Thomas Moore Research Articles

Irish Rebellion: Protestant Polemic, 1798-1900. Stuart Andrews.Memoirs of Captain Rock. Thomas Moore. Edited by Emer Nolan and Seamus Deane.

<i>Irish Rebellion: Protestant Polemic, 1798-1900</i>. Stuart Andrews.<i>Memoirs of Captain Rock</i>. Thomas Moore. Edited by Emer Nolan and Seamus Deane.

Mary Tighe and Literary History: The Making of a Critical Reputation

AbstractThis essay offers a survey of critical (and uncritical) responses to Mary Tighe from the initial private printing of her epic poem Psyche; or, the Legend of Love in 1805 to the present. It opens with a brief discussion of the problematic status of Tighe’s literary papers, reviews the curious fame she experienced before her death in 1810, and then provides a detailed analysis of her literary reception in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty‐first century after the 1811 publication of Psyche, with Other Poems. In addition to its extensive overview of the published scholarship that has shaped Tighe’s critical reputation, the essay also attends to the less prominent readers (or fans) who played a significant role in keeping what Thomas Moore once called Tighe’s ‘quiet fame’ alive.

“I Rarely Use the Word God”: An Interview with Thomas Moore

Thomas Moore was born in Detroit. At age 13 he entered the Servite religious order of the Catholic Church in preparation for a life of teaching and ministry. He left the order before being ordained...

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...

Thomas Moore of Liverpool: One of Our Oldest Colonists. Essays and Addresses to Celebrate 150 years of Moore College – By Peter G. Bolt

Journal of Religious HistoryVolume 34, Issue 2 p. 226-227 Thomas Moore of Liverpool: One of Our Oldest Colonists. Essays and Addresses to Celebrate 150 years of Moore College – By Peter G. Bolt Bruce Kaye, Bruce Kaye General Synod, Anglican Church of AustraliaSearch for more papers by this author Bruce Kaye, Bruce Kaye General Synod, Anglican Church of AustraliaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 26 May 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9809.2010.00874.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume34, Issue2June 2010Pages 226-227 RelatedInformation

Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (review)

Reviewed by: Music and the Irish Literary Imagination Rachael Sealy Lynch Music and the Irish Literary Imagination, by Harry White, pp. 260. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. $115.00. Harry White's Music and the Irish Literary Imagination is one of those rare, seismic books that shakes up and rearranges the ground beneath its readers. It is beautifully conceived and written: detailed, nuanced, eloquent, persuasive, and at times, very funny. White is also endearingly honest about his occasional use of strategic argumentation. He deploys a musicologist's familiarity with the history of European art music, and a deep understanding of English Romanticism and the depth and breadth of Irish literature and culture from Moore to Heaney. This impressive scholarly heft is put to work in the service of a wide-ranging argument that will cause White's readers to re-evaluate their thinking about the connections between words and music in the Irish literary canon. Music and the Literary Imagination deservedly won the ACIS Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture in 2009. White's central argument is that language predominates and functions as a substitute for music in the Irish literary imagination. The book explores "how words became 'words for music.' "What is the place of music in Irish cultural history, and how do we explain the extent to which literature has replaced it? White proposes that the quest for the Irish omphalos, "the stone that marks the centre of the Irish world," requires "a consideration of music not simply as a striking absence but as a vital presence in the Literary Revival and in contemporary Irish literature." Noting that "the canonic reception which attaches to Irish writing is still in striking contrast to the marginal presence of Irish composition in the world," he interrogates the relative unimportance of music, particularly art music, and seeks to find the "hidden music." Citing "two ghosts in the machine, "White first connects the absence of art music to its indictment "as an expression of the colonial presence," while a "verbal understanding" of Irish music attained significance in Irish literature written in English in the 1890s as [End Page 142] "the unheard melody of the literary imagination." He also points to the loss of the Irish language, with words in this case answering "the need for music." In the course of eight organically connected chapters, White takes us from a careful reconsideration and rehabilitation of Thomas Moore, who, he argues, "mapped the essential terrain of the Literary Revival" and "was the first writer in English to nominate music as the supreme intelligencer of Irish history," to a potent examination of Seamus Heaney's collapsing of the gap between words and music. "In Heaney," he asserts, "the extent to which literature fills the void left by art music in Ireland is essentially complete." In an Irish literary imagination that privileges throughout the "the notion of words for music," Heaney's poetry "comes as close to the Irish Omphalos as we could wish." White identifies in Heaney "the long tradition of music as a vital intelligencer of the text" going back to Moore, but argues that the Nobel laureate unlocks so completely the music inside language that the music itself becomes redundant. He leaves us with the assertion that Heaney creates music that is verbally conceived, "made good by words alone." The first, and by far the longest chapter, is devoted to Moore. White sets up a detailed and convincing corrective argument in favor of restoring Moore's reputation to the high position it occupied throughout Europe during his lifetime. Acknowledging that "reception history . . . has not been kind to Moore," he makes clear that Moore has suffered his reversals of fortune for reasons that have little to do with his talents and significance, having come to be dismissed as a "drawing-room toady," or a "poetaster of the English country house." White argues that Moore, in fact, understood the role of Irish music in the expression of loss and dispossession in a way that can "be legitimately read as the source of that stable association between music and the Irish literary imagination which is so strikingly reinvented by Yeats." Moreover, Moore's...

The Romantics and the Question of Ireland

The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was of telling significance for Ireland itself and for Britain as a whole; there were also important connections with Europe. Its consequences were palpable throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Some contemporary writers, such as Shelley and Byron, commented very actively on these consequences but many others reflected little or nothing of them. In his letters Keats refers to a visit to Ireland; he notes the ever-present poverty, but does not offer any reflection on its social and political context. Irish writers themselves reveal an awareness of this context, but are often highly circumspect in their comments. In her Irish Tales Maria Edgeworth restricts her treatment of Irish poverty almost entirely to social terms. Little of Thomas Moore's poetry touches on the subject, and where he does comment on the Act of Union he makes no mention of the events that led up to it. It is only more than thirty years after the event that he comments vigorously and explicitly on the rebellion, in his biography of Lord Edward Fitzgerald.

Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature Gordon Bigelow (bio) Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Julia M. Wright; pp. 268 + viii. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. U.S. $106 cloth. The title meeting for this book must have been tense. Its blurb says that the book "focuses on the way nineteenth-century Irish writers wrote about India." Its opening remarks that "little attention has yet been paid to the ways in which nineteenth-century writers from colonized nations wrote about colonization beyond their own borders" (1). These remarks, along with the book's title, point toward a study of India in the Irish literary imagination, concerned at least in part with whether and how Irish writers imagined in India an analogue for their own experience of British rule. The volume offers instead much more diverse reflections touching on the gothic, the culture of sensibility, the economics of colonization, and nineteenth-century historiography. The first chapter does not deal with India but rather provides an insightful and dynamic analysis of the way Enlightenment notions of sensibility functioned within Irish nationalist discourse. Chapter 2 continues in this vein, developing a coherent and useful reading of novels by Sidney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and Maria Edgeworth. This reading reveals sensibility as the force that binds otherwise feckless Anglo-Irish settlers to a sense of duty in the tasks of colonial administration. But these novels do not picture India in any way, nor does Wright's reading argue that India has any significance within them. Later chapters work with texts that imagine Indian settings, and in the second of the book's two major sections, "Colonial Gothic and the Circulation of Wealth," Wright shifts her focus away from sensibility in works of the Romantic period and toward questions of history and economics in works that span the long nineteenth century, from "Monk" Lewis to Bram Stoker. The book has considerable strengths, and foremost among these is the attention it devotes to literary texts that carried weight in their era but that tend to be neglected by contemporary scholars. Wright highlights Thomas Moore's Memoirs of Captain Rock, Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, and Denis Florence McCarthy's "Afghanistan," and in doing so, she effectively enlarges the ongoing conversation within post-colonial studies about the status of an Anglo-Irish literature. More impressive still is Wright's innovative treatment of the way Enlightenment ideas of sensibility threaded their way through often disparate views of nationalism and national identity well into the nineteenth century. The idea of a "romantic" nationalism is often too easily and sketchily evoked in discussions of nineteenth-century Irish culture, and Wright's work does a great deal to amplify and to complicate this formulation. But the argument about sensibility runs through only part of the book, and, since it is not set out as the volume's overarching argument, its stakes and consequences are never explored in a clear way. Representations of India are likewise the subject of many, but not all, of the book's chapters, and thus again the argument about how Irish writers invented and traded their figures of India is not completely [End Page 157] realized. Scholars are increasingly interested in the connections and comparisons between India and Ireland that nineteenth-century observers identified and wrote about. It is an important area of emerging research, engaged with central questions in colonial history and culture, and this book will help to establish and promote this emerging field. Gordon Bigelow Rhodes College Gordon Bigelow Gordon Bigelow teaches in the Department of English at Rhodes College, in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (2003). Copyright © 2009 Victorian Studies of Western Canada

JISB Interview: Intervention, Statebuilding and Security

Dr. Aidan Hehir and Dr. Thomas Moore interviewed Lord Robertson, at the House of Lords, London, on 16 December 2008

Bard of Erin: the life of Thomas Moore. By Ronan Kelly. Pp 624. Dublin: Penguin Ireland. 2008. £25.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

“Oft in the Stilly Night”: Past and Present, Myth and Identity in Delta Wedding

It is accurate to say that the past plays a significant role in Southern narrative, but anyone who says so is making neither a fresh observation nor a particularly helpful one, for the past plays a significant role in most narrative. Few storytellers come to their task with the assumption that the past does not count. Examples from the Iliad to Tristram Shandy reveal narrators struggling to portray the influence of the past on the present, the dead on the living. What seems more useful is to ask how a particular author portrays the relationship between (or the collision of) past and present. Continuing my study of songs in Delta Wedding, I will focus on Thomas Moore’s “Oft in the Stilly Night” and examine some questions that it raises. Particularly, in what ways, in Delta Wedding, does Welty portray the threshold between present time and past time? In what ways do characters perceive the past and the dead? The Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852) wrote “Oft in the Stilly Night,” also known as “The Light of Other Days,” and published it in the first issue of his National Airs (1819). Like other songs by Moore, such as “Drink to Me Only,” and “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” “Oft in the Stilly Night” became immensely popular during the nineteenth century and continued to be widely known and sung during the first decades of the twentieth. Found in many books for school and family use, even in McGuffey readers, “Oft in the Stilly Night” also was performed as an “art” song in concerts and on recordings. The song is sung twice in Delta Wedding, first by Aunt Shannon, and second, by the family members at the picnic after the wedding. Shannon Fairchild Miles, one of the old aunts who reared Battle and his brothers and sisters, sings or hums frequently in the narrative. The moment in question is Friday, the day of the wedding rehearsal, in the evening. As Welty describes the scene we do not see Aunt Shannon but merely hear her: “One of those inexplicable pauses fell over the room, a moment during which Aunt Shannon’s voice could be heard in another part of the house, singing ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’” (DW 272). This song is part of the novel’s almost continuous musical discourse (after a few moments pass, we hear Mary Lamar Mackey playing the popular dance

Moore's centenary: music and politics in Dublin, 1879

Introduction Within the first weeks of 1879, plans were afoot in Dublin to mark the centenary of the birth of Thomas Moore. What eventually transpired in May of that year was a high profile, large-scale occasion at the Exhibition Palace (now the National Concert Hall). Along with a number of professional singers, a large chorus and band were assembled for two concerts which featured an oration and ode especially written for the occasion. Military bands marched in the evening, and the Lord Mayor of Dublin hosted a grand ball at the Mansion House. The press followed both the preparations and the centenary celebrations closely. Its reports demonstrate that the 1879 celebration of Thomas Moore was a microcosm of political, cultural and musical concerns. Indeed, the story of this one-day event unfolds against a background of issues relating to Home Rule, Irish culture and Moore's somewhat contentious position in Ireland's cultural and political landscape. As rain poured down on the city of Dublin on 28 May 1 879, a procession of carriages left the Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor, and made a short journey to the Exhibition Palace on Earlsfort Terrace, the site of a grand concert. The corporation flag was raised at City Hall and the streets bustled with crowds, who, despite the purportedly atrocious weather, had made the journey to the capital, courtesy of extra trains. At the model schools1 on Marlborough Street, over 1,000 children sang a selection of the Irish melodies and that same evening, a house on Aungier Street received a throng of visitors and was lit up with the name 'Thomas Moore' emblazoned over that ubiquitous symbol of Irish nationalism, the harp.2 All of this activity marked the centenary of the birth of Ireland's national bard. Preparations to mark the centenary of Thomas Moore's birth had been under way since January. A committee had been formed to plan the events for 28 May, the date of Moore's birth. What transpired were large-scale spectacles that incorporated two concerts with audiences of 3,000 apiece; a specially written ode and oration; * Author's e-mail: maria.mchale@ucd.ie doi: 1 0.33 1 8/PRIAC.2009. 109.387 1 Model schools were created by the Commissioners for National Education from 1833 onwards. Initially envisaged as places of teacher-training, from 1883 they functioned as ordinary schools. 2 Number 12 Aungier Street was the birthplace of Thomas Moore. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 109C, 387^08 © 2009 Royal Irish Academy This content downloaded from 207.46.13.114 on Thu, 26 May 2016 05:51:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Samshoblo and Mamuli ('Homeland')

Research into any synonymic pair or group has self-sufficient value, and their choice does not stand in need of special argumentation. But in the present case the choice of the synonyms to be analysed was prompted by a preliminary (it may be said, perfunctory) observation of the differentiated attitude of Ilia Chavcha­vadze, Georgian literary classic of the 19th c., to the synonymic pair mamuli and samshoblo. In his original writings (poetry, belles-lettres, publi­cism) the author in­tensively – and I believe, consciously – uses mamuli to designate his own country, while in poetic translations (of Byron, Heine, Thomas Moore, Lermontov) – made directly from the language of the original or through some other (intermediary) language – the translator gives preference e to samshoblo (Chavchavadze 1937: I, 209-44). Besides, the purely termi­nological use of samshoblo, one of the synonyms, in some contexts modern Georgian is noteworthy. Examples of such contexts are: samshoblos (not mamulis) ghalat’i (legal use), ‘betrayal of one’s homeland’; chineti chais samshobloa (not mamuli) ‘China is homeland of tea’. Such non-substitutability or differentiated use-non-use of synonyms naturally stirs the researcher’s interest, challenging him/her to make his/her special study. In modern Georgian two synonyms are used to denote the concept of ‘homeland’: samshoblo and mamuli. Research into the following components is proposed in order to study their interrelationship: 1. The definition and typology of etymologies of the synonyms; 2. From monosemy to polysemy and synonymization; 3. Derivation (including forming compound words); 4. From polysemy to monosemy and terminologization; 5. Syntagmatics and Stylistics of synonyms

'The Tommy Moore Touch': Ireland and Modernity in Joyce and Moore

'The Tommy Moore Touch':Ireland and Modernity in Joyce and Moore Emer Nolan (bio) In A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus expresses his disdain for Thomas Moore, author of the Irish Melodies and the most popular Irish writer of the nineteenth century. As he passes 'the droll statue of the national poet of Ireland' in College Green, Stephen remarks on the figure's 'servile head', describing Moore as a 'Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a Milesian' (P V.216-21).1 In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom sees the same statue and comments, with an ironic nod to one of the best-known Melodies, that '[t]hey did right to put him over a urinal: meeting of the waters' (U 8.414-15). Moore is apparently a despised figure, but perhaps here as elsewhere, Stephen's contempt is in fact a measure of his intense involvement. In spite of his occasional scorn for Moore, Joyce refers to the Melodies throughout his works, alluding to every one of them in Finnegans Wake: he takes their appeal seriously and clearly was not immune to it himself.2 Louis Gillet recalls how Joyce would play 'his treasury of Irish melodies' on the piano in Paris, his listeners 'suspended on the doleful and nostalgic cadences'.3 On one occasion in A Portrait, Stephen returns to 'the chaos and misrule' of his father's house and finds his younger brothers and sisters singing Moore's 'Oft in the Stilly Night' over the remains of their tea and bread: He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they set out on life's journey they seemed weary already of the way. [...] He heard the choir of voices in the kitchen echoed and multiplied through an endless reverberation of the choirs of endless generations of children: and heard in all the echoes an echo also of the recurring note of weariness and pain. All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it. And he remembered that Newman had heard this note also in the broken lines of Virgil giving utterance, like the voice of [End Page 64] Nature herself, to that pain and weariness yet hope of better things which has been the experience of her children in every time (P IV.593-605).4 Through the medium of a popular song, Stephen makes connections between the present, past generations, Newman, Virgil, and finally 'Nature's children' - human beings. In a style which anticipates 'The Dead' and even Finnegans Wake, a single, rather lowly fragment of Irish culture yields a vision of shared experience. In such instances, Joyce proves himself to be a partial exception to the early twentieth-century flinch from Moore's 'servility' and 'inauthenticity', acknowledging the element of utopian longing as well as the sentimental nostalgia in his music. In a 1979 tribute to Moore, Seamus Heaney remarks that modern Ireland rescinded Moore's title of 'national bard' because his characteristic tone was 'too light, too conciliatory, too colonisé' for a nation 'whose conscience was being forged by James Joyce, whose tragic disunity was being envisaged by W.B. Yeats and whose literary tradition was being restored by the repossession of voices such as Aodhagán O Rathaille's or Brian Merriman's'. Heaney recalls: Yet this was the note I often heard coming over the wireless from Athlone in the forties, the note that John McCormack struck, the note that was struck in the schoolroom for generations. This was the music of what happened in the sentimental national heart, where Tara and Avoca and Lough Neagh's banks glimmered fitfully in the light of other days. Before I read my Corkery [...] my own sense of an Irish past was woven from the iconography of AOH [Ancient Order of Hibernians] banners and phantoms out of Moore's Melodies.5 Heaney had listened to Radio Éireann from Northern Ireland. He does not suggest that Moore's Melodies resonated any differently for Catholics on the northern side of the Irish border. Rather, he focuses on a division within Anglophone Irish culture, between writers devoted to cultural revivalism or modernist...

Moore's centenary: music and politics in Dublin, 1879

Within the first weeks of 1879, plans were afoot in Dublin to mark the centenary of the birth of Thomas Moore. What eventually transpired in May of that year was a high profile, large-scale occasion at the Exhibition Palace (now the National Concert Hall). Along with a number of professional singers, a large chorus and band were assembled for two concerts which featured an oration and ode especially written for the occasion. Military bands marched in the evening, and the Lord Mayor of Dublin hosted a grand ball at the Mansion House. The press followed both the preparations and the centenary celebrations closely. Its reports demonstrate that the 1879 celebration of Thomas Moore was a microcosm of political, cultural and musical concerns. Indeed, the story of this one-day event unfolds against a background of issues relating to Home Rule, Irish culture and Moore's somewhat contentious position in Ireland's cultural and political landscape.

Sudden whitening of the hair: an historical fiction?

Sudden hair whitening (canities) was first reported centuries ago. Although a rare event, it has affected well-known historical figures, including Sir Thomas Moore and Queen Marie Antoinette of France. Early reports are substantiated by more recent cases in the scientific literature. Often, there is association with psychological stress; in the two historical cases above, the condition is thought to have been a reaction to the sentence of execution. In this paper, we examine some case histories of those afflicted throughout history and discuss hypotheses to explain the phenomenon.

Incorrectly Political: Augustine and Thomas Moore ‐ by Peter Iver Kaufman

Journal of Religious HistoryVolume 32, Issue 4 p. 490-491 Incorrectly Political: Augustine and Thomas Moore - by Peter Iver Kaufman David Parnham, David Parnham Independent ScholarSearch for more papers by this author David Parnham, David Parnham Independent ScholarSearch for more papers by this author First published: 28 October 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9809.2008.726_16.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume32, Issue4December 2008Pages 490-491 RelatedInformation

Memorializing History in The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore

Tracing the various playtexts of Sir Thomas Moore, a play of the 1590s written partly by Shakespeare, reveals differing perspectives on the cause and significance of Evil May Day and thus serves as a litmus test on its various cultural meanings and a history of cultural change. Under a strongly Protestant regime, the Catholic Thomas More is seen heroically as an authority who puts down protest and uprisings, a champion of peace. From another viewpoint, he is the humanist interested in social justice. After the threat of the Spanish Armada, however, attention turned to the rioters as alien workers displacing natives ones. To make More more acceptable, he was turned into a man of wit and of theatricality, his Catholicism parodied. Together, such varied responses suggest the rich complexity of a play which deserves to be better known.

Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce (review)

Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce (review)

Ambivalent Realism: May Laffan's "Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor"

Ambivalent Realism:May Laffan's "Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor" Jill Brady Hampton It is probably true to say that few contemporary scholars of Irish literature have heard of May Laffan (1849–1916), let alone read her works. It is also true that any scholar with even a cursory knowledge of present-day debates in Irish literature would be aware of ongoing discussions concerning which writers are, and are not, to be considered part of the "canon"—a debate that grew contentious after the publication of the first three volumes of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991.1 Recent studies of nineteenth-century Irish fiction, particularly of women's contributions, have invigorated the recovery of once-neglected Irish writers. Scholars have recognized the importance of such early Irish authors as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, William Carleton, and the Banim brothers. They also have heralded writers from later in the century including Charles Lever, Charles Kickham, George Moore, and Edith Somerville and Violet Martyn (Ross). Research on Thomas Moore retains a vigorous presence in the scholarly literature; oddly, Charles Kickham, the author of Knocknagow —among the most popular and influential of all nineteenth-century novels in English—still fails to attract much attention.2 Widely lauded in the 1870s and 1880s, May Laffan, too, fell into obscurity until fairly recently. [End Page 127] For students of nineteenth-century Ireland never to read the biting satire of May Laffan would be unfortunate. In The Cabinet of Irish Literature (1883), an ambitious early attempt to represent a canon of Irish writing over four volumes, editors Charles Read and T. P. O'Connor (later a prominent Home Rule politician) recognized her distinctive contribution: Miss Laffan is to some extent the precursor of a new school of Irish fiction . . . she deserves the highest praise for the courage and remarkable skill with which she has exposed some of the shams and the narrowness that deface the society of Ireland as of every other country. Her writings in this respect mark unquestionably a new era in Irish literature.3 Read and O'Connor's praise raises questions about both the current Irish literary canon and nineteenth-century writing. They may, of course, have simply been wrong in their judgment; but it may also be that the scholarly neglect of Laffan and other, equally significant, writers provides insight into both nineteenth and twentieth-century critical judgments, and that she, too, warrants a place in the canon. Laffan's acclaimed short story "Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor" (1879), an exemplar of Irish literary social realism and penetrating satire, makes the case compelling.4 In 1979, Robert Lee Wolff 's editing of Garland's Ireland: From the Act of Union—1800 to the Death of Parnell—1891 sparked interest in Irish fiction outside the Revival.5 Notably, Wolff was a professor of history, not literature. In acknowledging literature's value as an historical source, Wolff commented that "above all, it was the novelists who taught the reading public about nineteenth-century Ireland. It is the novelists who if given the chance can still today outdo the scholars in teaching us in the late twentieth century about Ireland in the nineteenth."6 Including Laffan, the Garland collection presented a new perspective on Irish Catholic middle-class life, which recent research has further [End Page 128] developed.7 John V. Kelleher, Wolff 's colleague at Harvard, also testified to the value of the Garland collection: But to declare that most of it lacked seriousness showed either that those who leveled the charge had only a few of the lighter books in mind or, more likely, that the Ireland they knew was so changed from what it had been even a few decades earlier that they could have little comprehension of what the older writers had struggled with and tried to express.8 Kelleher also emphasized the helpful information, perceptive observation, and intelligent comment on nineteenth-century Ireland offered by the collected fiction. Born in Dublin, May Laffan was the product of a denominationally mixed marriage, a rarity in the highly sectarian Ireland of the time where religion fostered mental, social, and cultural ghettoes. Her mother, Ellen Sarah, neé Fitzgibbon...