Showing papers in "Irish Studies Review in 2010"

'To live and die [for] Dixie': Irish civilians and the Confederate States of America

Abstract: Around 20,000 Irishmen served in the Confederate army in the Civil War. As a result, they left behind, in various Southern towns and cities, large numbers of friends, family, and community leaders. As with native-born Confederates, Irish civilian support was crucial to Irish participation in the Confederate military effort. Also, Irish civilians served in various supporting roles: in factories and hospitals, on railroads and diplomatic missions, and as boosters for the cause. They also, however, suffered in bombardments, sieges, and the blockade. Usually poorer than their native neighbours, they could not afford to become ‘refugees’ and move away from the centres of conflict. This essay, based on research from manuscript collections, contemporary newspapers, British Consular records, and Federal military records, will examine the role of Irish civilians in the Confederacy, and assess the role this activity had on their integration into Southern communities. It will also look at Irish civilians in the defe...

Border crossings: new approaches to the Irish border

Abstract: This paper explores and extends recent work on the Irish border that has sought to redress the relative lack of attention to the social, economic and cultural dimensions of the border in contrast to its intense political symbolism. In particular it addresses the theme of border crossing as a way to consider the border in terms of its everyday dimensions and in terms of questions of conventional and reconfigured categories of identity shaped by borderland life. The first section of the paper outlines recent approaches to the Irish border and their relationships to the field of border studies. The second section uses new research material to explore the ways in which the border was experienced on the ground in the lives of those most directly subject to its changing nature over the course of the twentieth century. The final part of the paper addresses recent suggestions that those experiences may form the basis of new cross-border and cross-community ‘border identities’. The term ‘border crossing’ in the pa...

Direct rule and the governance of Northern Ireland

Abstract: Derek Birrell, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2009, 274 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7190-7757-9 Northern Ireland is often cited as one of the most researched places in the world. A...

C.S. Lewis: an Irish writer

Abstract: This article examines the effect of C.S. Lewis's Irish background on his work. It attempts to contradict the assumption that this Belfast-born writer should be included in the English and not the Irish canon. It emphasises that Lewis saw himself as Irish, was seen by others as Irish, and that his Irish background, contrary to what some have written, was important to him throughout his lifetime. It goes on to demonstrate the ways in which his work was influenced by his youth in Ireland and by the Irish mythology that he loved. Furthermore, this article maintains that, as a child of pre-partition Ireland with roots throughout the island, Lewis was influenced by the country as a whole, not just his native Ulster. Finally, it attempts to understand why Lewis, a proud Irishman, did not do more to promote himself as an Irish writer.

Irish children and teenagers in a changing world: the national Write Now project

Abstract: Pat O'Connor, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2008, 181 pp., £14.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780719078200 The academic study of children and – even more so perhaps – of teenagers in Ireland is r...

Historical archaeology of the Irish diaspora: a transnational approach

Abstract: Stephen A. Brighton, Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 2009, xxvii+221 pp., $49.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-57233-667-4 In the field of Irish studies, there are numerous tomes on immigration ...

From golden hills to sycamore trees: pastoral homelands and ethnic identity in Irish immigrant fiction, 1860–75

Abstract: The prose fiction that remembers the trials of starvation and eviction of the Great Famine (1845–50) often juxtaposes representations of blasted, infertile land with images of a green, idyllic Erin. Through a discussion of Mary Anne Sadlier's Bessy Conway (1861), Elizabeth Hely Walshe's Golden Hills: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1865) and John McElgun's Annie Reilly (1873), this article reveals that immigrant writers of the Famine generation often negotiate depictions of Famine-stricken wasteland with evocations of a pastoral homeland. In the case of the two Catholic novels, Bessy Conway and Annie Reilly, the pastoral becomes a point of ethnic identification through which the immigrants can recollect and reconstruct a sense of Irishness in exile. By contrast, Golden Hills, which focuses on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, does not lament the mass exodus of afflicted Irish: the novel rather envisions emigration as a way to regenerate Ireland as locus amoenus.

‘… that great swollen belly’: the abject maternal in some recent Northern Irish fiction

Abstract: This essay will consider the representation of the maternal in some contemporary Northern Irish fiction written by men It will examine, using feminist theories of embodiment and subjectivity, the power of the maternal image in Irish literary and critical discourse The work of Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz and Mikhail Bakhtin will be employed in this argument The pregnant body has the power to radically unsettle order, and this essay will explore the way in which men write their fears of this all-consuming imago Northern Irish men write out their fears of all-consuming national ideology through infanticide and grotesque mother figures and this essay will trace how this figure is complicated through political ideology in Northern Ireland The texts under consideration will be Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson and Resurrection Man and The Last of Deeds by Eoin McNamee, as well as a glance towards the work of Glenn Patterson as a possible alternative to the hegemonic view of the gro

Facilitating the future: US Aid, European integration and Irish industrial viability 1948–73

Abstract: was going to ‘visit his friends in the north’. The period 1948–51 is critical. Rees argues that the intensification of pressure for the removal of the border merely reinforced it. The 1949 election helped to secure unionist control and resulted in considerable loss by the NILP. The party was divided by the partition issue. The unionist position was strengthened by 1951. Financial dependence ‘made Stormont vulnerable to political pressure from London’ but Attlee’s government did not apply it. Labour’s policies were implemented in the North, strengthening links with the UK, and nothing was done to challenge the increasingly undemocratic nature of politics in the North. Rees’s conclusion draws on the inevitable comparison of this period with the Wilson government’s relations with Terence O’Neill in the 1960s. What emerges from this excellent and important study is a litany of seemingly missed opportunities, the underlying assumption being that such opportunities perhaps never existed, given the consensus of successive British governments to extricate themselves from the Irish ‘problem’. Once out, they were content to ignore their ‘large and expensive secret’ until it was far too late.

Playing for Ireland in foreign fields: the Gaelic Athletic Association and Irish nationalism in America

Abstract: With a few exceptions, the existing scholarship on the relationship between the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and Irish nationalism has largely overlooked the experiences of the Irish diaspora. This article seeks to redress this neglect by exploring the ways in which Irish nationalism has historically been produced, reproduced and contested amongst members of the GAA in the USA. In light of their status as focal points of Irish immigration and as centres of Gaelic games activity in America, the article focuses on the cities of Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. It draws on extensive archival and interview research conducted in each locale since 2000 and reveals that while intensely politicised and ethnic versions of Irish nationalism have historically weaved their way through US branches of the Association, since the mid-1990s there have been a number of socio-economic and political developments both in Ireland and in America that have seen the GAA begin to articulate a more civic, less ethn...

‘Stepping into history’: reading the Second World War through Irish women's diaries

Abstract: This article examines two very different wartime diary accounts by Irish women, Romie Lambkin, a driver in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and Mary Morris, who nursed in England, France and Belgium. Both texts assert the legitimacy of the Irishwoman's wartime story through consciously placing themselves in history, affirmed by the difference between their ‘real’ existence as participants in the war, and the ‘unreal’ Eire, outside history and reality, a ‘fairyland’, as Lambkin calls it, of lights and food set against a blacked out and bombed out Europe. More broadly, drawing on theoretical perspectives on life-writing and identity, the discussion focuses on these accounts as dynamic, vividly written contributions to our understanding of the war experience, showing how the subjective experience narrated in a diary has an important place in the collective historical narrative of the Second World War.

A history of the Irish short story

Abstract: Heather Ingman, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 344pp., £50.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-521-86724-5 Quickly: name the first few Irish writers to come to mind. Joyce. Yeats. Beckett (leav...

Yeats, Samhain, and the aesthetics of cultural nationalism: ‘a supreme moment in the life of a nation’

Abstract: Together, in the plays and essays published in the 1903 issue of Samhain, William Butler Yeats assembled writings that endorse his vision of cultural nationalism in that they stress the possibilities of an artistic regeneration that that has the power to reconcile perceived exclusive strata within Irish society and also to herald a new age not only for Irish culture but for the Irish nation. Yeats, in his cultural nationalism, ultimately vested faith in an Ascendancy tradition, defined not by birth as much as by a willingness to surrender not just political ambitions but all ambition to that of the artist.

Madness and Mother Ireland in the fiction of Patrick McCabe

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between madness and the figure of Mother Ireland in the work of the Irish novelist Patrick McCabe. It situates his work in relation to contemporary feminist responses to representations of Ireland as a woman, by identifying different versions of the Mother Ireland figure as a cause of psychosis in McCabe's writing. It argues that McCabe, in contrast to writers such as Eavan Boland and Edna O'Brien, finds an alternative and radical means of contesting this historically troublesome literary motif.

Irish novels, 1890–1940: new bearings in culture and fiction

Abstract: Just as interesting as what is said, of course, is what remains unsaid. Gender, while clearly an enormously potent influence in the young people’s lives, is rarely explicitly referred to sin the texts, ‘reflecting its (perceived) situational irrelevance in school, its taken-forgranted character or its perceived relationship to a sexual discourse’ (109). There are few mentions of ‘race’ or ethnicity and the author refers to class and sexuality, particularly homosexuality, as ‘hidden discourses’ in the texts. She suggests that ‘to a degree that we have not fully recognised, some of the difficulties surrounding adolescence in Irish society may arise from what appears to be the relatively sudden decrease in the importance of positional elements’. This is just one of the many points emerging from this study that could be taken up by future research. Others include the experience and significance of friendship(s) in the lives of Irish young people; processes and experiences of individualisation, so little studied in Ireland to date (and particularly given that one of a number of somewhat surprising findings is that the ten to twelve year olds express their ‘life plans’ in terms ‘rather different to the highly individualised ones that one might expect to be constructed in the light of theorising in the area’ (149); and how these expressions of worldview among eleven to twelve and fourteen to seventeen years olds compare with those of older teenagers and young adults. Also worthy of further investigation is the question of how the opinions, experiences and perceptions communicated in these texts relate to what happens in practice in young people’s lives, since, as the author acknowledges, the study ‘deals with accounts, which may to a greater or lesser extent reflect these young people’s actual behaviour’ (155). In this innovative and insightful study Pat O’Connor has significantly contributed to our understanding of childhood and youth in contemporary Ireland and in addition helped to set a challenging agenda for further research.

Rare models: Roger Casement, the Amazon, and the ethnographic picturesque.

Abstract: In 1910 Roger Casement was sent by the British government to investigate the alleged humanitarian abuses of the Peruvian Amazon Company in the Putumayo, a disputed border zone in North West Amazonia. Casement brought more than verbal and written testimony back to London. On 26 June, some six months after he returned from the Amazon, Casement collected two Amerindian boys – Omarino and Ricudo – from Southampton docks. This paper will reconstruct the brief period that these young men spent in Britain in the summer of 1911 and assess, in particular, to what extent they were treated as ‘exhibits’ by Casement, who not only introduced them to leading members of the British establishment but also arranged for them to be painted and photographed following contemporary ethnographic conventions.

‘Tinkers’: Synge and the cultural history of the Irish Traveller

Abstract: Mary Burke, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, 329 pp., £50.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-956646-4 There is a wide gap between the ‘tinker’ as a construct in Irish literature and the Traveller a...

‘I have been trying very hard to be powerful “nice” …’: the correspondence of Sister M. De Sales (Brennan) during the American Civil War

Abstract: Roman Catholic Irish nuns formed a large part of the American Civil War nursing experience in both the North and the South. In fact, when Confederate President Robert E. Lee beseeched the assistance of Irish-born Patrick Lynch, then Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina, to provide nurses for his hospitals, Roman Catholic sisters from a local convent were pressed into service. Sister M. De Sales (Brennan), born in County Kilkenny, Ireland, became instrumental in establishing two hospitals in the Virginias. During the war years she penned over 1000 pages of letters to him. Initially, the paper provides an overview of the cultural milieu and medical knowledge that existed prior to the onset of the conflict. Attending to soldiers whose wounds changed both the nature of medicine and the approach to it, women willing to move beyond the confines of predominantly private and family-oriented care assisted on battlefields and in field hospitals of various kinds. In these settings, widows, adventure seekers, good-he...

Making Ireland Roman: Irish neo-Latin writers and the republic of letters

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Charleston's Irish labourers and their move into the Confederacy

Abstract: In 1861, thousands of recently arrived Irish immigrants marched off to battlefields like Petersburg, Sharpsburg, and Cold Harbor carrying Confederate flags and Irish banners. Most, like those from Charleston, South Carolina, were not slave holders but young, impoverished, unskilled workers. Their motives remain shrouded in mystery. Were they hapless pawns of the powerful slave-owning elite? What were they fighting for? What was it in their view of the world that brought them to the decision to join the Confederate forces? The answer is embedded in their past experiences, current social relations, and sense of identity. In part, Charleston's Irish workers brought the memory of social exclusion with them to America and struggled to write a different history on Southern soil. Their position as free, white workers in a slave society and their constructed and publicly reinforced identity as exiled patriots and dutiful sons of their new homeland influenced their actions on the eve of the Civil War. In this essa...

Crossroads: performance studies and Irish culture

Abstract: the last century towards a more nuanced view, including, as in the example of Casey, to a perspective from ‘within’. The final chapter of the book discusses Travellers in Irish and American films ranging from Into the West to Snatch and Pavee Lackeen. The author’s reading of Travel(l)ers in the USA in the context of a broader configuration of race is particularly valuable. The argument that such American representations avoid ‘the Othering of the Irish Traveller that occurs in Irish films such as . . . Trojan Eddie’ (268) is, however, compromised by the author’s misreading of the status of that same Eddie, who is not a Traveller. Billy Roche deliberately set out in his screenplay to make the Travellers the insiders of his story, while Eddie, the settled character who works for them, remains on the outside of their culture. For Burke to read the depiction of Eddie as ‘resolutely unsympathetic to the point where negative print media stereotypes of the barbarian and irresponsible Irish Traveller male are . . . evoked’ (243), and to see his treatment of the women in his life as evidence of such stereotyping, is therefore a little ironic. Ultimately, as Burke rightly concludes, the ‘tinker’ as a construct of Irish Otherness can only be dispelled when more images of Travellers will be created by Travellers themselves. She ends her study with the optimistic prediction that the ugly stereotype will eventually be a thing of the past.

‘Now’, ‘now’, ‘even now’: temporal deixis and the crisis of the present in some Northern Irish poems of the Troubles

Abstract: The problem of how to describe and account for the present can be identified as a particular preoccupation of poets of the so-called Northern Irish renaissance. This article examines how the temporal deictic ‘now’ functions in some well-known poems by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. All three poets explore how to combine the plausibility of lyric derived from an individual consciousness with the authority of narrative derived from social interactions. This article will do three related things. First, it will argue that discussing ‘now’ as a temporal deictic enables us to appreciate the full ambiguity and complexity of some poems written at the height of the Northern Irish Troubles. Second, the article will argue that these poems reveal that ‘now’ actually functions in poetry more complexly than some theorists of deixis have allowed. Finally, the article will suggest newly fruitful ways of combining literary stylistics with more conventional close reading.

‘Aristocracies of thought’: social class in the early folklore of Yeats and Hyde

Abstract: The years 1888–89 saw the production of two influential collections of Irish folklore: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry by William Butler Yeats and Leabhar Sgeulaigheachta by Douglas Hyde. These works broke strongly with the unscientific and patronising tone of the Buchmarchen tradition in Ireland and established a new theory of folklore. In this theory, Yeats and Hyde distanced peasant narrators in an attempt to secure literary and, ultimately, aristocratic origins for their tales. As a result, Hyde and Yeats, despite their Ascendancy upbringings, could view themselves (and not the peasant narrators) as the legitimate inheritors of folklore narratives. The very stories collected, however, challenge this power dynamic. Stories such as ‘Monachar agus Manachar’ directly critique the perceived unjust division of labour and profit in rural Ireland in a way that parallels the act of folklore collection. The tales themselves resist the rhetorical frameworks of their Ascendancy collectors.

George Egerton, James Joyce and the Irish Künstlerroman

Abstract: George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859–1945), from Co. Laois, was the New Woman author most closely associated with the Decadent movement. As such, she was also the New Woman writer most profoundly affected by the downfall of Oscar Wilde. After the Wilde trials of 1895, Egerton's connection to Decadence and New Womanhood would make her work anathema to much of the British public. This essay will argue that ongoing tendencies to situate her texts solely within the New Woman categorisation and an English cultural location have had the detrimental effect of obscuring their importance to a specifically Irish literary tradition. By examining Egerton's 1898 novel The Wheel of God, focusing on its status as an Irish Kunstlerroman written from a position of exile, and drawing comparisons between it and the works of James Joyce, this essay will seek to redress this imbalance.

The poetry of Paul Muldoon

Abstract: Jefferson Holdridge, Dublin, The Liffey Press, 2008, 232 pp., €16.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-905785-30-8 Paul Muldoon's poetic precocity is the stuff of literary legend. Given an early poet's bless...