Showing papers in "Journal of Irish Studies in 2006"

The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882

Abstract: Drawing on more than ninety newspapers published in England, Scotland, and Wales, this is the first major detailed analysis of British press coverage of Ireland over the course of the nineteenth century This book traces the evolution of popular understandings and proposed solutions to the "Irish question," focusing particularly on the interrelationship between the press, the public, and the politicians The work also engages with ongoing studies of imperialism and British identity, exploring the role of Catholic Ireland in British perceptions of their own identity and their empire

The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture

Abstract: The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture / Diane Negra 1 "Still 'Black' and 'Proud'": Irish America and the Racial Politics of Hibernophilia / Catherine M. Eagan 20 The Wearing of the Green: Performing Irishness in the Fox Wartime Musical / Sean Griffin 64 "The Best Kept Secret in Retail": Selling Irishness in Contemporary America / Natasha Casey 84 "Papa Don't Preach": Pregnancy and Performance in Contemporary Irish Cinema / Maria Pramaggiore 110 rish Roots: Genealogy and the Performance of Irishness / Stephanie Rains 130 Ray Charles on Hyndford Street: Van Morrison's Caledonian Soul / Lauren Onkey 161 Garth Brooks in Ireland, or, Play That Country Music, Whiteboys / Mary McGlynn 196 "Does the Rug Match the Carpet?": Race, Gender, and the Redheaded Woman / Amanda Third 220 Dead, White, and Male: Irishness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel / Gerardine Meaney 254 "A Bit of Traveller in Everybody": Traveller Identities in Irish and American Culture / Maeve Connolly 282 Feeling Eire(y): On Irish-Caribbean Popular Culture / Michael Malouf 318 Irishness, Innocence, and American Identity Politics before and after September 11 / Diane Negra 354 Contributors 373 Index 377

The same age as the state

Abstract: Maire Cruise O'Brien explores the republican and revolutionary connections of her family as she was growing up, the fallout of the Civil War, and life in the Irish-speaking districts of Ireland almost a century ago. Maire spent two years studying in post-war Paris where she met Beckett and Sylvia Beech, among others. She became the first ever Irish woman diplomat, a role which took her to Spain in the time of Franco, the General Assembly of the U.N. & the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. After her marriage to Conor Cruise O'Brien, she accompanied him to various countries including wartime Congo when Conor was U.N. representative, Ghana, where he was Chancellor of the new university, and the U.S, when he lectured in New York University. This is the autobiography of a unique woman, spanning most of the 20th century. It is filled with famous people including revolutionaries, writers, statesmen and many more. A compelling insight into a time of great upheaval in Ireland, Europe and Africa.

An Essential Picture in a Sketch-Book Of Ireland: The Last Hedge Schools

Abstract: The national system of education was introduced in Ireland in 1831, which meant the beginning of the end for hedge schools. Nevertheless, they lasted longer than it is popularly believed and up to the 1870s there were still many parents willing to pay for the education of their children at the native schools. This was due to several reasons: the changing attitude of the Catholic Church towards the new system, the curriculum of the national school, its rules and material conditions, etc. After this date there is hardly any information about them. However, we have found a unique photograph which shows a hedge school still in use in 1892! In spite of being the last native school documented, it does not seem to be so different from the ones that many writers travelling in Ireland reported on earlier in the nineteenth century. In fact, it could vividly depict a scene belonging to pre- Famine rural Ireland, an essential document in any history of Irish education.

Accepting the Grotesque Body: Bildungs by Clare Boylan and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

Abstract: In Clare Boylan's fantasy novel Black Baby (1988) and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's realistic novel The Dancers Dancing (1999), female protagonists fear those who symbolize the grotesqueness of their own overweight bodies; hence, these heroines reject marginalized women, either black or retarded, and Irish peasants. Through their heroines' struggles to accept both themselves and marginalized others, Ni Dhuibhne and Boylan deconstruct the psychology of self-hatred, whether it occurs in teenage or elderly women. Bakhtin's ideas about the grotesque body, along with Stallybrass and White's connection of the grotesque to prejudice, and Kristeva's theory of abjection illuminate the conflicts over self-acceptance that Boylan's and Ni Dhuibhne's heroines face.

"Troubling" Thrillers: Between Politics and Popular Fiction in the novels of Benedict Kiely, Brian Moore and Colin Bateman

Abstract: Since the beginning of the Northern Ireland "Troubles", interest in exploring the social and political concerns of a region affected by sectarian violence and religious bigotry has produced a significant body of literary works within which the thriller has become one of the most suitable forms of expression. The traditional action thriller has acquired in this context a rich political dimension, producing what is now widely known as the "Troubles" thriller. The development of this mode has diverged into two categories: the "Troubles-trash"; and a more "literary" form, which draws on serious political matters to reflect upon social and religious disputes. Both kinds, however, have been criticised for offering a stagnant and reductive version of the dynamics of the conflict; a judgement that should be qualified. Bearing this in mind, the purpose of the present article is to analyse the ways in which these issues are echoed in the literary productions of three well-known writers: Benedict Kiely, Brian Moore and Colin Bateman.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: James Joyce, the Myth of Icarus, and the Influence of Christopher Marlowe

Abstract: Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) concludes at the point when Stephen Dedalus - a character substantially modelled on Joyce himself - is about to leave the Ireland of his childhood and young-adult years. Presented as a means of maintaining independence and distance as a writer, this move marks the culmination of a process of self-discovery. However, beyond this basic narrative dimension, A Portrait is hardly a simplistic novel. In this respect, the novel's oft-discussed patterns of imagery, and its complex, sometimes ambiguous, use of irony, for instance, continue to invite new interpretations. The present article, in fact, aims to provide insight into the function of Christopher Marlowe as a role-model and precursor - to-date unrecognized in Joyce criticism - of the idealized subversive artist, a writer whose work and cultural image contributed to the Stephen Dedalus-James Joyce persona as constructed in A Portrait.

Masculinity in Contemporary Irish Cinema

Abstract: In the mid- to late-1990s, Irish Cinema underwent a radical shift, which entailed, among other significant features, a thematic trajectory from the rural to the urban, from the historical to the contemporary and from the local to the universal (McLoone 2000, Ging 2002, Barton 2004). This shift also involved a radical reconfiguration of cinematic masculinities, not only in terms of the representation of male characters but also regarding how masculinity as discourse was being addressed: the earlier critiques of traditional patriarchal masculinity, which emerged from a more politically-engaged and less commercial period in Irish filmmaking (Rockett 1994: 127), began to give way to more ambiguous, male-centered narratives, whose protagonists resist unequivocal ideological categorization. What is most striking about this new cycle of male-themed and male-oriented films is its preoccupation with underclass, criminal and socially marginalized masculinities and the popularity of these underclass antiheroes at the height of the Celtic Tiger, a time of unprecedented economic prosperity in Ireland. Although recent years have also seen the emergence of a number of films set in middle-class mileux and featuring non-normative, sexually-fluid and reconstructed masculinities (About Adam, Goldfish Memory and When Brendan Met Trudy), the hapless criminal, the stoner, the 'loser' and the underclass rebel remain influential masculine types (Spicer 2001) in contemporary Irish cinema. Arguably, this trend has as much to do with the popularity of underclass-rebel and neo-gangster iconography across the global mediascape than it does with the social and economic specificities of modern Ireland. Elements of the new British gangster cycle (Chibnall 2001), the British underclass film (Monk 2000), the American "smart film" (Sconce 2003), the "gross-out" comedy (Greven 2003), the "male rampage film" (Pfeil 1996) and the "new brutalism" of Quentin Tarantino (Shelley 1993) are variously identifiable in a wide range of Irish films made over the past decade. Most of these films revolve around themes of crime and social exclusion, and feature sympathetic male antiheroes who are variously marginalised, criminally active and ostensibly opposed to the status quo. They include I Went Down, Saltwater, Flick, Last Days in Dublin, The Actors, Head Rush, Intermission, The General, Ordinary Decent Criminal, Veronica Guerin, Accelerator, Crushproof, Adam and Paul and Man About Dog. Many of these have been big commercial successes and even those that did not enjoy sustained theatrical release, such as Accelerator and Crush Proof, have achieved cult status through video viewing among certain male audiences (Ging, PhD findings: unpublished). In press reviews and in the films' own marketing strategies, comparisons with Trainspotting, Lock Stock and Pulp Fiction have been ubiquitous. Thus, in spite of Irish cinema's increasing generic and stylistic diversity and its growing ability to accommodate different scales and models of filmmaking, there remains a strongly identifiable trend within indigenous filmmaking over the past ten years, whereby traditionally male-oriented (sub)genres with universal appeal have been reappropriated within an Irish context. These constructions of masculinity signify an important break with Irish cinema's preoccupation, up until the mid-1990s, with stringent critiques of oppressive, absent and ineffectual fathers (Maeve, Exposure, The Field, Korea, The Butcher Boy, Guiltrip, Country, A Soldier's Song, Into the West, Our Boys, The Family and Amongst Women). More recent portraits of modern Irish masculinity are, by comparison, not only less culturally-specific but also less critical of hegemonic masculinity. However, rather than signalling men's willingness to adapt to the changes wrought by second-wave feminism, these developments are suggestive of a somewhat more complex dynamic in the contemporary 'genderscape', whereby the more traditional elements of 'hard' masculinity, such as excessive displays of drinking, fighting, (hetero)sexual bravado and involvement in crime, have been resurrected and repackaged in the form of the underclass rebel. …

Adam and Paul

Abstract: Taking their cue from comments made by director Lenny Abrahamson, many reviewers of Adam and Paul (2004) compared elements of the film's style and content with the Laurel and Hardy series and Beckett's Waiting for Godot. In terms of characterisation and mood, the similarities were so evident that few of the journalistic critics ventured to assess the extent of the resemblances. Certainly, the minor segments of physical comedy pratfalls and dialogue non-sequiturs, and the gradual emersion of the directionless protagonists into situations of epic and uncontrollable proportions echoed Henri Bergson's notion of the comic "snowball effect", and justify the first comparison. (1) Equally, the absurdity and existential lack of purpose of the central characters, their failure to act, their vaudevillian routines and circular conversations punctuated constantly by rhetorical questions, bear remarkable likeness to exchanges between Vladimir and Estragon in Godot. Even the bothersome stone in Paul's shoe--the impediment that inaugurates his series of accidents--connects him with the continually suffering Estragon, the most corporeal and physically cursed of Beckett's tramps. What becomes interesting once the parallels have been suggested however, is the way in which Mark O'Halloran's script--developed in collaboration with Abrahamson--contemporises these earlier aesthetic and structural moments for contemporary Irish audiences, half a century after the first staging of En Attendant Godot in Paris. The appropriation takes on a number of forms which become useful in understanding how themes that are relevant for present-day Ireland may be voiced through universal paradigms. The trope of the dual protagonist has appeared frequently in recent Irish cinema and while it provides another similarity to the texts mentioned above, it also facilitates for the screenwriter(s) a vocalisation of characters' otherwise undisclosed concerns, attitudes, reactions and feelings. In this way, a theatrical externalisation through dialogue connects spectators with characters intimately. Here, however, this does not happen. The erratic, illogical or indecisive nature of many of the exchanges between Adam and Paul actually ironises the externalisation by rendering it pointless as they remain largely inaccessible to us. As an alternative, we are provided with direct access to characters by another cinematic device. The audience is granted certain limited proximity to Adam and Paul at two moments of "internal focalization" (Branigan, 2004, 103); firstly during the scene in which the perfect family tableau occurs with Janine and the "baba", and later when they are tripping. Any alignment with their point of view at these times is however fatally undermined as we are not informed which of the characters is imagining or observing details in these scenes. It seems at first that the taller of the two is "seeing" the neon lights, the cigarette packet and the half-eaten apple core on the bridge, but eye lines are not matched in a way that can positively confirm this. Our separation from the "everyman" figures is also maintained because we never learn from the diegetic evidence which of them is Adam and which one Paul. (2) While this offers an interesting alternative to the operations of the star-system within mainstream genre cinema (the cast of the film were for the most part unknown Irish actors), it also counteracts the sense of continuity across the Laurel and Hardy series, and the immediate audience identification with those personalities whose characters were Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, both on and off screen. Although Dublin city can be identified from a number of its iconographic and architectural elements, the urban space is not drawn upon to provide any sense of Irish locality or recognisable backdrop for precise geographical definition. Rather it is used as a narrative structuring device, containing the random addiction-motivated rambling of the protagonists as they move from one encounter to another in search of their next 'score'. …

Intertextual Re-creation in Jamie O'Neill's "At Swim, Two Boys"

Abstract: As the title of the book indicates, Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys, published in 2001, refers back to Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). Through the use of such a parodic title, O'Neill places himself within a postmodern literary tradition, involving the influence of famous Irish parodists such as O'Brien or Joyce, who overshadow his novel. This title alludes to a famous text, gives it a new meaning, a new story and re-locates it in a different context, namely a gay universe which calls to mind another famous literary predecessor, Oscar Wilde, a writer also referred to repeatedly, whether explicitly or implicitly, throughout the novel. This paper focuses on the intertextual articulations of the novel in connection with the theories advanced by Neil Corcoran, Augustine Martin and Harold Bloom, whose essays take a real interest in the literary phenomenon of intertextuality.

Notes for Further Research: Through an Irish Lens: Viewing the History of Canadian Women Religious

Abstract: Notes for Further Research: Through an Irish Lens: Viewing the History of Canadian Women Religious Author(s): Elizabeth Smyth Source: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1, Women's Irish-Canadian Connections / Les femmes et les liens Irlande-Canada (Spring, 2006), pp. 64-67 Published by: Canadian Association of Irish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25515618 Accessed: 09/03/2010 15:13

Antoine Ó Flatharta's Elviad: from Grásta i Meiriceá to Grace in America

Abstract: Antoine O Flatharta bilingually charts media-saturated global impacts upon Galway's Gaelic-speakers. His play in Irish, Grasta i Meiricea (1990) features two young Irishmen who journey by bus on a pilgrimage to Elvis' Graceland. In its 1993 English adaptation, Grace in America, the pair meets relatives who emigrated to 1940s Buffalo. Reading these plays by applying Seamus Deane's "primordial nomination," Edward Said's "cartographical impulse," Declan Kiberd's "spiritual tourism," and sociolinguistics, their relevance sharpens. In transforming Grasta into Grace, O Flatharta foreshadows his own shift into publishing in English. The fate of the play's mutating Irish vernacular, as shown in O Flatharta's drama, becomes less lamented than might be supposed. America, and English, represent liberation for his characters, in his work not only in English but- unexpectedly-in his other native language of Irish.

Fabulism and Irish Censorship

Abstract: The aim of the article is to analyse the effects of the introduction of Censorship legislation on Irish culture. The analysis focuses on the reasons behind the introduction of the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 and previous cases of literary ostracism. Then, it deals with anti-censorship journalism published in The Bell and the most controversial bannings, which increased the general awareness of the inadequacies of the Act and caused it to be lifted. Finally, the article examines the Act's impact on Irish letters, especially the rise of fabulist fiction and the techniques used by writers such as Eimar O'Duffy, Flann O'Brien, and Mervyn Wall to circumvent and ridicule the censorship laws. The emergence of satirical fantasy writing can be seen as a reaction to oppressive legislation. As publishing realistic novels became nearly impossible, Irish writers expanded their range of expression to include non-mimetic fiction.

El Enigma de la Feminidad: La Música en "The Dead" de James Joyce y la Adaptación Cinematográfica de John Huston

Abstract: El presente estudio se adentra en el uso de la musica en el relato de uno de los escritores irlandeses mas internacionales, James Joyce -"The Dead" (1914)- y en su adaptacion cinematografica de John Huston con el mismo titulo (1987). El argumento central de este articulo es demostrar que el discurso musical aparece ligado a la esfera femenina en ambas obras. Esta asociacion se consigue por medio de un proceso de feminizacion que sugiere significados ocultos y deseos silenciados, que adquieren una materializacion indirecta. Igualmente, se argumenta que, en su adaptacion cinematografica, Huston enriquece de forma magistral el relato de Joyce para insistir en el papel crucial que el escritor irlandes proporciona a la esfera femenina a traves del discurso musical, anadiendo, a su vez, referencias a la literatura romantica como otra esfera alternativa para la expresion femenina.

Boy Eats Girl

Abstract: Spending just under an hour and a half watching Ireland's California-ised youth eat itself is a pleasure. In Boy Eats Girl, directed by Stephen Bradley for Element Films, a clatter of Dublin secondary school kids, their cultural touchstones firmly located in West Coast America, discovers that every blow job counts when their classmates start biting back. The film establishes its central characters with light brushstrokes--there is the hero, Nathan (David Leon), whose mother, Grace (played by Bradley's wife, Irish comedian Deirdre O'Kane), brings him back from the dead after she has accidentally caused him to commit suicide; school rugby bully, Samson (Mark Huberman), who causes the misunderstanding that leads to the half-baked suicide attempt after Nathan spots him apparently going down on Jessica (Samantha Mumba), and the two guileless best friends, Diggs (Tadhg Murphy) and Henry (Laurence Kinlan), who invariably catch up with what is going on two seconds after it has happened. The trouble, as you might expect from an Irish movie, starts in a Church when Grace stumbles across a book of curious imprecations lurking under the altar. Without realising that an all-important page is missing, she quickly puts together some hokum and reanimates her beloved Nathan, soon to cause havoc when he exacts his revenge on Samson's neck. Before you can say 'yum', half the class is tucking into the other half and only the inevitable small group of survivors is left to defend itself and wait for the arrival of an antidote. With its cast of pampered youngsters, its anodyne school buildings and its hierarchy of privilege, Boy Eats Girl knowingly recreates the iconography of the American teen-pic. Moreover, the kids all have the kind of names you might just as easily hear in a Hollywood production. This effect was, the director has said, a deliberate commentary on contemporary Irish life: 'the only ambition we had for the film to be taken seriously as a theme was to have the idea that, with the Celtic Tiger and all of that nonsense which has come over the last ten years, we have all sucked up that huge amount of Americana, and this film shows how much we have.' Casting Samantha Mumba in one of the central roles further connects the film to the new Ireland, though as the bearer of the film's most excessive display of wealth--her stinking rich and overbearing (white) father owns a large suburban home complete with riding stables--this is more the new Ireland of Louis Walsh and global pop stardom than of racial dispossession. The production's other most immediate influence is the low-budget British genre film, notably Shaun of the Dead (2004). In common with the latter, Boy Eats Girl is primarily a comedy, but with less of the self-referential knowingness of recent American horror films, such as the Scream series of 1996 onwards. This didn't prevent the film from running into trouble with the Irish film censor who refused certification unless the scene depicting the ostensible suicide attempt was cut. The issue went to the Appeal Board who unanimously reversed this decision and the film was released with a 15A certificate Boy Eats Girl is not Ireland's first 'romzomcom'. …

"Those Five Glenties Women": Echoes of Lorca in "Dancing at Lughnasa"

Abstract: This essay will attempt to show the numerous points that Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba and Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa have in common. Both plays create an intense rural atmosphere in their respective countries -Ireland and Spain- with echoes of the tragic days of 1936; and both introduce us to the rarefied community of five single women dominated by sexual repression and enclosed in the narrow confines of domestic space. The role of women at home was strongly emphasized by the papal encyclicals Castii Connubbi (1930) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931), highly influential in both countries. Interrogations and redefinitions of the female domestic space have been a central issue in gender studies, and so from this perspective we approach both plays as evidence of feminine oppression and its representation in the house, which stands for the five women's honour. The strict law of space will prove an obstacle for their sexuality, marriage and motherhood and its transgression will be severely punished. The sexual morality imposed by the Catholic Church will make the five women lifelong prisoners and will preside over the claustrophobic society they belong to.

"Talk talk talk..."?: Virginia Woolf, Ireland and Maria Edgeworth

Abstract: This article considers Woolf's only visit to Ireland and her attitude to the country as revealed in her diary and in a review of a book about Maria Edgeworth. She considered the fault of the Irish to be their loquaciousness. Her diary reveals her belief that Irish literature had declined since Dean Swift. Woolf, both in her twenties and when she visited Ireland in 1934, revealed a certain antipathy to the country. She asserted, for example, that the Irish propensity to talk had prevented the production of literature of any quality after the eighteenth century. In the 1909 review, Woolf, while criticising the author of a book about Maria Edgeworth, attacks Edgeworth herself. But her words imply that she had not read Maria's Irish novels. Bloomsbury's 'snobbery' and Woolf's Feminism throughout the essay are evident in her implicit criticism of the way that Edgeworth sacrificed love for duty. In dismissing Edgeworth's achievement, Woolf betrays a degree of ignorance that is worth considering.

The Irish in the Caribbean

Abstract: This paper is a historical account of the Irish immigration and colonization in the 1600s. It also analyses how the Irish turned from white slaves into an Irish entrepreneurial class in the 18th century.