manfred's Pain (1992), Robert Welch's Groundwork (1997), Jennifer Johnston's This is Not a Novel (2002), and John Banville's Shroud (2002) – for what it tells us about the cultural identity of modern Ireland, and for what it reveals of the psychohistory, and even the psychopathology, of Irishness hidden in these representations. The span of five novels allows some demonstration, first, of the ambivalence, rather than overt hostility or unqualified identification, which characterises this writing; and, second, of the striking variety and heterogeneity in the representation of ‘the Jew’ in contemporary Irish writing. Such unpredictability and contradictoriness in the construction of Jewish racial difference challenges or threatens both the national discourse which seeks to exert control over the unmanageable ‘reality’ of Ireland in terms of fixity, certainty, centredness, homogeneity, and the transcendent discourse of liberal universalism. That is, these novelists, in demonstrating the impossibility of fixing the indeterminate Jew as one thing or the other, reflect a more general crisis of representation, not only for the nation (Welch, Johnston), and the individual (Wilson, Stuart), but for epistemology itself (Banville).

‘I ran away’? The I.R.A. and 1969: the evolution of a myth

Between 13 and 15 August 1969 communal violence in Belfast saw seven people killed and over 400 treated for injuries. Nearly 2,000 families were forced from their homes. British troops were deployed on the streets to prevent further violence, events usually seen as the starting point of the modern Irish Troubles. In 1972 the Sunday Times Insight Team's Ulster set the tone for commentary on the role of the I.R.A. during this period. It claimed that the organisation had been ‘largely an irrelevance’ in Belfast during August 1969 and as a result ‘I.R.A. – I Ran Away was scrawled derisively over the walls of the Catholic Ghettos’. Conor Cruise O'Brien soon asserted in States of Ireland that when violence erupted ‘the I.R.A. had very few weapons and very few people trained and ready to use them. Their prestige in the Ghettos went sharply down. People wrote on walls I.R.A. I Ran Away.’ Echoing these statements twentythree years later Tim Pat Coogan in his book The Troubles stated that ‘the I.R.A. posed very little threat to anyone during those days. So little that the disgusted inhabitants of the area, used to regarding the I.R.A. in the traditional role of “the defenders” wrote up the letters I.R.A. on gable walls as Irish Ran Away.' Similar assertions are found in a wide variety of the literature, both popular and academic, dealing with the outbreak of the Troubles.

Age prediction formulae from radiographic assessment of skeletal maturation at the knee in an Irish population

Age estimation in living subjects is primarily achieved through assessment of a hand–wrist radiograph and comparison with a standard reference atlas. Recently, maturation of other regions of the skeleton has also been assessed in an attempt to refine the age estimates. The current study presents a method to predict bone age directly from the knee in a modern Irish sample. Ten maturity indicators (A–J) at the knee were examined from radiographs of 221 subjects (137 males; 84 females). Each indicator was assigned a maturity score. Scores for indicators A–G, H–J and A–J, respectively, were totalled to provide a cumulative maturity score for change in morphology of the epiphyses (AG), epiphyseal union (HJ) and the combination of both (AJ). Linear regression equations to predict age from the maturity scores (AG, HJ, AJ) were constructed for males and females. For males, equation-AJ demonstrated the greatest predictive capability (R2=0.775) while for females equation-HJ had the strongest capacity for prediction (R2=0.815). When equation-AJ for males and equation-HJ for females were applied to the current sample, the predicted age of 90% of subjects was within ±1.5 years of actual age for male subjects and within +2.0 to −1.9 years of actual age for female subjects. The regression formulae and associated charts represent the most contemporary method of age prediction currently available for an Irish population, and provide a further technique which can contribute to a multifactorial approach to age estimation in non-adults.

Cnuasach Bhéaloideas Éireann : The National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin

Cnuasach Bhéaloideas Éireann:The National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin Ríonach uí Ógáin (bio) Ireland is renowned for its storytelling, folklore, and vernacular traditions. Cnuasach Bhéaloideas Éireann: The National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin (http://www.ucd.ie/folklore/en) is Ireland’s primary repository for such materials of traditional vernacular culture. The Collection is a public archive, currently accessible for the most part in person; certain elements, however, are available online, and the intention is to make significant portions of the Collection available on the Internet in the near future.1 This current essay is divided into three main sections. It begins by placing the Collection in its cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts. It then addresses the Collection itself and the material it has to offer in terms of folkloristics and other aspects of social and cultural research. The final section offers an example from the archive in the form of a single sheet of music transcription and its collecting that underlies the importance and urgency of ongoing ethnographic fieldwork as well as its potential. Cultural and Historical Context In the nineteenth century, as a reaction against the industrial age and also in connection with the advancement of nationalism, attention was given to antiquarianism and what might be called popular culture. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, storytelling and folk tradition in Ireland began to be recognized as relatively untapped aspects of cultural expression. Some work had previously been undertaken in the compilation of Anglo-Irish tales and novels, and many of these writers belonged to what was at the time the English-speaking minority. People then began to turn to Irish-language material. The American collector, scholar, and linguist, Jeremiah Curtin, was one of the first to collect in Irish-speaking districts of Ireland. He visited Ireland on three occasions and published a number of books. His first book was Myths and Folklore of Ireland, published in 1890. Although Curtin collected from Irish speakers, he did so through English and then published in English. Dubhghlas de hÍde (Douglas Hyde) was the first President of the Republic of Ireland and professor of modern Irish at University College Dublin, and he was the first to collect and publish stories in Irish. His passion for collecting tales and lore came from his love of Irish. In addition to the cultural and language revivals, there was also a broader political revival, with people collecting and using vernacular material for a number of reasons. Collecting tales was viewed as having particular merit, and the notion of a romantic, idealized past was often seen as reflected in the material itself—a view that would eventually underpin an attitude to Irish culture, language, and folklore more generally. While this work of collecting, publishing, and promoting was taking place through Irish, parallel work was taking place in the Anglo-Irish community—W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and George Millington Synge are among the names most closely associated with these efforts. By the early twentieth century a particular emphasis was being placed on tales, legends, and beliefs. In addition, scholars began to come from abroad to study Irish language and literature. Traditional Material Found in the National Folklore Collection The person largely responsible for the establishment of Coimisiún Béaloideasa Éireann (the Irish Folklore Commission) in 1935 was Séamus Ó Duilearga (James Hamilton Delargy), who was Professor of Irish Folklore at University College Dublin (UCD), Honorary Director of the Commission, and editor of Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society for a number of years. Ó Duilearga was an assistant to Dubhghlas de hÍde at UCD. Before the Commission was established there were two preliminary organizations devoted to Irish folklore: An Cumann le Béaloideas Éireann (the Folklore of Ireland Society) founded in 1926 and Institiúid Bhéaloideas Éireann (the Irish Folklore Institute) founded in 1930. The Collection is successor to the Irish Folklore Commission, which was established for the purposes of collecting, safeguarding, and disseminating the oral traditions of Ireland (Briody 2007). The Commission was established by the government of Ireland under the auspices of the Department of Education, and it appointed a number...

Laments in Transition: The Irish-Australian songs of Sally Sloane (1894–1982)

Irish music in Australia has a strong tradition though it is less thoroughly documented and less frequently the subject of scholarly inquiry than in Ireland, the British Isles and North America. From the earliest days of white settlement in Australia, the Irish represented a significant proportion of total immigrants. One in three convicts transported to Australia from Great Britain after 1798 was Irish. About 20 per cent of these were connected with political and agrarian unrest in England and Ireland and many who survived transportation and incarceration continued rebellious activities directed at the ruling class in Australia. Irish immigration continued to increase in the nineteenth century as a result not only of the famine of the 1840s, but also because of growing persecution from English landlords who raised rents to levels resulting in mass evictions. After 1840, emigration became a vast, relentless national phenomenon. Between 1789 and 1921 about half a million Irish people set sail for Australia.1 Those leaving Ireland turned towards an unknown future half a world away beyond perilous oceans, not expecting to see their homeland again. Oliver MacDonagh, in his book Sharing the Green: A modern Irish history for Australians, asks:How was it to know that 'home' was much too distant to be seen again, or that one now lived in an expanse into which more than a thousand Irelands could be fitted, or to find the legendary rhythm of the seasons on which so many of the European patterns rested no longer formed the framework of the year?2The answer to McDonagh's question can be found in the music that developed in Australia, sung by colonial singers within the Irish diaspora, dating from the songs brought by the convicts and sailors who travelled to Australia on the First Fleet. Transportation ballads, which were often published as broadsides (printed on unfolded sheets of paper that could be pasted upon walls or carried easily), were the earliest of these songs, with titles such as 'The Convict Maid', 'The Transport's Lament' and 'The Black Velvet Band'. These were laments with lyrics protesting the innocence of the narrator against the vicissitudes of cruel fate. With so much left behind in the shape of family and the homeland itself, music was the portable, intangible, infinitely expandable mesh in which immigrants carried memories of their cultural identity.As MacDonagh asserts, the concept of diaspora encompasses more than one homeland and this duality facilitates the development of new songs grafted onto old musical rootstock. Longing for family and 'home' in Ireland is a sentiment regularly voiced today by Australian musicians for sympathetic audiences who are four or more generations removed from their Irish roots, so enduring is the residual dislocation from the mother culture. Songs of protest that travelled with Irish political prisoners transported to Australia were adapted and lived on in the new country, sung as songs of complaint about injustices perpetrated by the colonial government and wealthy landowners. They are still sung, sometimes with modernised lyrics, to equate a contemporary situation with that of the past.This essay examines laments in transition through the case study of Sally Sloane (1894-1982), a traditional Australian singer whose performance style and repertoire were strongly influenced by the songs she learned, by ear, passed down by her Irish grandmother and mother. These original Irish ballads remained in her repertoire as well as English and Scottish traditional songs, bush ballads and popular music-hall songs learned from the musicians she met throughout her life. Sloane was interviewed and recorded by a number of folkmusic collectors-John Meredith, Edgar Waters and Peter Hamilton, Warren Fahey and Graham Seal, Emily Lyle and Chris Sullivan-from the 1950s until the late 1970s.The case study of Sally Sloane is derived from my doctoral dissertation, titled 'Redefining the tradition: the role of women in the evolution and transmission of Australian folk music'. …

Transnational Perspectives on the Irish Foundation Myth

IntroductionThe town of Woodstock, Illinois, is perhaps most famous for being the shooting location of Bill Murray's 1993 film, Groundhog Day. Too distant from Chicago to be called a suburb, yet too populous to be called truly rural, Woodstock is instead a picturesque example of Middle America that proved ideal for the purposes of Mr. Murray and company. In reality, it is also home to the Stage Left Cafe, a small performance space on the town square where live music and spoken word events are hosted most nights of the week.The storyteller Clare Muireann Murphy came to Stage Left Cafe for a per- formance one Saturday night in November 2009. show was donation only, and the crowd was sparse but enthusiastic. Applause erupted in bursts after each of Murphy's stories, which she drew from her repertoire of legends and folktales from the Irish tradition. Then, at one point, she paused. She informed the audience that the story she was about to tell was not a regular feature of her sets, though she was willing to give it a try on this night because it-the story-was asking persistently to be told. Thus began the Irish foundation myth, told on this cold autumn evening, in a modest venue on the edge of the Midwestern prairie in the United States (Murphy, The Coming of the Milesians).In the next fifteen minutes or so, Murphy called up a myth both ancient in origin and foreign in location. Drawing on a blend of extemporaneous and theatrical performance techniques, the story was told, rather than recited, while voices and gestures were used to heighten dramatic effect. narrative tension reached its peak as the earliest ancestors of the modern Irish people defeated the monarchy that had previously ruled the island. When the three kings fell, the heart went out of the people, Murphy announced before the silent crowd. performance was an aesthetic success. mythic landscape, both alien and familiar to the modern mind, materialized in high relief through Murphy's telling. Yet the social question arising from this moment is how a culturally specific myth remained meaningful in the context of international performance and, moreover, how it reached Woodstock, Illinois, from its apparent place of origin in Ireland. Such concerns inform this study, which attempts to provide an interpretive frame- work for traditional narratives that cross national borders through the activities of traveling storytellers.Contested meanings surround the Irish foundation myth, as it is performed by Murphy on her tours of the world. Although she asserts that the main purpose of the story is to bring audiences together, alternative readings suggest connections with Ireland's history of sectarian conflict, as well as its present economic pre- dicament. Through this dialectic of personal and social forces, Murphy's version of the myth emerges as a quietly subversive ritual intended to foster narrative communion in a transnational performance context that imbues all stories with multiple meanings. following pages briefly discuss the terms and processes associated with this argument: globalization, mediation, transnationalism, myth, and ritual. Next, a description of Murphy's storytelling work outlines her history in the profession and her artistic interests. A subsequent interpretation approaches Murphy's version of the Irish foundation myth through the lenses of politics, economics, and ritual. Concluding remarks explore the connections among these forces, as well as the resulting perspective that may be applied to traditional narratives that travel far outside their culture of origin.1Globalization and the Performance of MythDefining globalization is the object of a perennial debate (Scholte 54-59), but it is generally accepted that one of globalization's practical outcomes is concurrent experience in different locations. For example, globalization allows for the simulta- neous online viewing of an international news event, such as the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, on 14 December 2012. …

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry ed. by Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (review)

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry ed. by Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (review)

Irish Modernity and the Politics of Contraception, 1979–1993

Irish Modernity and the Politics of Contraception, 1979–1993 Aidan Beatty In his seminal study Nationalism and Sexuality (1985) the cultural historian George Mosse argued that nationalism, “the most powerful ideology of modern times,” has had since its birth an intimate relationship with “respectability”— that is, the normative codes of public and private behavior, including sexual behavior, which also emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, Mosse argues that both nationalism and respectability were essentially middle-class movements that sought to enforce “correct” ideals of action for men and women, and so fed off each other. Both were also inherently modern ideologies, relying on emerging modernist notions of mass politics and the public sphere.1 Notwithstanding its obvious applicability to Irish contexts, Mosse’s innovative work, across a number of fields, has had sadly little impact on Irish Studies. A number of recent studies of Irish history have discussed the great relevance of notions of sexual respectability in modern Irish national identity. More specifically, these works have looked at how the pious self image of a sexually pure postcolonial Catholic Ireland was imagined against its opposing counterpart, the decidedly heathen, sexually immoral, and oppressively colonial English nation.2 What has perhaps not been grasped, however, is that this vision of Ireland represents a historically discrete modernist phenomenon. Ireland’s version of a specifically Catholic-nationalist modernity, though never singular, static or [End Page 100] monolithic, was a product of the nineteenth century; it was built upon modern notions of meritocracy and mass politics, and emerged in the aftermath of the Devotional Revolution. It was a modernity centered on relatively specific notions about land ownership, gender roles, public respectability, religious belief, attitudes toward “foreign” culture, and the role of the centralized state in enforcing these ideas. Conservative Irish Catholics, including the opponents of contraception who are the subject of this article, saw themselves as the defenders of a traditional social order. Yet much of what they considered traditional— sexual purity, public respectability, Irish piety in the face of alleged English impiety—drew on notions of a public sphere and of geographical and historical consciousness that could not have existed prior to modernity.3 The opponents of contraception were espousing a clearly modernist, if often belligerent and intolerant, set of ideologies. In this regard, they had much in common with the similarly modernist ideologues studied by George Mosse. It has been well documented that contraception was being widely used in Ireland at least as early as the 1960s, if not earlier.4 Various legal loopholes were exploited to allow a veneer of respectability to be maintained, despite what was clearly happening privately. This veneer of public sexual morality was an Irish version of what Mosse identified in English, French, German, and Italian national sexual respectability. However, in the 1973 case of McGee vs. Attorney General, the Irish supreme court found, though not in a unanimous decision, that a citizen’s right to personal liberty as enshrined in Article 40.4.1 of Bunreacht na hÉireann invalidated the 1935 law banning the import, sale, or manufacture of contraceptives.5 Six years after the findings of the McGee case, slouching slowly toward the consitutional legal reforms made necessary by the court’s ruling, the Health Family Planning Act of 1979 was brought to the Dáil.6 The 1979 act sought to “secure the orderly organisation of family planning services.” It allowed for the supply of contraceptives to married persons only, by pharmacists and doctors only, and only with a medical prescription. By removing the legal loopholes that had previously existed and replacing them with these narrow restrictions, the [End Page 101] new legislation actually made condoms less available, at least in major cities. This, inevitably, caused it to fall between two stools; it was too liberal for some and too conservative for others. Nonetheless, this was the first time that an Irish government had successfully legislated for a more “liberal” vision of sexual practice, provoking widespread public debate throughout the spring and summer of 1979. The themes of this debate were first established in the Dáil deliberations in February and March and two broad visions of Irish sexuality can be...

The Dynamics of the Clerical-Lay Relationship in the Roscommon Gaelic League

The Dynamics of the Clerical-Lay Relationship in the Roscommon Gaelic League Monica Paton (bio) and Timothy G. McMahon (bio) Present-day debates about the role of the Catholic church in modern Ireland color our understanding of clerical-lay relations in the past. Unquestionably, in the modern era the Catholic church has played a central place in Irish society, and as revelations about abuses of children have come to light, politicians and the public have been compelled to recognize how much power was ceded, almost reflexively, to the clergy, particularly in the various branches of education. These overarching debates have had a particularly resonant echo for scholars of one of independent Ireland’s central cultural projects, the revival of the Irish language prompted by the work of the Gaelic League (founded in 1893). Some scholars, including Tony Crowley, John Hutchinson, and Tom Garvin, have pointed out that many clerical and lay supporters of the early Gaelic revival, including Gaelic League co-founder Eoin MacNeill, considered the Irish language and Catholicism to be intimately linked.1 Crowley, for instance, cited a representative essay contributed to the League’s first newspaper as saying that “Irish is pre-eminently the language of prayer and devotion. Its dignity and impressive majesty admirably suit the themes of religion …; it has for Catholics an altogether peculiar interest in common to themselves alone.”2 A corollary of this position was [End Page 129] that Catholic clerical advocates of language revival sought to dictate policy to the League, a body founded ostensibly to appeal to “all creeds and all classes” in Ireland. In his study of the revival, however, McMahon has argued that although attempts by some clerics to control the League’s message were entirely in keeping with the powerful roles played by priests in secular and spiritual affairs in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Ireland, advocates of a nonsectarian vision pushed back against clerical dictation.3 What light might an examination of the early history of the Gaelic League in County Roscommon shed on these divergent interpretations of the relationship between priests and people in the Gaelic revival and more broadly on that relationship in modern Irish history? We propose to address this question through an intensive look at the language movement as it took root in the county town of Roscommon, where a series of priest officers were important advocates of the Gaelic movement. Specifically, we will address how the ongoing process of sorting out the power dynamics of the clerical-lay relationship affected the development of the revival in a particular locality and how the transfer of clerical personnel within the diocese of Elphin affected branch activity. Furthermore, we will contrast the approaches of the two most important priest activists in the early years of the branch—Fr. (later Canon) Thomas Cummins and Fr. Michael O’Flanagan—in order to highlight the importance of individual activists in shaping local understandings of the revival. Ultimately, three themes will emerge: first, that the views of priests—while influential—were not determinative in revivalist activities; second, that priest activists persisted in supporting the revival even when occasionally rebuffed over their understanding of its intent; and third, that laypersons were not the only ones to espouse a nonsectarian ideal through the League. Indeed, the evidence from County Roscommon creates a far more variegated picture of the clerical-lay relationship than the simplistic scenario espoused by Crowley and others. In our view laypeople relied on the power of priests to ensure that the revival attained status in their community, but this reliance did not imply unquestioning deference to clerical authority. [End Page 130] During the years of its most rapid expansion between 1898 and 1905, national promoters of the Gaelic League pragmatically looked to bishops and priests as local leaders with whom they should collaborate when founding branches. Throughout most of the nineteenth century Catholic leaders had been ambivalent about the decline of spoken Irish, but that attitude began to change largely through the work of staunch clerical supporters of the language—including Cardinal Michael Logue, Fr. Eugene O’Growney, and Fr. Michael O’Hickey—in the 1880s and 1890s. The latter two men played a special part in encouraging...

The Challenges of Writing in Irish in “I-Land”: Subverting the Western and Irish-Language Canons in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's “Oiléan/Island”

In the collections Pharaoh's Daughter (1990) and The Water Horse (2000), poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill considers the implications of (post)colonial cartography by reconstructing individual bodies as fig...

Re-reading the Modern Irish Drama : from (post)Colonial Politics to Aesthetic Voice

Re-reading the Modern Irish Drama : from (post)Colonial Politics to Aesthetic Voice

Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture by John Wilson Foster (review)

Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture by John Wilson Foster (review)

The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History by Patrick R. Mullen (review)

Reviewed by: The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History by Patrick R. Mullen Margot Gayle Backus (bio) THE POOR BUGGER’S TOOL: IRISH MODERNISM, QUEER LABOR, AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY, by Patrick R. Mullen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. vii + 213 pp. $65.00. As its subtitle makes clear, The Poor Bugger’s Tool both draws from and draws together key terms from four fields of significance for Joyce studies: Irish studies, queer theory/sexuality studies, Marxist theory, and postcolonial studies. As we might expect from Patrick R. Mullen’s titular choice of a Joycean synecdoche enfolding colonial resistance/oppression, class, sexual deviance, and production, Joyce’s extravagant textual strategies are both structurally and conceptually pivotal to Mullen’s project. Joyce’s centrality to Mullen’s work here is confirmed in the study’s fourth chapter when the author positions a reading of Joyce’s incorporation of Roger Casement in Ulysses. Structurally, Mullen’s Joyce chapter affords a transition from early sections devoted, respectively, to Oscar Wilde, J. M. Synge, and Casement to two final chapters focusing on the Irish cultural production of Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and Jamie O’Neill. As Mullen explains, the “queer sensibilities that emerge in Wilde, Synge, Casement, and Joyce” are analyzed as “experimental aesthetic forms” whose excess is “a critical response to the strictures of a British imperialist imaginary” (16). In its later chapters, “the study [suggests] that these aesthetic experiments were a success” and that “Irish modernists were able to transform affective excess into forms of cultural value” (16). Conceptually, it is in Ulysses that the “subterranean vein of queer sexual discourses” Mullen traces within fin de siècle and early-twentieth-century Irish culture becomes legible as “a dynamic framework for thinking critically about colonial and capitalist exploitation,” allowing for “potentially reparative forms of cultural production beyond an American model of identity politics” (8). For decades, Irish, modernist, and Joyce-studies scholars have sought a vantage point from which to theorize such reparative forms. Yet these efforts, though widespread, earnest, and often ingenious, have in one respect proved surprisingly unfruitful. On the whole, scholars remain as polarized as ever with reference to gender and sexuality and nation and empire. This polarization persists despite many successful individual efforts to bridge the material or cultural divide so as to produce analysis that attends to racial, national, and cultural identities as mediated and mediating between economic- [End Page 856] political and sexual-gendered axes of privilege and oppression. While there are doubtless many factors contributing to this dismayingly chronic disconnect, Mullen has persuasively identified one that may be a key factor. A major impediment to any political theorization of sexuality—and the modern identity categories that sexual acts, desires, and prohibitions make palpable—is traceable to Michel Foucault’s famous demolition of the repressive hypothesis in The History of Sexuality, Volume I.1 Mullen argues that the disconnect between identity categories and economic and political structures can be traced to the differing uses of Foucault by those trained as queer theorists and those trained as postcolonialists. Queer theorists, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s lead,2 focus on Foucault’s dismissal of the so-called repressive hypothesis and his (possibly misinterpreted) claim that, around the turn of the twentieth century, “homosexuality”—an aggregate of disparate and more or less random sexual activities—was reified into one coherent and recognizable social identity (43). Postcolonialists (exemplified by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri3) draw upon the work’s final section on biopower and biopolitics. Once grasped, Mullen’s opening claim is blindingly obvious, and yet it has gone heretofore unnoted. From the outset, Mullen’s crisp explication of the ways in which different moments in History of Sexuality, Volume I have hypostasized within queer and postcolonial theory exposes a dynamic that has been muddling conversations within and beyond Joyce studies concerning the significance of sexual desires and acts within imperial capitalism. As Mullen elegantly argues, “Sedgwick … takes up the thread of Foucault’s analysis that attends to the discourse of sexual definition, but she does not follow this thread through to its knotted entanglement with capitalism” (12). Hardt and Negri, in a symmetrical set...

Old Irish Tonic Pronouns as Extraclausal Constituents

Old Irish Tonic Pronouns as Extraclausal Constituents

The Political Context of <i>Cath Muighe Tuireadh</i>, the Early Modern Irish Version of the Second Battle of Magh Tuireadh

Two versions of the Second Battle of Magh Tuireadh are extant: an Old Irish version in British Library Harleian MS 5280 and an Early Modern Irish version in RIA MS 24 P 9. Through an analysis of the latter text and its manuscript context, and drawing on the evidence of Bardic poetry and other historical sources, this paper attempts to identify the political context in which the Early Modern Irish version was composed. It is argued that it was produced c. 1398 for a branch of the Mac Diarmada family and that it reflects the contemporary political struggles in which they were involved.

“My City's Million Voices Chiding Me”: “Answerability” and Modern Irish Working-class Writers

“My City's Million Voices Chiding Me”: “Answerability” and Modern Irish Working-class Writers

"Uncharitable Tongues": Women and Abusive Language in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland

"Uncharitable Tongues": Womenand Abusive Language in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland Cara Delay In 1914 the Catholic priest of Rosmuck, County Galway, reported on the status of his parish to Bishop Thomas O'Dea. He described a general state of peace, with one notable exception: "[wjomen," he explained, "sometimes say uncharitable things."1 One year later, another Galway priest informed his bishop that, although the parish could boast of having few problems or abuses, "some women of the parish have uncharitable tongues."2 Like the Galway priests, Irish legal authorities of the time also commented on the strange and troubling phenomenon of sharp-tongued women. In August 1911, one magis trate expressed his frustration when yet another case of abusive lan guage appeared in his court: "It is a strange thing that we never have a man here charged with that offence," he said. "It is all women ... I am sorry to say... that are charged."3 Indeed, just as Ireland's priests and bishops mulled over the problem, the secular courts busily pros ecuted thousands of women for abusive and threatening language. Priests' and magistrates' concerns testify that authorities, both colonial and Catholic, viewed verbally abusive women as a problem in early twentieth-century Ireland. On the one hand, such fears did reflect realities: many Irish women used their words to police each other, navigate community conflicts, and assert themselves within families and kin groups. As they scolded and defamed, such women, who were mostly poor or working class, followed well-established FeministStudies39, no. 3. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 628 Cara Delay 629 local traditions. On the other hand, anxieties about women with "uncharitable tongues" took on greater meaning from 1900-1915, a key time in Ireland's nation-building process. By the dawn of the new century, the nation was closely tied to the ideal of silent, peace ful, and benignly influential Catholic womanhood. Rural, Catholic, Gaelic Ireland—increasingly defined as the "real" Ireland—relied on a depiction of women as private and domestic.4 The wife and mother emerged as the nurturer of the family, poised to civilize men and children, in this Catholic and nationalist creation. As women's stud ies scholar Ursula Barry reminds us, women were constructed at the heart of Ireland, as "the standard bearers, the holders of the cul ture, the representatives" of the nation's soul.5 By the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Catholic discourse, which was deeply implicated in nation-building, fashioned Irish women as not only essentially private but also, in the words of Jesuit W. J. Lockington, "low-voiced."6 Women's "uncharitable tongues" presented a vocal, vis ible challenge to the ideal of modern Irish womanhood and thus to the emerging Catholic nation. In this article, I examine the ways in which poor Irish women in the early twentieth century used their voices to denounce and abuse their neighbors and kin. I assess the ensuing public distur bances and the responses that such disturbances provoked. After situating women's words and language, including gossip and scold ing, in a larger historical context, I focus on southern and western Irish women who were summoned to court for the criminal charge of abusive and threatening language during these years. My analy sis here draws on the records of the petty sessions courts, the lowest level of courts in Britain and Ireland, which dealt mostly with minor offenses. The charge of "abusive or threatening language," which was almost always leveled against women, reminds us of the ways in which women, by denouncing and cursing their neighbors, used their words to deliberate effect. My emphasis on Ireland's southern and western counties, and particularly Galway and Kerry, allows us to assess how poor women far away from significant urban centers interacted with each other and their communities. It also allows us to examine the disconnects between gender ideals and the realities of women's lives in the part of Ireland—the rural heartland—that con temporary commentators constructed as the "real" Ireland.7 630 Cara Delay I argue here that, although poor women were in fact using their words to regulate each other's behavior, newspapers and courts paid...

“SPLITTING THE ROCKS”: Derek Mahon’s Beckett

This study assesses impact of Beckett's work upon early work of Northern Irish Derek Mahon. Arguing that Mahon co-opts Beckett as an influence by misreading his work as that of manque, essay examines Mahon's handling of Beckett as source, model and 'adopted' precursor in four poems: Exit Molloy, An Image from Tithonus and Last of Fire Kings.The pros outweigh cons that glowfrom Beckett's bleak reductio -Mahon, Beyond Howth Head1. Exit MolloyIn 1984 essay on Samuel Beckett's poetry, Derek Mahon called him a minor and idiosyncratic poet (1996, 50). As editor of The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry in 1972, Mahon had represented Beckett by two poems and from Waiting for Godot (1972b, 111-14) - famous exchange from act 2 of play about All dead voices (the title Mahon gives it), complete with its name prefixes and directions. The 1984 essay ends by quoting same passage which, Mahon asserts, achieves [...] condition of music (1996, 53). The anthologist's co-option of passage is perhaps not surprising. In early Beckett criticism (of 1950s and 60s) it was commonplace to insist on musical or nature of much of his writing. In 1963, for example, Louis MacNeice, Mahon's poetic forerunner, described Beckett's drama as essentially lyrical, asking the sort of question that used to be prerogative of poets (124). In 2006 essay Mahon effects merger from opposite direction when he describes Beckett's best poems, examples of the existential lyric (1996, 56), as dramatic pieces in their own right [...] continuous with work for stage (2006, 1). But Mahon's anthologization of passage from Godot also hints at significantly personal reading.To present Godo /-passage as an honorary is to emphasize its qualities as momentary illumination, still point of insight amidst tedium and anxiety of waiting. In its context these qualities are heavily qualified: illumination is both made possible and clouded by obligation to speak, to bale out silence. While epiphany is not sine qua non of lyric, luminous moment is nonetheless native to genre. In drama, however, even lyrical drama of Beckett, any moment of is always likely to be submerged or rendered ambiguous by current of action. But Mahon's tendency has always been to read Beckett as manque. Much of time it is even dull, he wrote of Beckett's prose in 1976. One is tempted to skip. [...] But good bits are very good indeed. Not inexpressive as their author might wish, but expressive of rare vision, like 'brief scattered lights' [1959, 207] in Malone Dies (1996, 60). In 1986 tribute, Mahon asserts that novels of Beckett are a matter of texture rather than incident, quoting from How It Is: a few images on and off in mud earth sky few creatures in light some still standing (Beckett 1964, 8). This insistence on luminous moment issues in remarkable observation about the last words of Lucky's 'think' in Waiting for Godot, where 'the skull in Connemara,' 'the tennis' and 'Cunard' combine to suggest Proustian glimpse of childhood, summer afternoon in west of Ireland during long-ago school holidays (1996, 58).Although there is no evidence for it (Mahon was writing in 1976, before first generally available biographical information about Beckett), this last speculation is shrewd enough: comfortably-off Protestant Dubliners might very well have holidayed in West in 1910s. And Proust connection is natural. After all, Beckett's first book was critical study which asserts that Proust's entire book is monument to involuntary memory and epic of its action (Beckett 1965a, 34). Furthermore Beckett always claimed that vital shift in his own writing life and creative output, trigger for post-war frenzy of writing, which produced three novellas, trilogy of novels and Waiting for Godot, was result of revelation (Knowlson 351-53) in his mother's room in Foxrock. …

The Death of Irish Trade Protectionism: A Political Economy Analysis

The decision to abandon protectionism and move to a more open economy is considered one of the most important developments in modern Irish economic history. Drawing on recent work in the field of international political economy, we propose a new explanation for this important policy change based on interest groups’ demands. More specifically, we argue that Irish agriculture’s needs were highly influential in the policy decisions that were taken in the 1950s. Without the threat of exclusion from the emerging process of European integration and the accompanying loss of traditional markets for agricultural exports, protectionism would have persisted for some time. But we also suggest that the absence of significant objection from industry—supposedly the potentially adversely affected group, as the beneficiary of protection—reflects the changing balance between exporter and protectionist interests in that sector.

THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF "CATH MUIGHE TUIREADH", THE EARLY MODERN IRISH VERSION OF THE SECOND BATTLE OF MAGH TUIREADH

Two versions of the Second Battle of Magh Tuireadh are extant: an Old Irish version in British Library Harleian MS 5280 and an Early Modern Irish version in RIA MS 24 P 9. Through an analysis of the latter text and its manuscript context, and drawing on the evidence of Bardic poetry and other historical sources, this paper attempts to identify the political context in which the Early Modern Irish version was composed. It is argued that it was produced c. 1398 for a branch of the Mac Diarmada family and that it reflects the contemporary political struggles in which they were involved.