Showing papers in "Journal of Irish Studies in 2005"

The Cambridge companion to modern Irish culture

Abstract: List of illustrations Notes on contributors Preface Acknowledgements Chronology 1. Introduction: Ireland and modernity Joe Cleary Part I. Cultural Politics: 2. The survival of the Union Alvin Jackson 3. Language, ideology and national identity Gearoid O Tuathaigh 4. Religion, identity, state and society Tom Inglis 5. Republicanism, Nationalism and Unionism: changing contexts, cultures and ideologies Liam O'Dowd 6. Irish feminism Siobhan Kilfeather 7. Migration and diaspora Mary J. Hickman 8. The cultural effects of the famine Kevin Whelan Part II. Cultural Practices and Cultural Forms: 9. Modernism and the Irish revival Emer Nolan 10. Poetry in Ireland Bernard O'Donoghue 11. Irish sport Alan Bairner 12. Projecting the nation: cinema and culture Luke Gibbons 13. Folk culture Diarmuid O Giollain 14. Irish prose fiction Padraigin Riggs and Norman Vance 15. Irish music Lillis O Laoire 16. Modern architecture and national identity in Ireland Hugh Campbell 17. The visual arts in Ireland Fintan Cullen 18. Irish theatre Christopher Morash Index.

How to Disguise Fairy Tales in 21st Century Ireland. A Feminist Analysis of Marian Keyes’ and Cathy Kelly’s Blockbusters

Abstract: Ireland has suffered many extraordinary changes during the last decades that have made the Emerald Isle a geographical point upon which all eyes are fixed. Despite this metamorphosis, the question is if its population and cultural heritage have been able to cope with the times. Known as a traditionally catholic and conservative country, many social aspects remain unchangeable and those that have evolved may still keep an inner glimpse of the old times that is not always easily recognizable. Undoubtedly, women and all subjects related to them have experienced a revolution. However, data show that true equality is still far from being reached. In this context, literature must be taken as a powerful cultural force that helps create stereotypes and a popular conscience. Thus, this article analyses the success of what has been called "women's literature", especially Marian Keyes' and Cathy Kelly's bestselling books. It also tries to examine to what extent the traditional ideologies of womanhood are present and by which means their female protagonists attach to the old stereotypes under a mask of modernity and economic boom. Finally, their effects on the female Irish population will also be studied in order to demonstrate that globalization and modern capitalism prove to be unable to change the old myths that lie beneath and keep women in a relegated position.

Challenging Utopia: Irish migrant narratives of Canada

Abstract: This paper argues for the importance of the individual life story to migration research and outlines two recent Irish projects about migration which have employed life narrative methodology The case is specifically illustrated in the Canadian context with interviews conducted for the Narratives of Migration & Return Project with four individuals from Northern Ireland who immigrated to Canada during the 1970s, all of whom eventually chose to return to Ireland Their various experiences relate the complexities of migration and challenge the arguably predominant view of Canada as a utopian place so often conveyed in literature, humour and image In contrast with written accounts, the life narrative interview is more likely to give voice to migrant ambivalence which, it is argued, has political potential to invoke change

Several Landscapes: Bowen and the Terrain of North Cork

Abstract: The subject of this essay is the Irish writings of the novelist Elizabeth Bowen This essay discusses the disjunction between Elizabeth Bowen's critical writings on her family history and her fictive representations of the landscape of North Cork Looking at her 1942 family chronicle, Bowen?s Court and her childhood memoir Seven Winters, also published in 1942, the author suggests a gap between her critical perspectives on her position as an Anglo-Irish writer and her fictions on the same theme The essay concentrates on her imaginings of the hostile landscape around her home in North Cork and the murderous intent of these Irish fields and hills, in particular in her novel, The Last September and her short story, "The Happy Autumn Fields"

Northern Ireland in Transition: The Role of Justice

Abstract: All post-conflict societies switching to constitutional liberal democracies have to deal with their past through transitional justice mechanisms that offer to hear the victims, try the perpetrators of all types of abuses, introduce peace and reconciliation schemes. It is time for state and non-state organs to account for past crimes. Several countries have successfully tested such mechanisms. Northern Ireland is the ideal ground for transitional justice to operate but it dispels foreign tailor-made models. However, a number of major reforms and projects have addressed sensitive issues in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement. Two key institutions, the police and the criminal justice system, whose responsibility in the conflict was undeniable, have been reformed. Law and lawyers are concerned with these changes and the introduction of a Human Rights culture in Northern Ireland. A clear break with the past must be achieved for transitional justice mechanisms to work successfully.

"Belonging without Belonging": Colm Tóibín's Dialogue with the Past

Abstract: Toibin is not the archetypal "revisionist" intellectual that some have made him into, but rather a sort of in-between, making a virtue of his own ambivalences towards notions of tradition, community and nationhood. In this essay some of these ambivalences are scrutinised with special reference to two essays from Toibin's Walking along the Border (or Bad Blood). The assumption is that, intellectually, Toibin's ambivalences are rooted in a humanism which may partly be ascribed to his personal attachments, affections and loyalties: to family, place and community. It is argued that his personal need to reconcile himself with the loss of his father, when he was a young boy, is connected with a theme of more general significance: how to come to terms with the loss of the "certainties" of the past -nation, family, church- while defining and asserting personal autonomy in a new order of things, bereft of paternal authorities.

Comparing Ireland and Quebec: The Case of Feminism

Abstract: Recently, both Micheline Dumont (2000) and Linda Cardinal (2000) have drawn attention to the comparable experience of women in Ireland and Quebec. The principal aim of this article is to develop further exchange with scholars in Quebec studies by analysing some comparable themes in the political and social development of feminism since its emergence in both contexts in the nineteenth century. In particular, some widely held assumptions concerning feminism both in Ireland and Quebec are explored and challenged in the analysis, including: 1. The contention that the first and second waves of feminism came 'late' or 'later' to Quebec and Ireland where feminism has always been historically weaker, 2. The related assumption that women in Ireland and Quebec have historically been less modern/more oppressed than women in other European countries/the rest of North America because of Catholicism and nationalism; 3. The presumption that the 'origins' of feminism in Quebec and Ireland are always to be found elsewhere. The consequences of inappropriately 'measuring' the development of feminism in Ireland and Quebec against other feminisms/feminism in other societies to the neglect of important considerations in both contexts are addressed throughout this article.

A Reading from The Book Of Beginnings or The End of the Line

Abstract: FIRST BEGINNING Does the postmodern age signal the end of the 'grand narratives'? (So they ask me, and others like and unlike me.) Riddle How to answer a statement masquerading as a question? Question the statement What comes after the question? This is what I wrote afterwards: 1 They must think I know something about endings or narratives or both. Otherwise why ask me? Don't they know I am a construction not at all original and quite unauthorised. That my solidity lies on foundations I have not put down? It lies, my solidity. Fraudulent fiction. Can I have misled? No lack of example plenty of models lying around the place all deriving from the one anyway. Given the wrong impression? Impressed printed the self is not the same. The words lie coolly on the page removed from fleshy interference collected collaged into an appearance of coherence (in heat and difficulty) from here and there un peu partout (with and without pretension) Always speaking in tongues other than my own. Does this mean lies? 2 Many have the gift of the tongue but nothing to say. Do not listen to them. Many who have words and tongue have no ear, they cannot listen and they will not hear! (Gloria Anzaldua) I listen to her warning Take it to heart Although it is, may be, about me not for me. Warning from 'a poor chicanita from the sticks'. I hear your words Chicanita Gloria And will take care To say less. But what of the listeners? 3 Of course, I have credentials And protections Currently negotiable Of skin of class of education (for what it's worth). Connections not at all coincidental to anything. But what price my sex and nationality? And all the rest I cannot say in any tongue? Mere markers of permitted ex-centricity? The acceptable face of subversion? Marketable revolution par personne interposee? 4 What price my education? There is so much I just can't make head or tail of. Can't get my tongue around dense sense abstractions latinate hyphenates syntactical circulations. I am not naive far less innocent. I know the 'old simplicities' no longer function. But who --which 'we'-- can speak The new complexities? 'Old gardens are not relevant' (Mary O'Donnell) she said severely 'reading sunflowers in September' (And a propos of something rather different A woman's life, I think it was) And she was quite right, of course. New gardens are not necessarily fabrications. But they frighten me to silence Almost. There is not one truth, I know. Reason, Science, Progress and all the rest have gone the way of all flowers And I celebrate. But I don't always understand quite simply the words that killed them. 5 I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant almost to the point of being invisible --except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the Universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty. (Alice Walker) And the Universe begat a multiverse (Who knows this in the age of communication par excellence?) It may be more truthful But what price brilliance and sophistication If it leaves the old plots largely undisturbed for most? Of course, when more abstract writing is seen as more important, the language of underclass women is a speech then that has no relevance. When black women confronted feminist movement, urging inclusion of race and racism, this was revolutionary, Yet now the new terms of this discussion suggest that words like race and racism are inappropriate, not sophisticated, too simplistic. Currently, the discussion of race takes place within the framework of 'colonial discourse'. How many women and men know what that means? (Bell Hooks) New gardens are not everywhere appropriate. PLOT (OED) Relevant definitions: 1. The outline, plan or scheme of a play, poem, work of fiction etc 2. …

"Old Ireland and Himself": William Orpen and the Conflicts of Irish Identity

Abstract: The Irish painter William Orpen (1878-1931), defined here as Ireland's most 'Spanish' painter, was out of fashion for fifty years after his death; but he has recently been dramatically revalued, with his works fetching huge prices in salerooms and an unprecedentedly large exhibition of his work being mounted in London and subsequently Dublin. Best known for his Edwardian portraits and his devastating paintings of the First World War, he also produced a series of allegorical paintings of his native Ireland. These are discussed in this article, and linked to his admiration for J.M.Synge, his dislike of clericalism and repression in Irish life, and his celebration of sensuality. The same themes lie behind 'Homage to Manet', a celebrated group portrait which includes the Irish novelist George Moore and the art collector Hugh Lane -a close friend of Orpen's. Orpen knew other figures of the cultural Revival, and his relation to them is discussed; as is the conflict of identity he experienced (like other middle-class Irish Protestants) when the radicalisation of Irish politics and the outbreak of the First World War put a new strain on the allegiances of people who had previously thought of themselves as both 'British' and 'Irish'. After the trauma of the War, and Irish separation, Orpen opted for Britain; but, it is argued, he was closer to elements of the Irish cultural revival, and more involved with Irish politics and Irish history, than is usually accepted.

Couplings : agon and composition in Paul Muldoon’s ekphrastic poetry

Abstract: In the course of more than thirty years of prolific writing, Paul Muldoon has earned a reputation for surprising his readers again and again. To a significant extent, this continued ability to “make it new” is closely linked to Muldoon’s characteristically relational writing. Often described (in tones of eulogy or of deprecation) as the epitome of a postmodernist practice, his work has tested the limits of intertextuality —and his penchant for quotation, pastiche and parody has rather often sought referents in other media, notably in the

Engendering Change in the UDA: Gary Mitchell's Loyal Women

Abstract: Gary Mitchell's most recently published play, Loyal Women, continues his systematic exploration of the Ulster loyalist mindset, focusing this time on the role of women within the UDA. Whereas on the face of it, the play moves forward through what are presented as a series of sharp, irreconcilable oppositions -UDA/IRA, women/men, domestic/public, inside/outside- it emerges in the end that the fundamental organising principle behind the play, and by extension behind the paramilitary society it represents, is rather that of refraction, or more precisely, replication. As a result, any potential for evolution, individual or collective, is quickly subsumed into an apparently inescapable logic of duplication and repetition. In a profoundly pessimistic reading of post-Agreement Northern Irish society, Mitchell focuses on the embedded nature of a culture of violence and in the process presents an intimate, first-hand reading of the tensions within contemporary loyalist paramilitarism.

Tragic Heroines and Wise Women in the Novels of Somerville and Ross

Abstract: The novels of Somerville and Ross depict, behind their wit and social satire, a darker tragic vision in which class and gender overdetermine the outcomes often awaiting female characters. Even the heroines of relatively privileged background are vulnerable to change and insecurity. In The Real Charlotte the eponymous heroine's intelligence and determination fail to guard her against the predicament of the 'unmarriageable' woman in the society of the period. Her strength of character, her capacity to foresee and influence events (like the archaic Irish or Greek Wise Woman figure) turn to despair and damage to others. In The Silver Fox the outcomes are happier for the two heroines through the agency of another pre-Olympian tragic Wise Woman, herself the victim of tragic fate. In Sarah's Youth, a notable example of Modernism in Irish writing, the Wise Woman figures are the heroine's half-sister, and an older mentor-figure. Tragedy, engendered in the conflictual social-family nexus, is averted through the agency of foreknowledge, and a certain relative modernisation of society's attitudes to (economically independent) women.

Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Irish Cervantine

Abstract: To commemorate the fourth centenary of the publication of the first part of the Spanish masterpiece of all times Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, this article approaches in an introductory manner some of the literary productions which sprang from Cervantes's original within the Irish context. In the case of Ireland the Cervantine inspiration, albeit minor and neglected, has also been present; and, it is most probably the nineteenth century which provides the most ample and varied response to Cervantes's masterpiece in many a different way. Our aim is to see briefly how the legacy of Don Quixote found distinct expression on the Emerald Isle. Indeed, all these Cervantine contributions from Ireland during the nineteenth century were also deeply imbued with the politics of literature and society in a country which experienced historical, social and cultural turmoil. The reference to Cervantes as a key writer in Spanish letters will not only be reduced to his masterpiece of all times; but, will also be tackled in critical pieces of importance in Ireland.

Passion and Arrogance: Poetic Craft and Topographies of Remembrance in the Work of Michael Hartnett

Abstract: ion of "Public Art." The poem essentially lampoons a so-called "sculptor friend," whose creative output is critiqued, and belittled, as little more than an indecipherable "borrowing from some theory of some school." Crucially, it is the notion of a non-verbal register of communicability between the tribe and the landscape that preoccupies Hartnett. And in extolling the communicative codes of "remnants [which] speak a language," which in turn are "part/of the vocabulary ofthe tribe" (Collected Poems 201), Hartnett most expressly embodies WTielan's contention that "A living landscape dynamically embraces a spontaneous and reciprocal relationship between a community and their environment... [t]he landscape connects the outer contours with an inner vision" (16).6 The objects that populate the image-scape of Hartnett's verse, in this case discarded possessions that still retain a level of appreciable articulacy, are at one level simply detritus. However the kernel of Hartnett's argument is that the tribal identity is the cumulative result of both a historical and an ongoing performed consummation between individual and the local landscape. Returning to Wlielan: "The environment provides a locus for human affection, imprinted as remembered forms, ways of being, ways of living, ways of knowing" (16). Indeed it is an issue that reaches levels of apoplexy in Hartnett's poem "USA," in which he savagely depicts the usurpatory and rapine conquest of Native American lands. In verse that can legitimately be criticised for compromising its technical grace for unfettered polemic, Hartnett, nevertheless, again broaches the affective bonds of community and the traumas of territorial dispossession. Extending the feminine allegorisation of nation from Ireland to the American continent, Hartnett portrays a historical scene and process of unrestrained violence: "They chained the land and pulled her down/and nailed her to the sea with towns./She lies on her back, her belly cut in fields/of red and yellow earth. She

“… what’s far worse, it’ll have two mothers”: Rhetoric and Reproduction in Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Quartet

Abstract: This article argues that the rejection of Sean O?Casey?s The Silver Tassie by Yeats has had consequences for how we think about O?Casey?s drama in general because The Tassie is now regarded as a break in O?Casey?s development. In the first instance this leads to the idea of a Dublin Trilogy rather than a Dublin Quartet. The latter sequence makes much more sense since it is unified by setting, continuous developments in the use of theatrical space and form, theme, and politics. By incorporating The Tassie into O?Casey?s early writing we are enabled to consider again how his work as a whole functions in formal, thematic and political terms.