Introduction
Last year I wound up my summary of the year's Irish Studies events by noting the high state of anticipation in Ireland for the 2023 Academy Awards, for which there were an unprecedented fourteen Irish nominees. Alas, only one category had an Irish winner, and that was for Best Live Action Short, awarded to An Irish Goodbye, a Northern Irish film, directed and written by Ross White and Tom Berkeley. While there was disappointment all around, nominees Brendan Gleeson and Paul Mescal charmed Irish audiences by speaking Irish on the red carpet, something Mescal had done earlier at the British Academy of Film and Television Awards ceremony. Gleeson, a former primary school teacher, demonstrated especially impressive fluency. This year, there is only one Irish nominee for the 2024 Oscars, Gillian Murphy, in the Best Actor category for his starring role in Oppenheimer, for which he has already won a Golden Globe. The unimpressed reaction of Murphy's down-to-earth Cork parents to this news has amused fans everywhere. The Irish actors Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, and Barry Keoghan seemed also to be likely contenders but were, to use film industry parlance, "snubbed". Despite all of this, summer 2023 was declared "Hot Irish Guy Summer" in EUe's August edition, while December's Slate magazine declared that "these days, some of the buzziest stars hail from the Emerald Isle". Sadder Irish entertainment news that affected fans around the world in 2023 were the deaths of singers Sinead O'Connor, in July, and Shane MacGowan, in December.
Happier popular Irish music news from 2023-2024, which has recently become movie news, is the rise of the Belfast Irish-language punk-rap trio Kneecap, who have begun to achieve international recognition and have been profiled in music publications around the world, including Rolling Stone and The New York Times. The recent Irish-language biopic about them. Kneecap, starring Michael Fassbender and chosen to be distributed by Sony Pictures, has just won the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, the first Irish-language production to do so. But let us return to the beginning of 2023. This is not the space for sports news, as a rule, though Irish sport is a major component in the country's cultural life, but a standout performer from 2023 deserves mention, that of sprinter Rashidat Adeleke, who broke several Irish and world records, beginning in January of 2023 by lowering her own indoor record, following that up in February by setting a new Irish indoor record. The year continued this way for her. Another Irish track and field star, Elizabeth Ndudi, became Ireland's first field gold medallist at the European Under-20 Championships later in the year, breaking the long jump record. In many fields, 2023 was an excellent year for Irish women, as we will see.
The decade of commemorations has largely wrapped up, but there were still some noteworthy events connected to it. A Kerry Civil War conference was held in February as part of the national programme, and RTE Radio One ran a documentary special on the Civil War in September. In March, Queen's University Belfast held a hybrid symposium on "Multilingual Legacies of Ireland's Revolution and Civil War". The Royal Irish Academy offered a critical perspective on the decade's activities at the end of the year with a free webinar on the subject of "The Decade of Commemoration: Sources and Legacies". "Machnamh 100, Centenary Reflections", the Presidential seminars conducted by President Michael D. Higgins that reflected on some of the events comprising the decade of commemoration are still available on YouTube and worth watching. As I have noted in previous reports, the acknowledgement of women's contributions to the events being commemorated over the course of this decade has been welcome. University College Dublin historians Mary McAuliffe and Caitriona Walsh have been prominent figures in this re-evaluation and retrieval effort, and in June they recorded a podcast, "AFTERLIVES: Grannies, Guns, and Archives - Tracing Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary Women's Lives", ensuring that the work done to commemorate Irish women is not forgotten with the end of the official Decade of Commemoration. Further afield, a monument was raised in Troy, New York, to James Connolly 100 years after his execution by British forces for his part in the Easter Rising. Connolly lived for several years in Troy, working with both Irish and Italian immigrants, helping them to effectively organise as labourers.
Another significant commemoration that was observed internationally in 2023 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. There were events held around the world, including in the European Parliament and in Washinton D.C., where St Patrick Day celebrations included a gala concert and a special summit, which was livestreamed on 21 March. The D.C. commemoration launched international events celebrating that important achievement that changed the lives of so many in Northern Ireland, an achievement shared by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland. Commemorative activities were held in Ireland, the UK, several US cities, in Canada, Helsinki, and Vienna. An anthology of poetry that links the momentous peace agreement and natural imagery and commissioned by the British-Irish Council, And Now the Sun Breaks Through, is available online.
Irish drama, as usual, was performed around the world in 2023. The Irish theatre event of the year was the Druid Theatre's one-day production of Sean O'Casey's Dublin trilogy - The Plough and the Stars, Shadow of a Gunman, and Juno and the Paycock - or "DruidO'Casey", which premiered in the company's hometown of Galway at the July International Arts Festival, and went on to play in Belfast, New York, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. In March the Irish Postal Service, An Post, celebrated the latest tour-de-force from the theatre and its long-time director, Garry Hynes, by issuing a series of commemorative postage stamps. A production of Enda Walsh's Bedbound, starring Colm Meaney and his daughter, actor Brenda Meaney, which also premiered at the Galway International Arts Festival, was livestreamed for two weeks in November. November was also when Brian Friel's Translations was staged at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, the inaugural event of their "Friel Project", which will continue through 2024 - in other Brian Friel news, the Abbey Theatre staged a Ukrainian-language version of Translations in June of2023. A new Irish play, The Honey Trap, also had its premiere in New York in November, autumn having been a time for new Irish playwrights to stage their work. Traveller comedian and writer, Martin Beanz Warde's first play, The Dead House, premiered in September as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. It was also a season for theatrical innovation, as the Gaiety Theatre mounted a new stage version, by Michael Scott, of the Brinsley McNamara 1918 novel, The Valley of the Squinting Windows, a production that inaugurated new digital and audio technologies. It is set to run through 2024.
Spring and summer are conference season, and Irish Studies conferences internationally continue to produce and celebrate scholars at all stages of their careers. This scholar is still working actively to reduce her carbon footprint and to avoid contributing to the spread of deadly and life-altering disease, so she has not attended her historically high number of international conferences. A rather unusual venue for Irish Studies gatherings hosted the annual IASIL conference in 2023, the British University in Egypt. And while the programme included music and visual art in addition to academic presentations from the usual range of international scholars, the irony of a conference focusing on "sustainability" in a country that largely consists of desert terrain and to which the vast majority of conferees would have had to take long international flights must be acknowledged. The Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland held their annual conference, on the topic of "Colonising and Decolonising the Irish Nineteenth Century", in Netherlands, at Radboud University. EFACIS, responsible for the thriving "The Irish Itinerary" podcast, which continues to impress, held their annual conference in Belfast in August on the topic of "Unions and Partitions". The Seventh Annual Flann O'Brien conference was held in Romania in June, at the Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj, on the subject of "Strange Atmospheres". It was attended by Irish Times columnist Frank McNally ("Irishman's Diary"), whose entertaining commentary on the proceedings made for unusual mainstream coverage of an academic conference.
Spring of 2023 was a time of the usual flurry of international activities beginning with events inspired by St Patrick's Day, such as Irish Book Day in Washington D.C., sponsored by Global Irish Studies at Georgetown University, Solas Nua (Centre for New Irish Arts), and the D.C. Public Library. The John McGahern Barracks Museum webinar series celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of McGahern's The Barracks in March, with contributions from writers Colm Tóibin and Niamh Campbell, as well as archivists Catriona Crowe and Barry Houlihan. Chicago's Newberry Library series continues, with Mary Trotter giving a talk on "Actresses and Activists" in March, and one of the reviewers in this issue, Sean Farrell, delivering a presentation on '"The Blackstaff Nuisance': Civic Culture and the Environment in Victorian Belfast, 1842-1878" in May. In April, the online Book Salon, run by City University of New York's Center for the Study of Women and Society, featured Irish Women's Prison Writing 1960s-2010s", April also saw the annual launch of the Bealtine festival, which featured work focusing on older women.
April was a time for some cultural controversies in Ireland: the university board voted to "de-name" Trinity's Berkeley Library (it has not yet been renamed), and the promotion on social media by a member of Sinn Féin (housing spokesman Eoin О Broin) of an image created by Mála Spiosrai, that took a well-known nineteenth-century painting of an eviction and overlaid it with images of modern-day Gardai removing people from their homes. Less controversial was a New York Times piece that publicised and celebrated the achievements of The Stinging Fly Press, a small but increasingly powerful Irish publishing house that began as a small journal but has gone on to create the careers of some of Ireland's most exciting writers of the last couple of decades. Also in April, The National Gallery in Dublin appointed its first female director, Caroline Campbell, an art historian from Northern Ireland. In the following month, the gallery featured what the Irish Times described as a "superb exhibition" of the work of Lavinia Fontana, while the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast featured work by Niamh O'Malley. April as the month of Irish women continued when the Limerick Research Seminar offered an online symposium suggesting "A New Agenda for Women's and Gender History". Gender issues were at the centre of several Irish events and anniversaries in the spring and summer, in particular relating to the LGBTQ+ community. May marked the twentieth anniversary of the Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival, while in June the Dublin Pride Festival celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its first Gay Pride parade. Also in June, Irish drag queen Davina Devine appeared on the popular Irish podcast My Therapist Ghosted Me, garnering a significant listening audience, while Gay Community News (GCN) magazine made the first decade of its archive publicly available online as part of its thirty-five-year anniversary observation. To add to these milestones is the recent announcement of the Irish entry into Eurovision for 2024: "Doomsday Blue", a song by Bambi Thug, a nonbinary singer-songwriter.
There were a cluster of events marking trauma and the humane response to those in need across the globe in May, including the creation of a YouTube lecture, sponsored by Canada's Heritage Trust, about the welcome and care received by Irish famine refugees in New Brunswick. A new "folk musical", In the Midst of Plenty, which had premiered at the Famine Museum in Strokestown, County Roscommon, in 2022, began a nineteen-show tour of the country. The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma unveiled a sculpture, "Eternal Heart", to commemorate the famine-based relationship between the Choctaw and Ireland, a companion piece to the 2015 sculpture in Cork commemorating this deep bond, "Kindred Spirit". A possibly related event in May was a hybrid symposium held in Cambridge, "Lament: A One-Day Celebration of the Tradition of Irish Keen", to mark the 250th anniversary of the poem "Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire" ("Lament for Art O'Leary"), by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. In addition to Paul Muldoon and Angela Bourke, the symposium was attended by the work's most recent translator, poet Vona Groarke. People might recall that the poem was the inspiration for 2020's award-winning memoir, A Ghost in the Throat, by Doireann Ní Ghriofa. While on the subject of Irish-English translation, I would note one more event from May, the creation of a digital version of An Gaodhal, the world's first Irish-language newspaper, the product of a partnership between New York University and (the recently renamed) University of Galway.
June is often a month dedicated to James Joyce and Bloomsday for Irish Studies scholars, and the usual summer schools around the world continued to gather, having recovered from the larger than usual centenary celebrations of last year. Other canonical Irish authors received special attention over the summer as well. In Chicago, at the Bailiwick Repertory, composer Joseph Daniel Sobol celebrated W. B. Yeats's 158th birthday by creating a musical theatre piece, In the Deep Heart 's Core: A Mystic Cabaret. The restored Donerail Court, home of the St Leger family in County Cork, reopened with an exhibition about Elizabeth Bowen, one of the estate's noteworthy literary neighbours, such as Edmund Spenser. Summer of 2023 saw all of the annual literary and culture festivals, from Dublin, to Sligo, to Cork and around the country. Even I contributed to one of them, the West Cork Literary Festival in July. A festival I had not previously been aware of, Féile an Phobail, which nevertheless bills itself as "Ireland's biggest community arts festival", hosted in 2023 by St Mary's University College in Belfast, entered national consciousness when it was addressed by Jeremy Corbyn, previous leader of UK's Labour Party, who spoke on "The Choices for Ireland", which discussed the current debates about reunification of the island.
I will hurry through the autumn and winter of 2023 by focusing on Irish Studies in Germany, a country that provided the final event reported in last year's essay. In May of 2023, I was appointed Visiting Travelling Professor of Irish Studies in Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg, where I have been teaching and working since 1 October (and where I will continue to be until the end of March 2024). This initiative has been largely funded by the Emigrant Support Programme (ESP) of the Irish Embassy in Berlin, to promote Irish culture in Europe, possibly at least partly in response to Brexit and the weakening European position of the UK that has followed. Four universities are involved, Würzburg, Wuppertal, Saarland (in Saarbrücken), and Tübingen, and in November and December I delivered talks at all four institutions. My talks focused on Irish women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Eva Gore-Booth, Margaret Cousins, Alice Milligan, Hannah Lynch, Martina Carr, and Edna O'Brien). My presentation at University of Wuppertal in November was part of a series of events there marking the fiftieth anniversary of Ireland joining the EEC (European Economic Community), which would become the European Union. The library there hosted the Royal Irish Academy's traveling exhibit on Ireland's EU membership, and its opening was launched by Irish Consul in Berlin, Sarah Dooley. Also in November, the Irish Embassy in Berlin held a conference of Irish Studies scholars, as well as a meeting of German-Irish societies and cultural organizations. Spending this time amongst dedicated and lively Irish Studies scholars, students and professionals, has been encouraging and inspiring, and I look forward to reporting to you all next year on the success of an event I am co-organizing with colleagues here in Würzburg, a two-day conference in February on "The Irish Animal, Real and Imagined". Before signing off, I must thank the reviewers who did stellar work for this issue. I am so grateful for scholars who are so conscientious, generous, and supportive without expectation of remuneration, when we are all expected to do so much more.
Maureen O'Connor is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English in University College Cork and is currently the 2023-2024 Travelling Visiting Professor of Irish Studies in Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. She is the author of The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women 's Writing (2010) and of Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction (2021). She is the co-editor, with Derek Gladwin, of a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, "Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities" (2018); with Kathryn Laing and Sinead Mooney, of Edna O 'Brien: New Critical Perspectives (2006); with Lisa Colletta, of Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O'Brien (2006); and, with Tadhg Foley, of Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture, and Empire (2006). She is currently writing a volume for inclusion in the Cork University Press series, "Sireacht: Longings for Another Ireland", on the topic of Animals.
https://orcid.org/0000-00Q3-4455-5529
Space and Irish Lesbian Fiction: Towards a Queer Liminality Amy Jeffrey Routledge, 2022. 174 pages. ISBN: 9781032009483
Reviewer: Anna Charczun (Brunel University London)
The subject of queer liminality is undoubtedly an important aspect of study of literature, as it not only highlights the spaces of liminality of queer desire across a variety of texts, but also charts how those spaces evolved over time, and, consequently, how this evolution changed the portrayal and reception of queer persons in popular culture and vice versa. Deriving from the Latin word for a threshold or a border, liminality is "understood as a rupture or suspension of ordinary structures, a time and place out of the ordinary in which individuals or collectives must invent new forms of action or thought, which then become recognized permanently" (de Rapper 2016: 174). From a queer point of view, then, liminality denotes the in-between spaces occupied by queer emotions and individuals, which signify queer subplots in otherwise heterosexually centred texts. Moreover, when this in-betweenness is read in the Irish context, the concept of liminality seems even more judicious, as liminality "is a widespread theme in Irish literature and culture" (Gilsenan Nordin and Holmsten 2009: 7). The fusion of queer liminality in relation to Irish lesbian fiction, therefore, creates an interesting study, where Jeffrey's readers are met with a trajectory of Irish lesbian desire from the position of liminality to a homonormative inclusivity.
Jeffrey's monograph comprises a compilation of individual essays, connected by the theme of queer liminality present in Irish lesbian fiction. This is evident in her extensive introduction, which introduces and explains not only the concept of "(queer) liminality" and how she intends to use it throughout the book, but also terms such as "lesbian" and "queer", accompanied by lengthy histories of lesbians and of homosexual laws in Ireland. As a result, despite sounding sometimes like a textbook, and repeatedly misspelling Eve Kosofky's last name, Jeffrey achieves the aim of her introduction, where she ensures that her readers are comfortable enough with her take on all the terms in the book, which will eventually allow them to come to a similar conclusion, namely that lesbian desire is no longer liminal, at least in the south of Ireland, unless we choose to consider queer liminality from a new perspective of assimilation.
The monograph is thus preoccupied with an interrogation of spaces of queer liminality occupied by lesbians in Irish fiction between 1872 and 2016, although Jeffrey's discussion on queer liminality in culture reaches 2021. Her examination varies from in-depth analyses of the main recurring themes or places of lesbian desire's isolation, or rather concealment, to sometimes listing any additional motifs that could signify liminality, not always queer, in each text. However, even though the idea of liminality is interwoven into the book, as its engagement with thresholds, crossings, transitions, and intersectionality keeps appearing and disappearing, creating an impression of an ever-present thematic contingency, Jeffrey also proposes her own readings of the texts, which expertly go beyond a simple verification of the presence of lesbian desire and its implications for queer liminality.
Jeffrey's work is also largely expansionist as, rather than just concentrating on lesbian fiction written by women, she includes male authors or authors who do not at all identify as lesbian, since lesbian desire and identity are "an integral part of their work" (30); therefore, representations of lesbian liminal spaces in their respective works should be included in a discussion on queer liminality. Moreover, the conclusive part of the book incorporates voices from Northern Ireland, which is significant for two reasons: firstly, it ensures the all-round inclusivity that Jeffrey first created by fusing the moments of lesbian intimacy, passion, and desire within the wider concept of queer liminality; secondly, she is able to show the liminal position that Northern Ireland holds in comparison to her southern neighbour.
The first three chapters of the monograph portray queer liminality in the period between the late-nineteenth and the late-twentieth century. The liminal spaces present in the texts are first owed to the démonisation of lesbians and lesbian desire by the scientific literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, to then being condemned by religion, specifically the Catholic Church, although later Jeffrey does turn to debate the criticism of the occasions of lesbian "sin" instigated by the Protestant church, too. The first chapter, consequently, reads Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) and George Moore's A Drama in Muslin (1886), which, according to Jeffrey, construct the lesbian and the concept of sexual "inversion" within the context of the discourse of sexology, and thus contain spaces that are associated with liminality such as attics, boarding schools, and religious convents for women. The alliance of these places with an idea of them being alienated from the patriarchy and the general heteronormative order, Jeffrey notes, obscures the figure of the lesbian in the nineteenth-century literature (37).
In her reading of Carmilla, accordingly, Jeffrey concentrates on the motif of the pathologization of the lesbian body as the centre contamination, as she claims that "both inversion and vampirism are portrayed as infections that can be transmitted between women" (41). She thus investigates those sites of contagion that occurs predominantly in bedchambers, but also discusses how other locations could function as liminal spaces of crossing boundaries of female/male, dead/undead, and absent/present, which decisively points to her queer reading of the text. Since the term infection is indicative of an involvement of at least two persons, as well as any outside agencies and institutions, Jeffrey also discusses the effect that Carmilla has on Laura, and how Carmilla's execution can be seen as an act of "clerical aggression that seeks to reinstate patriarchal control which the deviant transgressive woman/vampire has momentarily disrupted" (47). In her reading of Drama in Muslin, on the other hand, Jeffrey concentrates on the queer liminal space of a convent school, a motif to which she returns repeatedly in her discussions of Kate O'Brien and Edna O'Brien's fictions.
Chapter Two concentrates on two novels by Kate O'Brien, Mary Lavelle (1936) and As Music and Splendour (1958). Here, Jeffrey argues that lesbian desire is still initiated in homosocial locations where women can feel partly liberated from the restrictive rules of the patriarchal order, and later begins to invade heteronormative spaces, such as cafés, opera houses, or public squares. Equally importantly, the chapter demonstrates how by comparing her characters to nuns, or generally positioning them in liminal spaces that relate to Catholicism, O'Brien begins to blur the line between the sacred and the secular. Admittedly, at the time when the Catholic Church remained silent with regards to lesbian desire and its dangers, despite its public position of contempt for gay male sexuality, O'Brien's lesbian characters occupy liminal spaces between inclusion and exclusion, of being neither fully visible nor invisible. In fact, Jeffrey proposes that "invisibility is a condition of liminality" (59). O'Brien's characters challenge not only the religious views on homosexuality, but also the Catholic church's association with Irish nationalism through their shared ideal of womanhood. Therefore, although lesbians in these texts are seen as abjected and marginal figures, existing only on the peripheries of their respective narratives, Jeffrey's argument certainly moves them closer to centre stage.
Before this happens, however, the monograph takes its readers to the fiction of the late twentieth century, where it offers readings of three authors: Edna O'Brien ("The Mouth of the Cave", "Sister Imelda", and The High Road), Maura Richards (Interlude), and Mary Dorcey (A Noise from the Woodshed). At this time, queer liminality was fluctuating between embracing its positive aspects, where it was "not just a resistance to social norms or a negation of established values but a positive and creative constructions of different ways of life" (81) and reverting to its closeted space. This pattern, Jeffrey claims, was disrupted by Mary Dorcey, who liberated the space of queer liminality with her association of lesbian desire with nature, which "holds the potential to alter ideologies and assumptions" (104). She ushered this liminality into the narrative spaces that were hitherto reserved solely for heterosexual relations, thus moving lesbian desire away from its marginal position and towards an overtly central space in the narrative and, by extension, Irish fiction.
Having achieved this, Irish lesbian fiction could then begin to openly discuss issues of (an emerging) lesbian sexuality. The reclaiming of the closet, therefore, becomes Jeffrey's focus in the first part of Chapter Four. The discussion of Emma Donoghue's Stir-fry and Hood appropriates the closet as a metaphorical (and sometimes a literal) space of public and private coming out, as opposed to the previous containment of one's lesbian desire. The monograph instances a plethora of physical and metaphorical spaces of queer liminality, some of them spaces of mourning or islands. By 2009, however, when Donoghue's Landing was published, Irish lesbian writing had long ago left the issue of coming out behind and moved towards a celebration of the state of inbetweenness. Nevertheless, despite the novel's portrayal of a seemingly synergic harmony between its lesbians and the rest of Irish society, Jeffrey laments that with the glorious crossing of borders and counterurbanisation of queer desire come certain risks. She thus contends that Landing is a perfect example of how "LGBTQ+ people's access to different spaces is dependent upon heteronormative ideologies" (140), which not only explains why she now begins to question the liminality of lesbians in popular fiction in the title of the chapter, but also directs the readers to her concluding thoughts on queer liminality in Irish lesbian fiction.
In conclusion, therefore, the book questions the position of queer liminality and argues that not only do lesbians lose their individuality within the wider queer movement, as more women begin to identify with the term queer rather than lesbian, but also that queer itself has become so popularized that it no longer holds its previous exceptionality. To explain this, Jeffery turns to the premise of homonormativity, which is largely based on the mimesis of heteronormativity appropriated by queer assimilation to the larger society, where literary portrayals of lesbians no longer occupy a liminal position, but a queer space (148). However, working with Lucy Caldwell's Multitudes and Rosemary Jenkins' Aphrodite's Kiss, Jeffrey also notes that queer liminality still very much plays an important role in representations of lesbians in Northern Ireland, as mentioned earlier: "caught in a space of suspended liminality [...] Northern Ireland finds itself in a liminal position in regard to many issues, being apart from the rest of the UK and also from southern Ireland" (150). Nonetheless, in her closing remarks, Jeffrey poses a significantly valid question: what is the future of queer? Can we still think about Irish lesbian fiction in terms of queer? I suppose the time will tell, but we can rest assured that Irish lesbian fiction will be a witness and a testament to whatever the future brings.
Space and Irish Lesbian Fiction is a great resource and a good read, which will be found useful by academics and Irish lesbian literature enthusiasts alike. It provides a new way of reading, and a framework for consideration, of Irish lesbian fiction, as well as of thinking of the presence lesbian desire occupies within narrative. With its cohesive and extensive explanations, innovative ideas, and a multitude of sites of queer liminality, from metaphorical to physical, this monograph has a real potential to bring new scholarship to the fields of lesbian, queer, and Irish literature, North and South.
Works Cited
Gilsenan Nordin, Irena, and Elin Holmsten (2009). Liminal Borderlands in Irish Literature and Culture. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Rapper de, Giles (2016). "Book Review: Thomassen, Bjørn. Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between?' Anthropological Notebooks 22 (3): 174-75.
Anna Charczun completed her PhD at Brunel University London in 2019, where she received the Vice-Chancellor's Prize for Doctoral Research in the same year. Her research interests include Irish women's writing, with an emphasis on lesbian writing. She has published on Irish lesbian writing at the end of the twentieth century and from the diaspora, and her first monograph, Irish Lesbian Writing Across Time: A New Framework for Rethinking Love between Women, was released in October 2021. She is now teaching Modern and Contemporary Lesbian Literature at Brunel and working on her next monograph.
https://orcid.org/0000-00Q2-9899-9515
Ordinary Lives, Death, & Social Class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902 Ciara Breathnach Oxford University Press, 2022. 290 pages. ISBN: 9780198865780
Reviewer: Bridget English (University of Illinois)
Historical narratives about death often focus on the extraordinary or the exceptional: tales of self-sacrifice, heroic war deaths, brutal murders, or historic catastrophes. It is the quiet deaths - by accident, disease, drowning, or asphyxia - of ordinary people that are often written out of these grand meta-narratives, rendering the lives of the poor, women, and children invisible or irrelevant. Ciara Breathnach's brilliant new book, Ordinary Lives, Death, & Social Class, places the deaths of everyday people at the centre of the story, using coroners' inquests and eyewitness testimonies to unearth these largely forgotten narratives. Employing original quantitative research data from coroners' inquests and the 1901 census to interrogate the workings of biopower in Ireland during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, Breathnach makes a hugely significant contribution to historical scholarship on gender, class, death, and the law during this period.
As Breathnach reminds readers early in the book, the protocols surrounding the discovery of a body in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in Ireland were much like they are today: the police were notified, they carried out a preliminary investigation and generated a report that was sent to the coroner. After deciding whether an inquest was necessary, the coroner assembled a jury of "no fewer than twelve and up to twenty-three local men from 1881-1926, and according to section 22 of the 1846 act they were to be residents and rate-payers of over £4. By these decrees jurors were ordinarily of a higher social standing than the subjects of the Dublin City coroner's court" (5). One of the key arguments of Ordinary Lives hinges on this very point, which indicates how wealthier and more prominent Dubliners were often left to determine the fates of those less fortunate. Nevertheless, despite this seeming lack of agency, Breathnach emphasizes that the coroner court records do "contain clear voices of the poor, even if their experiences are mediated through the DMP and the court clerk", raising "fundamental textual and contextual problems: where, how, and can we locate coronial court records in terms of agency of the poor and authenticity of voices" (7). These questions animate this study and open new ways of examining historical documents by utilizing official documents to uncover narratives of the underprivileged. As the introduction makes clear, power and gender are the central analytical frameworks for this book, and Breathnach is careful to reference gender theorists like Judith Butler to highlight the instability of these categories and to point to the ways that men and women experienced city life differently.
The first chapter of Ordinary Lives situates readers in the socio-economic contexts of coroners' cases. The remaining three chapters are divided into causes and location of death: sudden and accidental deaths in domestic settings; deaths in public and workplace settings; and unnatural, suspicious, and violent deaths. This organizational pattern provides not only categories for comprehending likely causes of death in Dublin during this period, but also allows for a wider picture of how the lives of women, children, and the elderly were impacted in these contexts. In chapter two, for instance, Breathnach explains how "for older people, fear of death in the workhouse and the social stigma of the pauper burial was very real. Engagement with the Poor Law for impoverished parents was always a calculated risk that brought child custody into the equation" (88). Primary causes of death in the domestic setting included tuberculosis, cardiac problems, and pulmonary diseases, and many of these deaths were caused by either neglect of personal health or lack of awareness of underlying health conditions. Accidental deaths included those from fires and falls from windows and stairs and other hazards of cramped living spaces, situations that significantly impacted the lives of small children who frequently died from burning and scalding in tenements.
The outside world posed different kinds of risks to Dubliners living in the rapidly modernizing city. Chapter three details some of these outdoor threats, including road traffic and transport accidents, drownings, and workplace accidents. Perhaps the most intriguing of these is the "accidental deaths in waterways" section which describes the topography of Dublin, divided by the Liffey into North and South, and its watery perimeters marked by the Royal and Grand Canals. Breathnach points out that "swimming clubs were the preserve of the middle and upper classes. Lifesaving skills were more common to the elite in Ireland" (155). Without these skills, working-class Dubliners were more vulnerable to drownings, especially in the summer months when bathing became alluring, even for weak swimmers. Additionally, drunken night swims were popular and perilous, and the treacherous waters of the Irish Sea continually posed a significant threat, as did walking on unkempt canal banks. Workplace deaths were particularly devastating, and this chapter details a particularly gruesome incident that occurred in the Guinness Brewery on Easter Monday 1902, in which three men were crushed by a concrete floor. Taken together, these stories, and others involving railways, are not simply titillating narratives for morbidly curious readers but highlight the lack of public safety measures in Dublin during this period and the workplaces and public spaces in need of reform.
The concluding chapter, on unnatural, suspicious, and violent deaths, will be one of the most engrossing chapters for many readers, given public interest in criminality. However, this chapter is even more unsettling for its descriptions of infanticide and suicide. Breathnach expertly navigates the blurred lines between criminals and those who were subject to unjust rulings based on eyewitness testimony rather than evidence. The chapter is thus divided into two sections: the opening section focuses on infanticide and the critical role the coroner's court played in these cases; and the second examines suicides, which during this period fell under the legal category of "foul play" or yielded verdicts of "temporary insanity". While murder was a capital offence under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, Breathnach notes that the state rarely brought murder charges. Further, Breathnach reminds us that "with great frequency, light sentences were handed down in cases of gender-based violence giving a distinct impression that the victims' lives did not matter as much as the perpetrator's reputation or the potential pecuniary impact on dependant family were they punished more fully" (179). Despite these injustices, there was no public outcry following most of the deaths covered in the chapter, a fact that highlights one of the central aims of this book, which is to expose past injustices.
The deaths detailed here include infanticide, malnutrition, starvation, drowning, murder, and suicide, which posed significant challenges to the coroner. Breathnach clarifies that "suicide in the nineteenth century occupied a legal grey area - the existing legislation had ramifications for both the burial rites and the property of the deceased. Unlike infanticide, which was specifically nominated in a series of acts and, in particular for our purposes, as a misdemeanour in the Offenses Against the Persons Act 1861, the statues pertaining to suicide and attempted suicide did so indirectly" (193). Despite this fact and the ambiguity surrounding suicide in Irish homicide law, the act could still cause a range of issues regarding "posthumous handling of the corpse", burial, and the estate of the deceased. The differences between Irish and English law become particularly pronounced here, as a combination of canon and common law characterized the Irish legal approach to suicide. As Breathnach notes, "Suicides had legacy impacts for families who had to bear the perceived stigmata of mental health problems in the lineage" (199). The fact that the Catholic church forbade the burial of suicide victims on consecrated ground further complicated matters as coroners' reports listed "temporary insanity" or "actions whole of unsound mind" to shield surviving relatives from the shame associated with suicide and allow for proper burial. Overall, this chapter foregrounds the intriguing ways that vernacular and formal justice systems co-existed during this period as well as how implementation of the law was highly localized.
Ordinary Lives is a remarkable book that examines the medico-legal system of Dublin city coroners' inquests through the frameworks of blame, gender, and power. What Breathnach's skilful analysis exposes is not only the history of the Dublin City coroner's court, but also the marginalized lives that often evaded the surveillance of biopower. The methods and ethical approach to the subject demonstrate exemplary historical scholarship, but this study will also appeal to literary and cultural studies scholars because of its finely grained attention to Dublin life and attention to biopower. By writing these forgotten stories back into the historical narrative of Dublin, Ordinary Lives invests the quotidian deaths of this period with meaning and value.
Bridget English is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel (Syracuse U.P., 2017) and co-editor of Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism (Clemson U.P., 2023). She is also со-editing The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature and is working on a second monograph titled Self-Destructive Modernisms: Suicide, Failure, and Institutions of Care.
https://orcid.org/0000-00Q2-5199-2391
Gerald O'Donovan: A Life, 1871-1942 John F. Ryan Liverpool University Press, 2022. 304 pages. ISBN: 9781800855274
Reviewer: Heather Laird (University College Cork)
As indicated by the title, this book is a biography of a man whose life coincided with one of the most tumultuous periods in Irish history. Biographies are generally the preserve of those considered to have lived notable lives that impacted in some significant way on the society they inherited. While Gerald O'Donovan (born Jeremiah) is not well known in the Ireland of today, his life could certainly be described as an exceptional one. Moreover, this was a man who actively sought to shape the Ireland of his time. In survey studies of twentieth-century Irish literature and society, Gerald O'Donovan is most likely to be remembered, if at all, as a Catholic priest who left the church and went on to write Father Ralph (1913), a controversial best-selling bildungsroman about a young liberal priest who leaves his ministry in response to the Catholic church's failure to modernise. John F. Ryan's well-researched scholarly biography covers this important aspect of O'Donovan's life, but also moves well beyond it to provide the reader with an admirably detailed account of O'Donovan and the world he inhabited.
O'Donovan was the author of six novels, the first of which was Father Ralph. These were all published within a ten-year period, 1913 to 1922. O'Donovan was over forty when Father Ralph appeared in print. However, prior to that he had published a significant number of shorter pieces, including stories, sketches, and articles. In addition, lectures and letters by O'Donovan, on topics ranging from industrial development to rural libraries, were published in local and national newspapers and journals. Though O'Donovan's writing career is covered in detail in Gerald O'Donovan: A Life, 1871-1942, the book is perhaps most engaging when discussing the many causes he was involved in whilst living in Ireland, and those he encountered through his social and cultural activism. O'Donovan is aptly described by Ryan as "[a]lmost unique in his holistic approach to the Irish revival" (2), with his interests including the Irish arts and crafts movement, the Gaelic League, and the Cooperative Association. In Ryan's analysis, two drives underpinned this activism: nation-building and modernisation, though concerns at one point about his wife's suffragette cousin overly influencing his household suggests certain limits to his embrace of the "modern"! These two drives also influenced much of his writing, both literary and otherwise. Gerald О 'Donovan: A Life, 1871-1942 is grounded in empirical research rather than theoretical debates so the various complexities of nationalism and modernity in the Irish context, as explored by Irish postcolonial scholars and others, are not acknowledged, though there is a brief mention of O'Donovan's underestimation of the significance of Ireland's peripheral position in the global capitalist economy in the discussion of O'Donovan's support for an expanded Irish manufacturing sector (23).
O'Donovan's career as a novelist began after he left Ireland for England and married a Protestant woman with strong Irish links whose grandfather had been a Church of Ireland rector. Though he remained in England for much of the rest of his life, estranged from his immediate family who disapproved of his abandonment of the priesthood and subsequent marriage, and cultivating "an almost perfect upper-class English accent" (210), five of his six novels are set in Ireland. Moreover, he continued to meet with acquaintances from Ireland, such as George Moore and W.B. Yeats, and maintained an interest in current events in Ireland; his second novel, Waiting (1914) features an Independent Nationalist candidate for Parliament in the constituency election who is defeated after being denounced from the pulpit for his marriage to a Protestant, and his fourth novel, Conquest (1920), details an array of political opinion in Ireland in the decades running up to the Easter Rising. According to Ryan, O'Donovan, in his latter years, became even more focused on Ireland, though the Ireland that he was preoccupied with at that stage was "peopled mainly by his literary and artistic friends, and by social reformers, who shared his ideas and ideals, and whose passing evoked nostalgia" (239). A poignant point to bear in mind is that O'Donovan had not returned to the country of his birth since before his marriage.
Gerard O'Donovan, who led a singularly varied life, is depicted in this biography as a talented man who could potentially bring something of value to a range of workplaces, but who found it hard "to make any long-term commitment or settle in any position" (162). Indeed, his later tendency to walk away from jobs raises the question as to whether his resignation from the ministry had been purely on ideological grounds, though this is not directly addressed in the book. Most notably, O'Donovan worked off and on in publishing; as a private secretary to the co-operative leader Horace Plunkett; and also for a while in the British Department of Propaganda, with H.G. Wells as one of his colleagues and a subsequent friend. Whilst working for the Department, he also met the renowned author Rose Macaulay, and commenced an affair with her that continued, alongside his marriage, for the rest of his life, nearly two decades. Given his patchy employment and the fact that none of his later novels achieved the success of Father Ralph, O'Donovan was lucky that his wife benefited from a trust fund and inheritances, and that some of his friends were willing to lend or give him money when he required it. Even Macaulay, who, in a letter to a fellow novelist attributed the relative lack of success of some of O'Donovan's novels to the fact that his writings were "too documentary" and "lacking in style" (223), was a source of financial assistance, contributing to the education of his children. This may strike the reader as an odd scenario, but a useful context provided in the biography is that O'Donovan was a strong advocate of proper education for girls, notwithstanding his aforementioned reservations about his wife's suffragette cousin, and was keen for his two daughters to be as well-educated as his son.
As stated in the opening sentence of the book's acknowledgements, Gerald О 'Donovan: A Life, 1871-1942 is the result of many years of research into O'Donovan and the various milieus he inhabited. John F. Ryan is an independent scholar and this very rich book, the first full-length study of O'Donovan, raises important questions about contemporary research culture. Professional academics in today's university too often operate in a system in which citation numbers matter more than the context of the citation and are under constant pressure to increase their publication "output". In response to this situation, some are now advocating for "slow scholarship", pointing out that time is essential to good research, whether that be time to think, trawl the archives, read books, or simply converse with scholars working in overlapping areas and other relevant parties. John F. Ryan's book is a standout example of the benefits of the longer journey to publication. The primary sources Ryan consulted range from newspapers and journals to papers in libraries in Ireland, England, the U.S., and Canada. Moreover, Ryan's longstanding devotion to the topic of O'Donovan's life and times is key to the relationship of trust and friendship that he built with some members of O'Donovan's family. This relationship, referenced in the acknowledgements, ensured that he could gain access to materials relevant to Gerard O'Donovan that are not in official archives, such as unpublished literary works; correspondence with such important contemporary figures as W.B. Yeats, Constance Markievicz, and H.G. Wells; and unpublished reminiscences of Gerald O'Donovan's wife. The latter includes an account of a holiday in Co. Donegal in August 1910, where Beryl O'Donovan, then Beryl Verschoyle, first met the man who would become her husband. In these reminiscences, she recalls that they were both guests in the home of Hugh Law, the Nationalist MP for Donegal, and his wife Lota, and that Æ (George Russell) was also staying there at the time. Vividly capturing the oft exhilarating atmosphere of Ireland in the period leading up to the Rising, she describes long conversations into the night between O'Donovan and Æ concerning "fairy lore, politics, agriculture and the United Irish Creameries, literature, poetry and Indian philosophy on and on past the point to where one got a kind of second quickening" (105). Given how richly O'Donovan's life is contextualized in this biography, it is a pity that the book does not include in its opening pages a chronology of that life alongside a chronology of O'Donovan's times, with the latter subdivided into cultural context and historical events. Indeed, when reading the book, I found myself on more than one occasion flicking back through its pages, seeking to place a detail, and expecting to find such a resource.
In conclusion, given its focus on an Irishman who is now relatively unknown, this is a book that is likely to attract a niche readership, but Gerald O'Donovan: A Life, 1871-1942 is deserving of broader attention. The contemporary university press often finds itself having to prove its value, sometimes in quite instrumentalist terms. In continuing to publish books like this biography, Liverpool University Press aligns itself with those of us who still strongly believe that the quality of the scholarship rather than the quantity of readers should be at the core of a university press's mission. The Press is also to be commended for the design of this publication, with the front cover warranting special mention. Here the then Father Jeremiah O'Donovan looks intently out at us with a firm but not unkind expression. The cover reproduces the black backdrop of artist Dermod O'Brien's portrait of O'Donovan. Against both that backdrop and the slightly darker black of O'Donovan's priestly garb, the cover captures the luminosity of the priest's face and white collar in O'Brien's portrait. Indeed, the flesh of O'Donovan's face is so richly rendered in what is otherwise an unusually flat monochrome image, that it produces a subtle three-dimensional effect, as if the subject of the artwork may at any moment reach out and enter the world of the viewer. In O'Brien's portrait, as in the book that its reproduction adorns, we see the inability of the priest, Father Jeremiah O'Donovan, to fully contain the man, Gerald O'Donovan.
Heather Laird is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College Cork. She is a postcolonial scholar whose research interests include theories and practices of resistance, Irish culture since the early nineteenth century, and the intersection between gender and class. She is the author of Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879-1920 (2005) and Commemoration (2018), and an Editor of Sireacht: Longings for Another Ireland, a series of short texts that explore the potential of ideas commonly dismissed as utopian.
https://orcid.org/0000-00Q3-2104-0434
Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Emigrant Women Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick Penguin, 2023. 336 pages. ISBN: 9780241994320
Reviewer: Sean Farrell (Northern Illinois University)
In October 1908, Annie Young, an Irish-American woman living in Boston with her old daughter was arrested for keeping a disorderly house, a charge brought on by allegations that lodgers were engaged in sex work in the South End residence. The arrest initiated a series of visits from caseworkers from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (MSPCC), who ultimately deemed that Young was incapable of caring for her daughter. Marie was transferred to the Home for Destitute Catholic Children, and eventually adopted by another Irish emigrant couple. Unable to get her daughter back, Annie returned to her native Sligo in September 1910, where she lived with her parents as Annie Furey. Twenty years later, Marie took out an ad in a Boston newspaper trying to contact her birth mother, but it is unlikely that Annie Furey ever saw her daughter's plea (63-83).
Stories like that of Annie and Marie Young lie at the heart of Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick's Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem, and the Lives of Emigrant Women, a pioneering study of Irish-American women's history, and one of the best books on the Irish diaspora in recent years. The broad outlines of the late-nineteenth-century emigration of Irish women to North America are familiar enough. Between 1856 and 1921 half of the Irish emigrants who ventured across the Atlantic were young women, a proportion that increased after 1880, an anomaly in the history of transatlantic emigration. While there have been a number of excellent histories of Irish American women in this era, most of these have focused on uplifting narratives of nuns and teachers working to improve themselves and/or their communities. Flipping the script, Farrell and McCormick reconstruct the lives and stories of Irish-born women who found themselves on the wrong side of the law in Boston, New York City, and Toronto. As the authors make clear in the introduction, this was a considerable number of people, since there were often more Irish women in prison than Irish men. By looking at the ways that Irish-born women interacted with the law, the authors provide a more comprehensive and humane portrait of turn-of-the-century Irish-American women, who, they make clear, typically resembled neither St. Brigid nor Bridget MacBruiser, a simian stereotype that appeared in an 1875 book on physiognomy. There was no one Bad Bridget. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Bad Bridget has found a wide readership in Ireland, and deservedly so.
Farrell and McCormick organize the book in ten thematic chapters, each built around an illustrative case study. Many of the stories highlight the challenges faced by working-class female emigrants in a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society. One theme that runs through the chapters is the myriad difficulties faced by single women earning low wages and with little social support. A particularly heartbreaking example is that of Rosie Quinn, a nineteen-year-old hotel worker charged with drowning her three-week-old daughter in Manhattan's Central Park in December 1902. Despite her insistence that it was an accident, Quinn was found guilty and sent upstate to the state prison for women. The chapter underlines the sheer power of the social forces arrayed against unmarried mothers. One juror later wrote that "had she but one friend to whom she could have turned for consolation or advice, we are convinced the crime could never have been committed" (43). Her contemporaries agreed, and the governor pardoned Quinn after she had served a little more than a year and a half in jail. Despite her high-profile case and some well-placed supporters, Quinn disappeared from the historical record shortly thereafter, a nice reminder of the fragmentary source base that the authors expertly use to piece these stories together.
Not all the crimes were social in nature. One of the most dramatic stories in the book centres on the 1899 kidnapping of Marion Clarke, the twenty-month-old daughter of a wealthy couple in New York City. When the girl disappeared, suspicion immediately fell upon Carrie Jones, the couple's nurse, who had taken the blonde-haired toddler on a walk to Central Park and never returned. With a story seemingly written for a made-for-TV movie, the case quickly became a media sensation, but the ensuing police investigation was eventually successful, bringing Marion back home to her parents. This was only the beginning. It turns out that Carrie Jones was actually Isabella Anderson, a recent emigrant from County Mayo who had colluded with a couple to kidnap Marion in an effort to get rich. As the story inevitably rolls to its dramatic denouement with a courtroom trial, Farrell and McCormick deftly show how each of the participants leaned into various gender tropes in performances designed to engage their audience and reduce their sentences. The authors bring these same analytical and literary skills to their other stories, memorable tales of a rebellious girl in Boston, drunk and disorderly women in Toronto, and the murder of a woman in upstate New York, to name just a few. Taken together, these intimate portraits of Irish-American life underline the sheer range of female emigrant experiences, as well as giving voice to women too often ignored in traditional historical accounts. It is also simply a damn good read, an intoxicating blend of true crime tales with gender and social history.
Bad Bridget's insistence on the diversity of Irish-born women's experiences in turn-of-the-century North America is undoubtedly one of the project's real strengths. It also underlines the regrettable absence of a conclusion, where the various strands explored in this rich study might have been brought together. This is a relatively minor quibble, for the book is a remarkable achievement, essential reading for anyone interested in the history of modern Ireland and/or the Irish diaspora. Farrell and McCormack's work should inspire scholars to see if they can find similar stories across the Irish World. Did Irish-born women living in Chicago, Melbourne, or San Francisco have some of the same experiences? Whatever the answer, the authors make clear that if we are to understand the global Irish diaspora, it is vital that we study the good, the bad, and the in-between.
Sean Farrell is Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. A former president of the American Conference for Irish Studies, he has published a wide range of articles and books on religion and politics in nineteenth-century Ireland, including the award-winning Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Ulster, 1784-1886 (2001). His latest book is Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast (Syracuse University Press, 2023).
sfarrel1fen iu.edu
https://orcid.org/0000-00Q2-1722-4946
The Necromantics: Reanimation in Victorian British and Irish Fiction Renée Fox The Ohio State University Press, 2023. 300 pages. ISBN: 9780814215494
Reviewer: Gordon Bigelow (Rhodes College)
In a 1986 book, the great Irish critic Seamus Deane contended that Gaelic culture in Ireland "was well and truly dead by the end of the eighteenth century". His point was that centuries of violent incursion and intensive settlement - involving the confiscation of land as well as the suppression of language and faith - had by this point altered patterns of Irish life so indelibly that efforts to mobilize a pre-colonial cultural unity always involved some form of deliberate reconstruction. The passage in full reads as follows: "The various forms of artificial respiration on Gaelic culture had no hope of ever reviving it as such. It was well and truly dead by the end of the eighteenth century. But as an idea or as an ideal, it continued to live" (28). With both the elegance and the brutal directness that were the hallmarks of his writing, Deane encapsulates a critical sensibility that would shape the development of a specifically Irish postcolonialism. The metaphor is searing, as it invites us to picture the Celtic revivalists of the Victorian and modernist generation - heroes of nationalist historiography and literary tradition - kneeling over the corpse of a colonized country, trying to inflate its cold lungs with their warm breath. In that figure Deane brings together several of the most decisive intellectual currents of the period. He draws on a certain left scepticism about the use and misuse of knowledge among elites, á la Hobsbawm and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition (1983), as well as the corrosive analysis of origin stories developed in poststructuralist philosophy. These turn together with some of the theoretical legacies of the age of decolonization, in particular the heightened awareness of empire's sweeping effects at the level of culture. One of Fanon's core observations, for example, was that the idea of preserving a pure and authentic native culture was often deployed by settlers and their indigenous allies in defence of the colonial order (236-248). Insisting that the pre-colonial culture was alive, essentially unchanged and untouched by modernity, can work as a tool of political reaction, a way of denying the historicity of the colonized or the formerly enslaved.
These strands of thought merged in Deane's writing into a particular kind of postcolonial perspective that would inspire many and exert considerable influence on the rise of Irish Studies as a modem academic field. It also gave considerable offense, irritating both national pietists, with its suggestion that their articles of faith were mobile and contingent, and unionists, who resented the implication that Gaelic culture had been killed off by English settlement, i.e., that anybody had colonized anybody else to begin with. But until I read Renée Fox's wonderfully sensitive and provocative book, I never understood how many Irish and British thinkers in the nineteenth century conceived of the past in exactly this way: as a lifeless body that might be revived with the lively spirit of the present. Fox shows, across remarkably different genres and registers, how writers used "images of reanimated corpses to semtinize how the Victorian historical imagination makes the past legible and useful in the present moment" (2). In Fox's hands the figure of the reanimated corpse becomes remarkably resonant, echoing through Victorian debates on aesthetics and historiography, and forward to the undead obsessions of contemporary fan fiction and TV. Fox is a professor in the Literature program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she co-directs both the University's Dickens Project - which sponsors major annual conferences and programs on British literature - and its new Center for Monster Studies. The intellectual range and omnivorous cultural sensibility suggested by these commitments is everywhere on display in this book. Written with verve and wry humour, it is as deeply invested in contemporary methodological debate as it is in Victorian poetics, as curious about the zombies that stalk the figurative landscapes of nineteenth-century prose as those that shambled across the movie screens of the 1970s.
Fox works at the start of the book to isolate and theorize the specific trope she traces, distinguishing it most importantly from the now-familiar topos of speciality. When writers describe the past as a dead body to be reanimated, they are not imagining a past that lives on in some ghostly or spectral form. These writers are inventing a "deliberately unhaunted gothic" whose significance, she argues, has been little understood (9). Instead of imagining a historical present that cannot shake off the influence or threat of some early trauma, some disturbing event that continues to live on, they evoke past worlds that are "well and truly dead" and then imagine what it would mean if they could be made to wake up and walk around in this changed landscape of the present. She makes a definitive case for the pervasiveness of the trope as she surveys some of the most influential of the period's historical thinkers. Michelet, she reminds us, understood the job of the historian explicitly in these terms, arguing that the scholar's purpose is to "exhume" the "too-forgotten dead" and give them "a second life" (cited in Fox 15). According to Froude, the measure of Carlyle's success as a historian was that he "brings dead things and dead people actually back to life" (cited in Fox 33). Standish O'Grady, a crucial influence for Yeats and for the Celtic revival movement in general, modelled his own practice as a historian on that of Carlyle, whose "blazing" words, he said, had the power "almost to wake the dead" (cited in Fox 18).
If a romantic and conservative historiography sought rather straightforwardly to bring a dead past back to life, the literary artists Fox considers prove much more sensitive to the dangers and complexities involved when we seek to wake the dead. She begins with Shelley's Frankenstein, showing importantly how different the imagination of this book is from the "necromantic" aspirations of these historians. She points out the way that - little noticed in previous criticism - Shelley's text avoids any discussion of the historical bodies that were used in the making of the creature. Frankenstein, she proposes, is thus not about the réanimation of previously dead things but about the principle of animation itself, a meditation on the process of creation and its aesthetic and formal implications. Writing on Dickens, Fox finds the reanimation topos working to produce a related but more specific reflection on literary form. From early on, Dickens was criticized for making characters that seemed artificial, like cardboard cutouts or puppets, without the animating spark of real life. Lewes compared them to the dead frogs of Luigi Galvani's well known 1786 experiments, whose limbs were made to twitch and wiggle by electric current. "Their actions", Lewes wrote, "want the distinctive peculiarity of organic action, that of fluctuating spontaneity [...] they are as uniform and calculable as the movements of a machine" (cited in Fox 99). But for Fox, this aesthetic of cultivated artificiality is part of an "immanent critique" of the naïve realism that perspectives like Lewes's take for granted (100). In her reading, Dickens's books "reimagine the signifying power of language as a ghastly act of imagination" (82). The book moves then to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning, in a chapter focused primarily on The Ring and the Book. The emphasis is again on the range of aesthetic and formal concerns invoked in the poems' self-conscious determination to invoke the voices and images of the dead.
Fox concludes with chapters on Irish literature in the early period of the Celtic revival, focusing on works by Yeats and Stoker. With Yeats she concentrates on the early work, which she holds up as an underappreciated "bridge between Victorian Studies and Irish Studies" (139). Working with his early folklore collections, as well as with the long narrative poem, "The Wanderings of Oisin", she places these texts into dialogue with a series of British poems about museums, showing how both look at the business of assembling and reassembling the fragments of a past age into modern exhibits. But where Keats, D. G. Rossetti, and Hardy reflect anxiously on the imperial violence of collecting - think of the Parthenon sculptures propped up in the British Museum - Yeats is ambivalent. For Fox, his work considers the collection as a potentially valuable "site for the synthesis of a national sense of self', even as it delivers a "warning [...] against the immersive lure of Celticism" (139, 176). Writing on Stoker's mummy novel, The Jewel of Seven Stars, Fox provides a compelling account of the Egyptian nationalist movement that grew before and after Gladstone's Suez Canal annexation in 1882, and she shows how Irish nationalists saw the fates of the two countries as comparable. In this context, Stoker's bizarre plot about an English collector seeking to reanimate the mummified remains of a five-thousand-year-old Egyptian queen reads as a reflection on Ireland's complex colonial status.
Fox's conclusion takes two different and equally revelatory turns. It looks first at recent horror-genre driven rewrites of nineteenth-century British fiction - books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) or Jane Slayer (2019), and their film and TV and YouTube afterlives. Our own time, she shows, is also taken up with the question of the deadness or liveliness of the past, as these fan-fiction outgrowths continue to collect, curate, and revive its artifacts. And, trenchantly, she pushes the formal questions running through earlier chapters with analysis of the postcritical turn of the 2010s, a movement caught up in its own drive to see how (as Rita Felski declares) "words from the past may spring back to life, acquiring fresh vigor and vitality" (cited in Fox 219). If we should think of Carlyle as "the George Romero of the 1840s", as Fox suggests in an earlier quip (32), we might think also of the postcritical scholar as the modern Michelet. Fox's book shows us how every age seems to be subject to its own revivalist impulses, struggling with how, and whether, and why we conceive of historical consciousness as necromancy.
Works Cited
Deane, Seamus (1986). A Short History of Irish Literature. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Erwin, Sherri Browning (2010). Jane Slayre. New York: Gallery.
Fanon, Frantz (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press
Grahame-Smith, Seth (2009). Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Philadelphia: Quirk Books.
Gordon Bigelow is Chair of the English Department at Rhodes College, where he teaches courses on Victorian Britain, Irish Studies, and critical theory. He is the author of Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2003), and his work has appeared in NOVEL, ELH, and other venues. His current research focuses on the Irish fiction of Anthony Trollope.
Thirsty Ghosts Emer Martin The Lilliput Press Ltd, 2023. 352 pages. ISBN: 9781843518631
Reviewer: Sally Bar Ebest (University of Missouri-St. Louis)
When I finished reading Emer Martin's The Cruelty Men (2018), I was bereft. I wanted more stories of the resilient O'Conaill siblings. I was entranced by Martin's voice, which melds painful Irish history with political insights, personifies tragedy through the heart-wrenching stories of abandoned children and heartless clergy, and - despite the children's perilous existence - contextualizes it with humour mixed with ancient myths in language bordering on the poetic. Perhaps because he is both the cruellest and the dumbest of the O'Connaills, most of the humour revolves around the karmic accidents experienced by the mean-spirited Seamus, so miserly that he sent his sisters out to work and put his younger siblings in the Laundries and Industrial Schools rather than pay for their keep.
Despite the Troubles and the scandals inside and outside the Church, Thirsty Ghosts contains less humour, virtually nothing on the priest scandal, and just one attempt at a joke:
Q: How did the priest find the boy in the long grasses?
A: Eminently satisfying.
No need for more. As Fintan O'Toole famously noted, during this period in Ireland, the priest scandal was an open secret (167).
And now the stories continue: Martin's fifth novel, Thirsty Ghosts, the second of a proposed trilogy, was released on September 14, 2023. Whereas The Cruelty Men ended in the mid-1950s (with detours into the mythic past and under the ground to seek out their sources), Thirsty Ghosts picks up these stories as Ireland muddles through the Troubles and begins to catch up with the rest of the world's social, religious, and economic progress. Two of the six O'Conaill children - Sean and Padraig - have perished, thanks largely to machinations of the Church; the remaining four have grown up and established families of their own. Mary is the housekeeper for the Lyons family, Seamus has remained on the family farm, Bridget and Maeve have presumably moved to America. Seamus has produced a son, Ignatius, known as Iggy to his family and Zoz to his disreputable friends. He married Esther, a Jewish woman with whom he sired Cormac, Fionn, and Etain, who move into the spotlight formerly held by their aunts and uncles. These children hang out with two offspring from the Lyons and MacInespie family trees - Deirdre and Orla - while their parents, Baby (née) Lyons and Paddy Maclnespie, socialize with Iggy. They are all brought together by Mary O'Conaill, whose love for Baby ensured her a permanent home with the Lyons family. Confused? Luckily, Martin provides a family tree.
Ireland's movement through the latter twentieth century periodically detours into the distant past to remind readers of its influence. The Hag, who represents Ireland, begins and ends the novel. She starts with a warning and a bit of hope:
Because you loved - you feared. Because you feared, you screamed. Because you screamed, you spoke. Because you wanted a shape to outlast you, you told a story. To send messages to those not yet born. And those stories mean the pain will not always kill you. (4)
She ends on a cautionary note: "The affection of a hag is a cold thing" (340).
In addition to the Hag, the character Caitriona appears periodically out of the late 1500s and 1600s to remind the reader that the British, who massacred her children, have always been the enemy. All she has left is her stories, her only sustenance (55). Indeed, whereas The Cruelty Men primarily blamed the Catholic Church for the country's problems, Thirsty Ghosts focuses on the psychic damage caused by the British. Natural outgrowths, the Troubles are subtly interwoven.
The British are excoriated throughout with stories of their savage duplicity through the ongoing story of the Earl of Essex, who travelled to Rathlin Island off the coast of Ireland, where he massacred men, women, and children, cut off their heads, threw them into bags, took them to Dublin, placed them on spikes - and claimed the island for England. Iggy refers to the heads as "thirsty ghosts" because they were not buried. But that term also applies to the book's characters who had been sent to Industrial Schools and confined in the Laundries; they too are thirsty, "full of holes never to be filled, unquenched needs" (239).
Whereas the characters in The Cruelty Men personified the evils of the Catholic Church and its hold on Ireland, Thirsty Ghosts recounts Ireland's growing pains via the extended O'Conaill family. As in Martin's other novels, the primary narrators are women: Mary, Dymphna, and Deirdre. Just as in The Cruelty Men, Mary O'Conaill (based on Martin's parents' housekeeper) is the glue that holds the various families and their childer together through her care-giving and her stories about fairies - fairy rings, pookas, ghosts, banshees (drawn largely from Ella Young's Celtic Wonder Tales) - and British invaders. These stories are in turn passed down by her sister Maeve, lost in the Laundries, who the nuns have re-named Teresa. Another inmate, Dymphna, has heard the tales so often that she memorizes and retells them to her children and their father. "The stories were a link to the first of our people", she explains, "and no one could steal them or beat them out of us" (69). Like the ancient Caitriona, the stories are all she has.
Dymphna, "the Patron Saint of the Mad", personifies the public and private woes of women in Ireland. As she says in a classic line, "I was born in Gestapo Ireland in the 1950s - where men weren't allowed to think and women didn't exist" (5). Her mother feared the girl would disgrace the family because she wrote poetry, so she put her in the Laundries. The only positive result is that she learned the O'Conaill family stories from fellow inmate Teresa and passed them on, for they were "a link to the first of the people, and no one could steal or beat them out of us" (69). After she escapes, she walks the streets of Dublin, where she meets Iggy, or Zoz as he is known there, and eventually gets hooked on drugs. Her story represents a new scourge, the epidemic of heroin addiction in inner-city Dublin which began in the 1980s.
Deirdre, daughter of Baby and Paddy Maclnespie, embodies the discontent of the rising middle class. Her mother is a schoolteacher and her father a professor at UC-Dublin; they live in one of the new suburban housing estates and enjoy central heating. As a child, Deirdre had a habit of hiding behind sofas and eavesdropping. There she learned that by joining the EEC, Irish women gained the rights to equal pay and to work after they married, that bombings by the UVE and IRA heralded the Troubles, which were exacerbated by the British army, and that the Gardai were no less violent with their own citizens. She discovers this first hand when, hidden again behind the sofa, she witnesses family members being slaughtered by the police for providing guns to the resistance. Not surprising, for as Iggy says, "put an Irishman on the spit and you'll find two others to turn him" (63).
Deirdre has a crush on Cormac, Iggy's son. To get Cormac's attention, she decides to become a punk rocker. Her mother, Baby, allows it because she too thinks of herself as a punk because of her pro-choice stance. Through her, Deirdre introduces one of the primary social issues facing Ireland in the latter twentieth century: the anti-abortion movement, exemplified by the "wee gold foetus feet" her schoolmates must wear on their uniforms (241). Deirdre rebels against the nuns' parochialism, the priests' demands to vote down the abortion amendment, her parents' desire for success, and the sad Irish economy: "Boring boring boring Ireland. Fifty percent of the population under twenty-five, no work, no future, priest riddled .. . . Home Rule is Rome Rule" (245). Teenage angst leads to drinking, drugs, and the self-mutilation endemic among depressed teens at the fin de siècle: Deirdre cuts herself because the pain "was like an anchor that tethered me to the world" (317).
Ironically, Deirdre is saved by her uncle Iggy. Although he appears as a ne'er-do-well to his family since he cannot hold a job, he is well known in the mean streets of Dublin where he has taken the alias Zoz or Zozimus, a legendary Irish street rhymer, because he too is known for his stories. Iggy notices Deirdre among the junkies, buys her a drink, and makes her hand over her stash - then advises her to leave Ireland: "Scoop up my sons, take a boat, take a plane, build a raft, learn to swim, grow your own wings but get on the fuck out of here to somewhere where they have shorter memories, and don't let me see you in Marlborough Street ever again" (321). With that she leaps up to call her cousin Cormac to persuade him to escape with her to London.
This is not the book's conclusion; it is followed by six quick chapters, suggesting that other characters may escape as well, thus laying the groundwork for Book III. When it emerges, we can be sure that Martin will continue her efforts to give voice to Ireland's silenced women by telling the stories of their families, their suffering, and their perseverance.
Sally Barr Ebest is Professor Emerita in the English Department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she taught for 30 years. From 1987-2009, she served as the department's Writing Program Administrator, during which she authored Changing the Way We Teach (SIUP 2005). Subsequently, she developed and co-edited two books: Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism? (Notre Dame, 2003) and Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers (2008). From 2010-2016, she directed the university's Gender Studies Program. During this period, she taught Gender Studies courses, co-chaired the state's first and second transgender conferences, and published a feminist study of Irish American women's writing entitled The Banshees (Syracuse, 2013). Sally retired in2016. She is currently at work on what will probably be her last book, on Irish American Catholic women's autobiography.
https://orcid.org/0009-0000-580Q-8214
Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction Maureen O'Connor Bucknell University Press, 2021. 180 pages. ISBN: 9781684483358
Reviewer: Margot Gayle Backus (University of Houston)
Maureen O'Connor's Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction does a lot of heavy lifting for one single-authored volume. O'Connor's sophisticated, meticulously researched assessment of Ireland's most eminent living practitioner of the art of fiction opens up new and enabling routes across an overdetermined terrain that has rendered critical engagement with O'Brien's oeuvre strangely difficult. By bridging a series of mutually reinforcing quagmires in which O'Brien criticism has been prone to bog down - grievance; the lack of an adequate critical idiom; and, difficulty moving beyond the lens of second wave feminist versions of gender and sexuality - O'Connor's study clears the way for a new generation of Edna O'Brien scholarship.
At the heart of the problems besetting O'Brien scholarship is a profound asymmetry between O'Brien's staggering artistic achievements and their astonishingly loud and bellicose dismissal by a range of often otherwise reasonable people. O'Brien's career has been at once so very long, and so extraordinarily fecund; her literature so fine, as art, and so annihilating, as social critique; and yet it has so consistently inspired one (usually male) critic after another to throw such extraordinary public fits. This disparity has created a gravitational field that repeatedly, almost invariably activates any feminist scholar's defences. Even in drafting this review, with mires and hogging-down foremost in my mind, I found myself helplessly pouring forth grievances concerning the ways in which literary criticism and academic publishing have ill-served O'Brien. Ultimately, I drafted and deleted many pages of useless prose enumerating instances of critics' and reviewers' unfair, unrigorous, unserious and unprofessional treatment of Edna O'Brien. So grievance - the compulsion to recall and call out injuries to O'Brien, the person, as a preliminary to or even in place of engaging with O'Brien's literary output - has certainly been a sticking point for me. And, based on my periodic forays into O'Brien-related research, it would appear that others have experienced similar problems. As O'Connor's study leads me to conclude, this reactivated grievance that pulls or sucks one back into outmoded debates, both causes and is sustained by a lack of adequate critical language and an adequate theory of sex/gender identity.
To her inestimable credit, Maureen O'Connor has fashioned a means to soar above these interlocking quagmires, beginning with her brisk integration of a range of gendered critical responses to O'Brien and her work in a biographical introduction that handles O'Brien's career wholistically. O'Connor balances the vitriol of O'Brien's detractors with a far less well-known account of O'Brien's many admirers and allies. O'Connor dispassionately notes O'Brien's banning in Ireland, the accusations of obscenity, and the rabid attacks from critics who, as Ann Fogarty observes, considered writing by women to be, by definition, "unworthy of consideration in the Irish public sphere" (8, 9). At the same time, however, she draws together in this concise literary biography a powerfully countervailing account of the enormous recognition that O'Brien's work has received, going all the way back to the publication of The Country Girls in 1960. From the outset, O'Brien was lauded by many well-established authors and literary professionals inside and outside of Ireland. In particular, as O'Connor makes clear in a nuanced, layered account, O'Brien has been lionized by internationally celebrated authors from Philip Roth and V.S. Naipaul to Dorothy Parker and Alice Munro, as her international reputation followed a gradual upward trajectory. Most importantly, O'Connor renders visible some unexpected commonalities connecting the writings of many of O'Brien's champions - who frequently minimize her work in well-meaning reviews which, for instance, praise her work as fresh, youthful and girlish - to rabid attacks of her most vociferous detractors. Moreover, while noting patterns of gendered condescension that variously inform many positive reviews and interviews, O'Connor makes clear that even the most vicious ad hominem attacks against O'Brien express the same essential complaint first made by O'Brien's one-time husband, Ernest Gebier: "you can write, and I'll never forgive you" (5).
O'Connor's approach resembles a feminist adaptation of Odysseus' stratagem for getting past the Sirens. She lends a deaf ear to most of the cat calls and insults, noting only their general character: recurrent patterns of objectification and minimization, punctuated by eruptions of male overreaction to the possibility of a woman writer capable of compellingly describing the Irish Catholic family from the perspective of Irish girls and women. By summarizing these critical patterns in terms of their general affective content, rather than through an array of egregious examples, O'Connor steels herself against the fruitless temptation to engage in battles of wits with unarmed opponents. Her discipline, in turn, reaps abundant critical rewards. Effectively, by resisting the temptation to directly skirmish either with O'Brien's detractors or with her advocates when they fall short, O'Connor frees herself from "the historical tendency to reduce O'Brien's fiction to uncomplicated autobiography" (26). In doing so, she shifts the focus of O'Brien criticism from the author to her work, thereby producing a critical history of O'Brien's writing and O'Brien criticism that is both new and indispensable.
In this study, Maureen O'Connor has scrupulously redefined O'Brien studies itself, in a manner that serves to neutralize the deleterious effects of the loudest, most reactionary voices, with their propensity to polarize and thereby hypostatize a public exchange. In thus reframing O'Brien's critical history, O'Connor brings to the fore a large number of insightful and valuable points that have been made over the decades concerning O'Brien's work in particular, and Irish women writers in general, and it is in this context that O'Connor's own literary assessments emerge. What we have here is nothing less than a new conversation in which the many expressions of appreciation and critical insight into O'Brien's work - and its place within broader assessments of Irish women's writing - are no longer drowned out by the voices of O'Brien's least qualified critics. Grounded in this new and far better-informed conversation, O'Connor has produced a fully worthy and capacious account of the whole of O'Brien's extraordinary oeuvre that more accurately conveys the history of O'Brien criticism, while rendering the literature itself far more critically accessible.
The second of this book's astonishing innovations - the author's simultaneously elegant and eloquent critical style - is clearly the product of O'Connor's carefully curated community of competent readers. As Kathleen Costello-Sullivan rightly notes in her back-of-the-book praise, O'Connor's study is "readable yet theoretically sophisticated". In addition to being readable yet theoretically sophisticated, O'Connor's critical prose style evinces extraordinary responsiveness to her subject. Her delicately indexical language, like her deep familiarity with the whole range of critical commentary on O'Brien's writing, can only have resulted from decades spent immersed in O'Brien studies. Grounded in a confidently reconfigured account of O'Brien criticism, O'Connor has found a critical language adequate to O'Brien's elusive prose style, which ineffably interweaves beauty and grotesquery, sheathing existential and psychoanalytic nuance in a veneer of straightforward realism. O'Connor's meticulous descriptions of the effects O'Brien achieves in individual passages, and in patterns that recur across the author's career, fuse critical insight and stylistic grace. Here, for instance, is a claim O'Connor makes almost in passing concerning O'Brien's allusions to Dracula; "Dracula, who can both command wolves and transform into one, has featured in O'Brien's writing since The Country Girls, regularly lurking in the background as a romantic figure, thrilling but evil, a shadow thrown by male characters in the foreground ready to consume and destroy unwary young girls and women" (85). Such insights capture with exquisite precision how a given image pattern, intertext, theme, or psychoanalytic dynamic recurs in ways that not only enrich our understanding of multiple passages at once, but also heighten our sensitivity to the complex meanings such passages convey. Many of O'Connor's phrases are so beautiful, apt, even epiphanic, that I found myself marking them - as I do with literary passages - with the intent to quote them in my own writing, purely to share with others the pleasure they bring me.
The study's second chapter, "The Liberating Sadomasochism of Things", offers up a super-abundance of such pleasurable passages, which build both conceptually and figuratively to new understandings of especially enigmatic aspects of O'Brien's work (35-50). For instance, in one particularly luminous topic sentence, O'Connor connects her meditations on the "web of recurring and overlapping objects and images [...] in O'Brien's early work" to a psychoanalytic insight that hauntingly recurs across the study: the daughter's characteristic loss of the one great love - the mother - and that great, primal beloved's inadequate, socially-ordained exchange in favour of a heterosexual love object. In a delightful/insightful passage, O'Connor meditates on the painstakingly assembled domestic decorations with which O'Brien's mothers frequently adorn their homes. As O'Connor notes, "these items are often enshrined in a 'good' room that is never, or very rarely, used" (41). Emphasizing the "frailty of the private bulwark they present against the harsh reality for women of Irish rural domesticity", O'Connor observes that the vibrancy of these assemblages emanates from "their promise of 'nonidentity,' that is, evading the determinant power of dominant gender and sexual identities" (41).
Throughout this chapter, O'Connor focuses on decorative domestic details as extensions of the mother, in a critical language that simultaneously explicates and elegantly elaborates on O'Brien's own meaning, as when she describes the flagrant disparity among the items that comprise one such "promiscuous assemblage", as "respect[ing] no boundaries" (65). Through her own linguistic responsiveness, O'Connor compellingly captures the domestic space as a reflection of the status of the mother-daughter bond. Her description of a pattern in O'Brien's fiction, whereby the tasteful decor that lends a touch of glamour to a series of originary family homes undergoes an abrupt "diminish[ment in its] beauty" that is the objective correlative of the daughter's loss of the mother, helps the reader to see what can only be seen through committed, thoughtful reading and reflection over an extended period of time. On the basis of her impressive familiarity with the full range of O'Brien's work, including her short stories and even her poetry, plays, and journalism, O'Connor affords us moving insights that are only visible when certain patterns are noticed across a range of texts. This careful reflection has informed O'Connor's critical language, enabling her to offer such rich observations as "objects lose their glamour, reclaim their thingness, whenever the mother-daughter bond is broken, to be replaced with the loneliness of enforced heterosexuality" (42).
It is through her linguistic responsiveness to O'Brien's art, grounded in an updated, theoretically informed bibliography, that O'Connor, in many such passages, makes her third consequential intervention: radically reconsidering not only sexual desire and sexual identity, but also gender identity across O'Brien's oeuvre. O'Connor's synthesis of psychoanalysis, gender studies, eco-criticism, anthropology, and folklore and mythology productively complicates the standard Freudian account of female individuation and its discontents. She does so by factoring in the disconcerting reality - originally noted when Simone de Beauvoir pointed out that "one is not born, but becomes a woman" - that sex/gender identity is not a static endpoint, but a process, continually negotiating among powerful biological, intrapsychic and socio-cultural forces. Most fundamentally, O'Connor places under constant pressure the heteronormative presumptions largely shared by O'Brien's most virulent detractors and most of her champions. "From [her] earliest novels", O'Connor observes, "many commentators had noted that desire is at the core of O'Brien's narratives", yet "the true irony in such observations lies in their frequently blinkered understanding of what constitutes that desire, reducing it to a heteronormative, Barbara Cartland-style pursuit of 'romance'" (23). O'Connor links the current of lesbian longing that courses through O'Brien's work to O'Brien's impressively early, explicit statement in a 1964 interview, that lesbian desire seems to be "part of every woman's experience" (22).
Though O'Connor does not explicitly link O'Brien's queer propensities to her observation that "Irish feminism has been slow to reevaluate O'Brien's cultural significance", she lets O'Brien herself describe her work's reception by feminists and academics (22). O'Brien points out that these more sophisticated readers are often inclined to tear into her for her "supine, woebegone inclinations", thereby capturing a vitriol that appears, strangely, to be shared by many of O'Brien's outraged male detractors, and many of her natural allies. Indeed, O'Brien's description of a ripping, rending reaction to her "supine, woebegone inclinations" suggests an unwittingly coordinated response to something about gender performance shared by both her most rabidly masculinist, and avowedly feminist commentators, calculated to produce what Sara Ahmed terms "queer discomfort" (2004: 22).
Yet, if O'Brien has been an overlooked casualty of hegemonic heteronormativity, the cause of this owes less to textualized lesbian eroticism than to her representation of binary gender categories as, for women, at least, alien and alienating forces imposed on that which is fluid, contingent, and in process. Unarguably, O'Brien's explicit representations of the subjective experience for her protagonists of being gendered can evoke creepy feelings in a range of readers, because these representations so mortifyingly confront us with the alienating operations of gender itself. Conversely, as O'Connor describes in her chapter, "Myth and Mutation", O'Brien has increasingly pushed back against the abjection that gendering imposes, in her "female and nonheteronormative metamorphoses [...], [which can] function at an oblique angle to the official, binarized conception of volition and (in)dependence, [...] and of the human and the nonhuman". O'Brien's "female shape-shifters" are refugees from the binary, who "seek to rejoin the peace and unity of the non-oppositional world" (89). In this study, Maureen O'Connor has brought O'Brien criticism to the cusp of a nonbinary gender critical framework through which we may access the disconcertingly, multifariously gendered worlds O'Brien has wrought from The Country Girls onward. Crucially, in doing so she has re-positioned Edna O'Brien's corpus in its rightful place in the canon of international art with the capacity to demystify and perhaps neutralize the social operations of binary gender identity - perhaps the most powerful of all the tools that, as Audre Lorde memorably cautioned, we must lay down, if we really mean to dismantle the Master's House.
I will leave the final words of this review to an elegant passage meditating on a particularly elaborate domestic assemblage in O'Brien's short story, "The Rose in the Heart". Here, as elsewhere in the study, O'Connor vividly shows rather than tells us how O'Brien's strangely figurative art creates layers of gender identity and performance, lack and compensation, desire and renunciation:
The mother's carefully archived unused and unusable mementos are the stage dressings for a lacerating yet liberating drag performance, disconnected from, indeed, alien to her own lived experience and expectation. This imagined performance of femininity at once relishes and regrets the mysterious pleasures of a denied version of womanly embodiment. (47)
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Margot Gayle Backus is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English at the University of Houston. She was 2014-15 Queens University Fulbright Scholar of Anglophone Irish Writing, and 2015 James Joyce Scholar in residence at the University of Buffalo. Her books include The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Duke University Press, 1999), Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), and, with Joseph Valente, The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (Indiana University Press, 2020).
The Oxford Handbook of W. B. Yeats Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell, eds. Oxford University Press, 2023. 752 pages. ISBN: 9780198834670
Reviewer: Julian Breandán Dean (York College/CUNY)
When I tell people that I work on Yeats, I am often met with snide smiles. The Sally Rooney reading of Yeats as a far-right reactionary with mediocre poetry whose work in the Senate was just as insidious as his drama is somehow the most common reading of Yeats these days. Recently, while planning a conference on the centenary of his Nobel Prize, a colleague asked if we would include a "talking ill of the dead" panel. People would enjoy it, he said, because Yeats was "a bit of a shit". Indeed, whenever I am discussing the poet with non-Yeatsians, the only positive thing anyone seems to say is that he managed to stop a lot of cocaine from being smuggled into Ireland. Of course, that is referring to the naval ship not the poet.
The thing about Rooney and my colleague, both of whom are brilliant people with more than just passing knowledge of Yeats and his oeuvre, is that they are correct. Yeats was, in my colleague's words, a bit of a shit. But what bothers me about these readings of him is that they tend to totalize the poet using only certain periods of his life and work. Yes, Yeats did indeed view fascism as a legitimate political alternative to democracy. But as most Yeats scholars will tell you, this flirtation did not last, and so treating Yeats as a fascist ignores most of his life and work to focus on him at a singular point in time. And again, that is fair to critique and to even bring to the forefront in conversation, but it severely limits our view of a very complex person who, like all of us, changed and grew and changed again over the course of his life. He held contradictory viewpoints at any one point in time, let alone over his entire lifespan as a writer. And it is this complex, paradoxical Y eats who still has something to offer.
The Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats presents Yeats in all of his complexity. Yes, there are indeed essays on his fascism. And there are essays on his earlier radical phase. There are essays that highlight the bigheadedness of the man and those that demonstrate his capacity to work with and for others. In short, this collection of essays edited by Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell is neither hagiography nor slam piece. It is a well-rounded view of the complexities in life and literature of Ireland's first Nobel Laureate.
The volume is divided into six parts with a brief Preface from Arrington and Campbell and a brilliant Postscript by Vona Groarke, in which Yeats is exposed to contemporary criticism and forced to face his detractors and students (and I must say the "computer programme that swoops down on and gobbles Yeats phrases from politicians' speeches" deserves to be copyrighted immediately).
Part I: "Such Friends: Predecessors and Collaborators" consists of eight essays looking at friends both intimate and social who helped form Yeats and his works. Seán Hewitt's essay, "Fairy and Folk Tales of Bedford Park", is a well-timed reassessment of Yeats's first book and the cultural milieu in which it was produced. The small group of occultists interested in folklore, a group Y eats was in dialogue with when writing Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, are certainly an understudied group. This focus on peripheral figures is complimented with essays by Nicholas Grene and Margaret Mills Harper on Lady Gregory and George Y eats, respectively. Both Grene and Harper manage to say things fresh and new about figures much more familiar to Yeats studies.
Part II: "In and Through History" comprises eleven essays exploring Yeats's place in and use of history. The very names of contributors in this section (indeed as in the whole volume) are nothing less than intimidating, with Arrington herself in this section providing yet another example of her field-shaping scholarship. While new essays by Roy Foster and Edna Longley are alone worth the price of the volume, there are also some gems from (slightly) less renowned scholars. Geraldine Higgins, for instance, provides a critical reinterpretation of Yeats's unstable histories in "September 1913" and "Easter, 1916" that forces us to grapple afresh with the dialectic between history and art in Yeats's work.
Part III: "From the Global to the Interplanetary" comprises six essays looking at reception, collaboration, and vision (and, yes, A Vision). This section follows a broader trend in Irish Studies to move away from a narrow focus on the island to a broader scope that interrogates how world (or planetary) politics inform our readings of art and history. Jahan Ramazani's chapter on "Asias" is representative of this trend and builds on the superb work he has been doing in this field since The Hybrid Muse. Coupled with this broadened scope, this section also provides three readings of Yeats's view of the world and cosmos. Katherine Ebury's "The Scientific Revolution" and Cóilín Parsons' "Planets" both provide critical insights into how Yeats understood the material world through his acceptance and rejection of modern science.
Part IV: "Genres and Media" is perhaps the most diverse section of the volume. Charles Armstrong and Tom Walker provide historicized accounts of the influence and reception of Romanticism and Aestheticism and Modernism, respectively, in and on Yeats's poetics. In the same section, Claire Nally introduces us to new ways of conceptualizing Yeats's obsession with the ghostly, while Jack Quin, Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, and Emilie Moran each provides critical accounts of Yeats's collaborations in various mediums.
Part V: "Playing Yeats" has five essays which focus on the theatre. The first three essays cover his early, middle, and late period with Susan Cannon Harris's chapter shedding light on some very understudied early plays. Patrick Lonergan's chapter provides a critical account of Yeats's performance legacy in Ireland. Lonergan challenges the notion that Yeats's plays are somehow not worthy of staging by demonstrating the vast and rich history of production outside of the Abbey. Finally, this section ends with Susan Jones's essay that treats dance both as a symbol and a performance question in Yeats's drama and poetry.
Finally, Part VI: "Reading Yeats" consists of five essays that vary from the very close readings of Stephanie Burt, Matthew Campbell, and Lucy McDiarmid to the more editorial-minded readings of Wayne K. Chapman and Warwick Gould, who focus on the late style of Yeats and the posthumous editing of Yeats, respectively. Ending with these two scholars was a brilliant move by Arrington and Campbell, as I would be hard pressed to identify two scholars more important to the field over the past thirty years. Of course, this is not quite the end. As I mentioned earlier, there is a treat at the end in the form of Groarke's Postscript.
The Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats is, like the man himself, complex and sometimes contradictory. With so many contributors from so many backgrounds, the view of Yeats is hardly unified. And that is why this is such an important volume. We get a kaleidoscopic view of Yeats that, when held in tension, gives us a near total view of the man and his works. There are, of course, issues with having so many contributors. Some essays break important new ground and were received by this Yeatsian with shock and joy, while others are a bit more introductory and review critical work and approaches more familiar to us in the field. This, of course, makes the book ideal for libraries as it contains something for the neophyte and those in the higher orders (sorry I am afforded one occult joke per review). But perhaps the greatest strength of this collection is the attention paid to collaboration in many of these essays. As has been the trend in Y eats studies over the past decade, this collection subtly expands the spotlight to include the many collaborators who shaped the life and work of W.B. Yeats. By exploring the connections and collaborations that made his art possible, these essays expand our knowledge of Yeats and the world in which he lived. Essays like Susan Harris's highlight virtually unknown collaborators while contributions from Jack Quin, Nicholas Grene, and Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux recentralize known collaborators like Althea Gyles, Lady Gregory, and Lilly and Lolly Yeats, respectively. By highlighting the connective tissue between Yeats, his friends, family, and colleagues in the art of W.B. Yeats, this volume implicitly asks us to reimagine what it means to be an artist and what it means to credit an artist. Yeats did not work alone. In his Nobel Prize speech, he accepts the prize on behalf of his "fellow-workers" in the Irish Dramatic Movement, the "many known and unknown persons". Thanks to this volume, many of those unknown persons are brought to the forefront while the person most known to a general public is complicated in new and important ways.
Julian Breandán Dean is Assistant Professor of English at York College/CUNY. His research is interested in tragedy as a form and how it is deployed in the postcolonial setting with special attention to Irish, Caribbean, and global Anglophone drama.
Flann O'Brien: Acting Out Paul Fagan and Dieter Fuchs, eds. Cork University Press, 2022. 352 pages. ISBN: 9781782055358
Reviewer: Zan Cammack (Utah Valley University)
It is perhaps unorthodox to start a book review with the final chapter of the book, but in Flann Ó 'Brien: Acting Out, the final chapter is perhaps one of the most convincing arguments for the need for a dedicated edited collection about themes of theatricality and performance in the works of Brian O'Nolan. Paul Fagan's closing chapter is a "basic working inventory of key productions and adaptations of O'Nolan's work for stage, radio and screen", and the subsequent thirty pages detail an incredible range of works and media written by the complex multiplicity of authorial voices that include Myles na gCopaleen, Flann O'Brien, and Brian O'Nolan (322); and, as Fagan makes clear, this catalogue should not be considered comprehensive or exhaustive. It offers a compelling case for O'Nolan's enduring allure in, and the inherent performativity of, his works. The inventory is only a part of the larger argument of the entire edited collection, which is that O'Nolan's works have intrinsic qualities of performance, theatricality, and staging that "have long been evidenced by productions, adaptations and creative receptions of his writing for the stage, radio and screen" and that work on these aspects of O'Nolan's writings is still largely underdeveloped (352). This chapter is something of an exclamation point at the end of a truly impressive edited collection, comprising twenty essays curated by Paul Fagan and Deitre Fuchs, that delves into the theatricality that permeates O'Nolan's multifaceted oeuvre.
The collection is structured into five "Acts", examining different facets of performance in O'Nolan's writing and personas. While the sheer volume of chapters included does not allow for a detailed discussion of each work in a review like this, the intricacies and nuances of the collection would be lost without a certain high-level overview of each section and its included chapters. The first section, "Act I: Stage Irish", focuses on the complexity of O'Nolan's authorial identities, embedded as they are in Irish theatrical history ranging from Dion Boucicault's plays - from which O'Nolan derives his pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen - to critiques of his contemporary theatre-goers in his Cruiskeen Lawn articles, from the multiple authorial voices that perform as Myles to the multiple plays - including J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World - that inform plot and performance in O'Nolan's novel The Third Policeman.
"Act II: O'Nolan's Globe" explores wider influences on O'Nolan's writing, emphasizing the interplay between his "international theatrical contexts and debts" (13). This section's chapters examine William Saroyan's correspondence with O'Nolan and their transactive exchanges regarding the Sweeny legend and translation, Luigi Pirandello's influence on O'Nolan's characterization and metanarrative, and the Brechtian strains in O'Nolan's collapsing novel narratives and breaking the fourth wall in works like At Swim-Two- Birds. Another chapter delves into the Bakhtinian carnivalesque nature of O'Nolan's often undervalued short story "The Martyr's Crown".
The third act, with its witty pun "Myles en Scène", examines O'Nolan's plays particularly. Chapters include an exploration of storytelling's transformative power through speech acts rather than elaborate scene settings in Thirst; a contextualization of Faustus Kelly within a critique of global and Irish rhetorical contexts that aligns O'Nolan's play more closely with Goethe's Faust Part One than one might think; a look at the staging and imagery that emphasizes the post-human mechanical insects in Rhapsody in Stephen's Green; and an analysis of An Sgian and The Handsome Carvers that places O 'Nolan within the Grand Guignol tradition, oscillating between the absurd and the graphically horrific. This section offers a nuanced view of O'Nolan's performative prowess, expanding beyond traditional theatrical norms.
"Act IV: Transmedial Entanglements and Interlingual Adaptations" widens the spotlight to showcase O'Nolan's adaptability across different media forms and translations. The first chapter in this section discusses O'Nolan's use of disembodying technologies like gramophones, radio, and film to express posthuman subjectivity and test the limits of corporeality within technical genres. Another chapter explores Lady Augusta Gregory's influential use of tableaux vivant and her novel The Workhouse Ward in O'Nolan's works such as An Sgian. The subsequent chapter unravels the intricacies of translating Brinsley MacNamara's play, emphasizing the complex choices O'Nolan faced with the linguistic nuances of proper names. The section concludes with a poignant exploration of O'Nolan's translation of the Capeks' play Ze života hmyzu in 1943, functioning as a politically charged critique of Irish rhetoric during the Emergency.
The final act, "Curtain Calls", sheds light on some of O'Nolan's posthumous authorial personas, revealing them as often unintentional performances that blur the lines between the man and his masks. Chapters in this section explore how posthumous reflections on O'Nolan through personal memoirs and anecdotes, critical apparatuses like the journal The Lace Curtain, or the theoretical framework of historicism have profoundly impacted our understanding of the author, his authorial personas, and his critical reception and trajectories. The constant throughline of the section is an exploration of the performative nature ingrained in O'Nolan's authorship and works.
One of the standout features of the collection that becomes apparent when taken as a whole is its delivery on the contention that "[tjhrough a series of interrelated examinations of his creative debts and collaborations, staged performances and modes of adaptation", it emerges that the "prominence of performance, imposture, social theatricality, and literally illusion in his multi-genre project remains under-scrutinized" (5, 12). An example of thematic developments of the collection in this vein are the two chapters on O'Nolan's adaptation of Capeks' The Insect Play into Rhapsody in Stephen 's Green. In Lisa Fitzgerald's "Insect Plays: Entomological Modernism, Automata and the Nonhuman in Rhapsody in Stephen 's Green" she demonstrates how the staging of insects as automata and specific stylistic choices are clearly situated as part of a broader modernist tradition: "The physical and behavioural attributes of insects suggest that they are predisposed to the mindless mechanistic traits that were to become a central part of twentieth-century aesthetics" ( 181 ). In a similar vein, Matthew Sweney's "'A Play with two titles and several authors is a rather unusual event': Rhapsody in Stephen 's Green by Myles na gCopaleen and Ze života hmyzu by the Brothers Capek" provides a stunning examination of how O'Nolan translated the play in a specific global political context. Sweney argues that O'Nolan's translation is closer in spirit to the original play than the existing English-language script, and that his adaptation is also a heavy-hitting critique of Irish neutrality under de Valera during the Irish "Emergency". Fitzgerald's chapter positions O'Nolan's play in global modernism in terms of performance, whereas Sweney discusses it in terms of global politics. Together, these chapters give us a powerful understanding of Rhapsody in Stephens Green, positioning O'Nolan as an author finely attuned to global politics, global artistic movements, and the politics of adaptation and translation.
As a whole, this collection also teases out convincing and nuanced narratives that support Fagan's claim that "a taste for the performative, even the outright theatrical, marks O'Nolan's work throughout his career", and that Acting Out "interrogates this complex nexus of disguise and disclosure, of simulation and authenticity, of persona and imago, that produces the unique hybrid identity of author, performer and literary character that is Brian O'Nolan, Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, et al." (5). For example, Maebh Long's essay, "Plagiarism and the Politics of Friendship: Brian O'Nolan, Niall Sheridan and Niall Montgomery", focuses on the correspondence between O'Nolan and his two long-time friends. Through their correspondence, it becomes clear that Myles is an intricate tangle of multiple authors; so intricate that plagiarism (acknowledged or not) becomes a tricky concept to nail down. Long's previous impressive work on The Collected Letters of Flann O'Brien makes it unsurprising that she would handle this topic so deftly. O'Nolan's correspondence provides additional connection to chapters like Joseph LaBine's "'Comedy is where you die and they don't bury you because you can still walk': William Saroyan and Brian O'Nolan's Playful Correspondence". LaBine traces these two authors' relationship through the letters, interrogating what we know of their literary give and take. Concepts of authorial agency and performance in these letters become a throughline that allows us to see larger narratives of performance emerging in his larger body of work and his interactions with other authors; the performance of the authorship and how he perceives the additional production of theatrical writing is fascinating.
Other chapters serve as similarly interconnected explorations of O'Nolan's different authorial masks and personas. From Long's chapter, we understand that Myles na gCopaleen is a combination of at least three different authors. Then, chapters from Johanna Marquardt - "Morphed into Myles: An Eccentric Performance in the Field of Cultural Production" - and from John Greaney - "The Richness of the Mask: Modernist Thought and Historicist Criticism" - demonstrate that Myles and O'Nolan and Flann O'Brien are always a moving target of performance, mask, and persona. The interview that O'Nolan has with R. M. Smyllie at a pub to become the writer for The Irish Times as Myles na gCopaleen in Marquardt's chapter is partially performance, for example. And there is constantly a shifting and moving target when it comes to how we discuss O'Nolan or how we refer to O'Nolan and his authorial attribution.
This creates an interesting point of contention in the larger work. Chapters generally use Brian O'Nolan as a somewhat standardized name for the author at the centre of this collection, and yet the collection is named after Flann O'Brien (a decision that is not specifically addressed as an oddity in the collection). This is probably because Flann O'Brien is arguably the most popular authorial voice that we associate with him because of his novels. But interestingly, we notice that this use of O'Nolan's name is not standardized even in this collection when we read the chapter by S.E. Gontarski, "Sweeny Among the Moderns: Brian Ó Nualláin, Samuel Beckett and Lace Curtain Irish Modernism", which refers throughout to the author using the Irish spelling of his name. This question of the stability of translating proper names in different contexts is similarly raised in Richard T. Murphy's chapter, "Cad é atå in ainml Maighréad Gilion by Brian O'Nolan and Mairéad Gillan by 'Brian Ó Nualláin"'. This is not to say that the inconsistencies or repeated interconnected themes are weaknesses within the collection, but rather they show the difficulties of exploring O'Nolan as an author because of the inherent performance embedded in his writing; even nomenclature is unstable when it becomes associated with the staging of an authorial voice or persona.
This collection is a much-needed examination of O'Nolan and the myriad ways he and his art are "acting out". It gives us even greater access points to modernist theatre. It gives us access points to O'Nolan as a global modernist, rather than being considered, as he often has been, an author isolated from global influence by staying in a somewhat insular Ireland. This collection demonstrates what is possible when we explore this author outside of the media standards that we are more familiar with in O'Nolan scholarship. Flann O'Brien: Acting Out emerges as a substantial and meticulously curated collection that significantly advances our understanding of O'Nolan's works within the broad scope of performance, theatre, and diverse media, offering a nuanced exploration of his multifaceted oeuvre. The collection's framework guides readers through a range of critical apparatus and thematic intersections of O'Nolan's creative endeavours. It carefully examines collaborative dynamics, intertextual influences, political critiques, and the performative dimensions embedded in O'Nolan's personas. As such, Flann O'Brien: Acting Out adds depth to O'Nolan studies and stands as a foundational resource for scholars exploring the intricate interplay between literature, performance, and modernist sensibilities in his works. This collection invites us to continue to engage with O'Nolan and his works on a larger stage.
Zan Cammack is a lecturer in the Department of English and Literature at Utah Valley University specializing in Irish studies, material culture, and digital humanities. Her book Ireland's Gramophones: Material Culture, Memory, and Trauma in Irish Modernism (Clemson UP, 2021) examines the gramophone as an object of cultural significance during the early 20th century. She continues work situated at the intersections of intermediality and word and music studies, as demonstrated by her project "Seeing Wilde Songs" which examines the intertextuality between American composer Charles T. Griffes' Four Impressions and Oscar Wilde's poetry. She is also the co-host of The Thing About Austen, a podcast about Austen and her material world.
Zan. Cammack@uvu. edu
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-19Q8-7488
Reading Gender and Space: Essays for Patricia1 Anne Fogarty and Tina O'Toole, eds. Cork University Press, 2023. 356 pages. ISBN: 9781782055648
Reviewer: Nathalie Lamprecht (Centre for Irish Studies, Prague)
There are few academics who manage the precarious balance of being teachers, researchers, and prolific writers quite as well as Patricia Coughlan has done over her impressive forty-plus-year career. It is no wonder, then, that an expansive and insightful collection such as Reading Gender and Space is dedicated to her. In close conversation with Coughlan's own comprehensive scholarship, the fifteen essays collected here discuss a wide range of topics, covering a variety of time periods. Edited by Anne Fogarty and Tina O'Toole, the collection presents a valuable contribution to the field of Irish (literary) studies, presenting new insights and opening up space for further exploration into a fascinating selection of topics. In a wide-ranging collection, the essays are brought together by a devotion to Coughlan's own brand of criticism, which combines a close engagement with the text at hand and feminist as well as psychoanalytical approaches. Indeed, in her preface to the collection, Margaret Kelleher surveys Coughlan's long and successful career, highlighting her "ability to integrate historicist and textual approaches with fresh and diverse theoretical perspectives" (xxii). The preface ends on a brief review of Coughlan's work as a teacher who inspired many to follow in her footsteps, including most of the contributors to the collection. It further notes Coughlan's contributions to conferences and her tongue-in-cheek humour, setting the tone for a collection of rigorous academic work, which yet manages to be engaging and lovingly devoted to one of the greats in our field.
In their introduction, editors Anne Fogarty and Tina O'Toole underline "the variety of [Coughlan's] interests [...] and the span of her academic curiosity" (1), noting how the collected essays, taking inspiration from Coughlan, are accordingly varied. They do, however, isolate two themes that are common to all of them, namely the eponymous gender and space. Structurally, the collection is interesting as it is split into three sections in an attempt to unify the various thematical and theoretical concerns of the essays within. Thus, these parts each have an overarching theme, namely "The Politics of Genre", "The Family Romance and Sibling Relations", and "Rethinking Femininity/Masculinity", containing between four and six chapters each. Each part is introduced by poetry which speaks to similar themes and shines a light on the overall focus of the collection on poetics and language use.
In chapter one, entitled '"Gente Blanca' in the Green Atlantic: Selfhood, Victimhood, Whiteness, and Early Modern Ireland", Patricia Palmer surveys life writings of and about two sixteenth-century missionaries and their voyages in South America, discussing the writers' strategies of blurring boundaries between reality and fantasy. Referencing Coughlan's influential essay on Anne Enright's The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch and its assertion that South America offers the perfect setting for the questioning of European systems of order, Palmer concludes her trilingual analysis on the astute observation that outside of Ireland, the Irish were themselves colonizers, willing to accept and profit from slavery.
Sarah McKibben in her essay "Transformational Transactions: Eochaidh Ó hEodhasa's Poem (1603) to James I" discusses the high political importance of Bardic poetry, referring to Coughlan's argument that texts are always embedded in their context. In a carefully detailed analysis of the poem "Mór theasda dhobair Oivid", she offers a fascinating new way of looking at that genre, which so seldom begets new research. McKibben emphasizes the poet's ability to assert his own culture and sophistication via a reference to Ovid, noting that the poem is a multi-faceted response to an important historical event, in which Ó hEodhasa manages to warn of the power of the new king while praising him and asking him for leniency.
Chapter three is Nicholas Daly's fascinating exploration of the parallels between advancing public transport, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's urban ghost stories, which takes inspiration from Coughlan's writing about the importance of space in Le Fanu, as well as her historically informed close readings. "The Ghost Comes to Town: Le Fanu and the Urban Gothic" argues against Le Fanu as the "Invisible Prince" and instead positions him as a keen observer of and - through his family - participant in the restructuring of Dublin's trainlines. Indeed, by leaving behind analyses of Le Fanu's work as being reflective of the disintegration of the Ascendency, and instead seeing it as portraying anxieties brought on by advancing public transport, Daly manages to portray Le Fanu's stories as specific to their own time and space, despite their historic settings.
In the fourth chapter, "'Very little to have been so long about' : Pastoralism and William Morris in Yeats's Poems, 1899-1905 and Related Writings", Yeats's middle period comes under scrutiny. Alex Davis argues that despite the poet's own admission of being dissatisfied with his Poems, 1899-1905, through this volume and subsequent revisions, as well as through his engagement with William Morris, Yeats fashioned his voice for the new century. Despite lacking direct reference to Coughlan's work, Davis's detailed textual analysis is akin to her own approach to otherwise neglected topics.
In her chapter "Fianaise Lom / Bare Witness: Surrealism and Life Writing in the Work of Celia de Fréine", Máirín Nic Eoin offers an in-depth exploration of de Fréine's oeuvre, specifically her use of surrealist imagery and poetry as life writing. Particular focus is placed on her collection Blood Debts!Flacha Fola, which focuses on the Hepatitis C scandal which affected numerous women in the 1990s and early 2000s. One of the longest chapters in the collection, Nic Eoin's essay gives an indication of the wealth of research still to be conducted on de Fréine's work.
Chapter six, by Catherine La Farge, is entitled "Siblings: Juliet Mitchell and Malory's Morte Darthur" and is an extensive psychoanalytical analysis of Malory's Arthurian stories and their portrayal of sibling relationships. While this essay makes no direct reference to Coughlan, it engages with her work through its use of psychoanalysis to explain the doublings and deaths of siblings in these stories. La Farge explains how Juliet Mitchell amends psychoanalysis's failure to account for lateral sibling relationships in the development of the self, arguing that unresolved sibling issues are the basis of Malory's stories, in which people struggle to relate to each other. She then concludes that the time of writing, characterized by "crises, tensions and factiousness" (126), informed Malory's depiction of fractured and deadly sibling relationships.
In chapter seven, "Fathers and Sons, Mothers and Daughters: The family romance in Katherine Cecil Thurston's The Fly on the Wheel", Clíona Ó Gallchoir connects to Coughlan's scholarship through her engagement with Freudian theories and her dedication to investigating an otherwise neglected or too easily dismissed text. She sees the novel as a feminist protest against the lack of roles for women outside of the home in Ireland at the time, in which the woman appears at first as the mere object of man's desire until she escapes her bounds by committing suicide. Overall, the essay convincingly argues that The Fly on the Wheel, for its realism, focus on an emerging Catholic middle class and feminist perspective, deserves a place in the canon of foundational works of Irish literature.
Chapter eight, borrowing its subject matter from Coughlan, focuses on Maeve Brennan's Dublin sequences and how they can be read as a critique of the nuclear family, the 1937 constitution and the loss of power women experienced after independence. In '"Now in the city there are two worlds': Maeve Brennan's Dublin Sequences", Eamonn Hughes explores the intricate connections between stories and sequences, the interplay of Brennan's life and work, and the empathy and mockery dealt to both her female and male characters. In an empathetic reading of a contradictory woman's laudable work, he shows the importance placed on both the private and the public space in the author's oeuvre, as well as her focus on female characters' interactions with these spaces.
In the ninth chapter, "The Law of the Mother and the Sibling World: Leeanne Quinn's Queer Ecologies", Moynagh Sullivan attempts to combine neuroscientific and evolutionary biological research, psychoanalysis by Juliet Mitchell, and ecocritical elements. This creates a rather dense text, that is in parts difficult to decipher. What does emerge, however, is an in-depth analysis of the poet's oeuvre and the way she, in communion with her partner, the visual arts, and the environment creates worlds of togetherness in her poetry. Eschewing inclusion in a masculinist canon, Quinn instead takes inspiration from and seeks connectivity with other women artists and poets, highlighting the importance of support and collaboration in her practice.
Elisabeth Okasha's brief, well-structured exploration of the overlap between grammatical gender and biological sex in Anglo-Saxon names, "Female Personal Names in Old English", sets the tone for the third and final part of the collection, which deals broadly with "Rethinking Femininity/Masculinity". While an interdisciplinary approach is always appreciated, in this otherwise literary minded collection, this linguistic text seems slightly misplaced. Y et, it speaks to some of the concerns brought up elsewhere, especially through its feminist re-evaluation of certain case studies and attention to language use.
In her chapter, "Writing Irish Women in South America", Laura Izarra returns to a more literary approach with an examination of the life writings of nineteenth-century Irish woman migrants in Argentina. Taking inspiration from Coughlan's argument that only through persistent intervention can masculine-focused narratives be countered, she attempts to refocus attention to the diaspora experiences of ordinary women. Looking at their letters and autobiographical novels, she discerns how they play with the traditional roles of women in both Irish and Argentinian society at the time, commenting on history, economy, war, and family life. By maintaining connections with family members in Ireland, Australia, and elsewhere, these women constructed transnational networks that might be ongoing today.
Chapter twelve, "'All I am is feeling': Samuel Beckett, Aesthetics, and the Matter of Mother", presents Seán Kennedy's discussion of the misogyny so rampant in Beckett's writing and how it should not be taken at face value, but rather as an indictment of the misogynists themselves, something Coughlan has pointed out previously. In his chapter, Kennedy shows that the economy of masculinity needs the infrastructure of women, both unseen and free of cost, in order to prosper which is why the masculine is threatened by the feminine. Kant, Kennedy reminds us, thought that feeling and need are in the way of aesthetics; Beckett, by admitting to his own vulnerability, and thus becoming a better writer, disproves this. This is a compelling argument supported by ample textual evidence.
In her chapter '"Mind Our Men': Fragile Masculinity in Post-Crash Irish Men's Writing", Anne Mulhall turns towards a by now very familiar topic, namely novels written in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger depicting masculinity in crisis. She analyses three novels by male writers and discovers that they make use of horrific violence against women and general misogyny, sometimes crossing the line between critiquing and contributing to such anti-woman discourses. This aligns with so-called mancessionary narratives, in which women and feminism were blamed for the perceived downfall of man during the economic crash. Mullhall sheds light on the fact that the mancession is itself a myth, as it is women who are disproportionately affected by economic cuts and increased care duties. This article, probably completed before the publication of Austerity and Irish Women 's Writing and Culture, 1980-2020, edited by Deirdre Flynn and Ciara L. Murphy, yet seems in close conversations with that collection's theme.
In the penultimate chapter, entitled "'a permeable membrane gives at the slightest touch': The Ecopoetics of Houses in the Poetry of Vona Groarke and Sinead Morrisey", Margaret Mills Harper argues for Groarke and Morrisey as ecopoets, showing their lyricism which is urban and focused on houses to be engaged with space, the self and the (non-human) other in a way akin to other poets of that genre. She also speaks to the freedoms afforded to these two poets by their strong predecessors Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian. From Coughlan this insightful formal analysis borrows the notion of blurred boundaries between interior and exterior space in Irish women's poetry.
Finally, chapter fifteen is a critique of post-feminist notions, using Gilles Deleuze's concept of "dividuation" to analyse Anne Enright's short story "Natalie" and Leanne O'Sullivan's poetry collection Waiting for my Clothes. Both of these authors, Claire Bracken argues in "Alienated Subjects: Post-Feminist Control and Contemporary Irish Femininity", first show the alienation and separation created by the post-feminist ideal of femininity, only to then subvert these ideas through a desire for connection with other women as postulated by feminism. In close conversation with Coughlan's work, this final chapter highlights the importance of continuing a feminist critique of Irish literature, despite certain victories won in recent years.
Overall, one might be inclined to say that this collection offers something for everyone. Spanning the genres of life writing, fiction, and poetry, as well as the fields of history, psychology, linguistics, and literature, it speaks to the value offered by Patricia Coughlan's eclectic body of work, which continues to grow. For the contributors to honour their friend, colleague, and mentor in such a way is indeed touching, especially seeing as their own contributions are no less intriguing than Coughlan's own catalogue. This it will be easy to brush up on, since an extensive list of her publications is included in the appendix to the collection.
Nathalie Lamprecht is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Irish Studies, Prague. Her research focuses on depictions of young women in recent Irish novels written by women, examining the intersections of space, gender, and emotion. She has recently co-organized two international conferences and has served as editor at the student academic journal The Protagonist. Nathalie has publications forthcoming on Rosaleen McDonagh's Unsettled and Brendan Behan's short fiction.
https://orcid.org/0000-00Q3-1865-4582
Irish Republican Counterpublic: Armed Struggle and the Construction of a Radical Nationalist Community in Northern Ireland, 1969-1998 Anne Kane and Dieter Reinscheck, eds. Routledge, 2023. 174 pages. ISBN: 9781032208411
Reviewer: Nathalie McCabe (Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma)
How did a "counterpublic" gain significant support from isolated, underrepresented populations among Northern Ireland's Catholic inhabitants, becoming a vast social movement resisting British rule, bolstering the Provisional Irish Republican Army, upholding momentum for nearly three decades between 1969 and 1998- and, in fact, beyond? Aspects of this question are answered in Irish Republican Counterpublic: Armed Struggle and the Construction of a Radical Nationalist Community in Northern Ireland, 1969 - 1998, edited by Dieter Reinisch and Anne Kane. The book, the fourth in a collection sponsored by the Hansen Collection on Peace and Nonviolence Research and dedicated to interrogating the connection of passive agents of social change with political violence, fills a gap in research surrounding communities of support behind this social movement.
Reinisch and Kane's edited volume centres upon the idea of a "counterpublic" and its expansion within and alongside the Northern Irish Republican Nationalist social movement. In the introduction, labelled chapter one and penned by the book's editors, the text contends that "a counterpublic may develop along with a social movement, as we argue is the case in Northern Ireland during the Troubles" (11). Specifically, the chapters examine how this notion assisted the social movement's "'community-building' efforts" (1) as significantly more support was built during the second half of the twentieth century from the late 1960s through the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Here, the editors utilize the definition of counterpublic put forth in Civil Sphere Theory by Jeffrey Alexander: "The subaltern, shadow community of discourse and institutions upon which a social movement by a subordinate, excluded social group is built" (cited in Kane and Reinisch 2). The introductory chapter justifies the book by explaining that examining the "'community building' efforts" through a counterpublic lens fills a gap in the research into this time and place (1).
A description of the book on the back cover identifies a specific audience, including sociology, history, and political scholars. As such, this volume acknowledges that its target readership comprises academics and scholars of the aforementioned research areas, especially given its earliest beginnings as a conference panel. In other words, the book is not for the reader looking for a general overview of "The Troubles". Fortunately, for those outside of these specialties, most chapters in the book specifically define, outline, and elaborate upon their terminology and thesis statements, making for an organized and advanced read.
The collection spans seven chapters, including an introduction and afterword, written by various authors. Each chapter probes different aspects of the issue contributing to the overall notion of how this Irish Republican counterpublic was formed and gained momentum. The chapters were initially papers presented as a session during the 2021 American Conference for Irish Studies, held in Derry, Northern Ireland. The first chapter, by the book's editors, Anne Kane and Dieter Reinisch, is titled "Social Movements and Counterpublics: The Northern Irish Republican Movement, 1969 - 1998". Kane also wrote Chapter Two, "The Northern Ireland Republican Movement and Counterpublic Construction, 1969 - 1976", exploring the early years of this movement. Chapter Three, "Irish Republican Counterpublic and Media Activism", by Stephen Goulding and Paddy Hoey, explores the effect of various forms of media on building identities integral to sustaining support. Chapter Four, "Troubled Mothers: The Mobilization of Republican Motherhood during the Northern Irish Conflict", by Miren Mohrenweiser, explores women's power within this counterpublic, within and outside of the gendered space of their homes. Dieter Reinisch penned Chapter Five, "The Republican Counterpublic in the H-Blocks, 1983 - 1989", observing how those imprisoned during this time built upon such identities. Chapter Six, "The Prisoners' Support Campaign: How Hunger Strikes Facilitated the Counterpublic", enhances Reinisch's work discussing the social movement within the prisons in a specific exploration of prisoner resistance. The conclusion summarizes and reiterates many of the collection's main ideas in its Afterword, Chapter Seven, "The Irish Republican Counterpublic: A Processual Perspective", by Lorenzo Bosi. Each chapter encompasses an impressively documented exploration of specific avenues within the broader categories mentioned above.
In Chapter Two, Anne Kane cites the diverse array of groups and people at the movement's beginning as providing a foundation for the movement: "Politicized by extreme measures of British domination and repression, the working-class Nationalist population became active in myriad volunteer organizations of resistance and opposition" ( 17). Even so, she points out that this book does not and cannot cover all of the individual situations and groups, leaving the discussion open for further exploration in the future. Still, this chapter provides a solid base for subsequent chapters.
Stephen Goulding and Paddy Hoey investigate the assorted techniques and technologies used to grow its counterpublic, which was aware of the movement's "subaltern" status in Chapter Three. The message was put out via newspapers, magazines, broadsheets, and, later, forms of street art such as murals, some of the latter of which are still visible today. Including visual art forms contributes to the article's inclusiveness and expansive assessment.
Chapter Four, by Miren Mohrenweiser, is particularly noteworthy. Even among marginalized groups, mothers are often cast aside or relegated to basic supporting roles; the same remains true in academia and the areas focused upon in this book. Initially, this chapter references the more passive role mothers held in early Republican ideology. Several works are cited, leading to the idea that "Women's sacrifice in the form of visiting prisoners and performing the ritual mourning the death of sons was seen as expected, and, therefore, uncelebrated and unglorified within the patrilineage" (75). Later, she discusses "maternal activism" in such depth that the chapter is divided into multiple categories, labelling it overall a "liminal action" that is "between the public and private spheres" (76). The book notes that part of this was done in line with gendered spaces; typically, the areas within the four walls of a home are gendered female. With men largely active on the outside for work, for activism, and, occasionally, in prison, their wives, often also in roles as mothers to many children, were left to emphasize authority in the home away from the influence and control of the British government. While the research presented in this book adds new insights into the growth in the support for the Nationalist Republican movement in Northern Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century, this chapter in particular enriches scholarship by delving into the realm of women's and gender studies, appallingly understudied areas. By doing so, the text brilliantly adds to several lines of conversation in a particularly timely fashion. It removes women, specifically mothers, from their frequently static stereotype of being impacted by, but not actually performing or contributing to, the violence and sacrifice committed by and against men in such Republican ideology and, instead, inserts them as active players, supporters, and proponents of the cause, within and outside of the four walls of their homes. Going further, the chapter discusses women developing strong support networks for other women, especially mothers, often left solo parenting with husbands and fathers working elsewhere or otherwise being involved with and/or imprisoned during this time. This chapter stands out as an especially timely discussion of women's and, specifically, mothers' invaluable contributions at a time when the rights and roles of women continue to be debated and curtailed in other Western nations. The nationalist movement of the early-twentieth century often personified Ireland as a woman, a widow, and a mother bemoaning the theft of her four green fields enticing men to die for her, if they were not already dead. Here, women, including mothers, are placed as active players constructively contributing to a movement, a counterpublic, in ways often not discussed in research or elsewhere.
Two subsequent chapters focus on the movements and situations inside prisons of Northern Ireland from this time. In Chapter 5, Dieter Reinisch, using Alexander's definitions as mentioned for other terms in this book, casts prisoners as actors, their protests and actions as performances, and prisons as stages (cited in Kane and Reinisch 19). Reinisch labels the prison theatrics an avenue of public dialogue through which the Northern Irish Republican counterpublic gained further support. He charts the prisoners' struggle to attain and maintain political prisoner status. Defining the specific logistics with such a distinction in status would help augment this already-thorough article, though most, if not all, readers in the overall book's scholarly target audience base likely have that understanding beforehand.
F. Stuart Ross's Chapter Six takes a particular angle when detailing various hunger strikes in Northern Irish prisons of this time, some of which resulted in deaths of such now-prominent figures as Bobby Sands. While the hunger strikes and tragic associated deaths are not news, this chapter references and explains the application and elimination of "special prisoner status" - that is, applying and then denying the right of detainees to be categorized as prisoners of war - to imprisoned Republican Nationalists. It makes the argument that the self-induced starvation worked the opposite way from what the British government hoped it would. Instead of reducing support for the Nationalist Republican movement, it spurred the counterpublic along, becoming a further threat to the British government.
Lorenzo Bosi's chapter concludes the book with further avenues ripe for interrogation. Bosi reiterates Sinn Fein's current support and leaves open the question of whether or not that support results from the continued presence of an Irish Republican counterpublic in the wake of the Good Friday Peace Accord.
The book's timing is exceptional. Compiling a variety of topics into different chapters in one volume enhances the book's appeal, particularly given the current political situation in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. As mentioned in the Acknowledgements section, at the time this book was finished, Sinn Fein was "the largest political party in Ireland. In Northern Ireland, it won the local parliament elections in May 2022, finishing first for the first time in the history of the statelet" (xiv). Now there is a volume of collected works contributing to the understanding of how the support for this began, leaving open room for questions about its future.
Natalie McCabe is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma, USA. Prior to this, she taught for various higher education institutions in Florida. She received her PhD in Theatre and Graduate Minor in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2018 and her MA in Theatre History, Criticism, and Dramaturgy from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC in 2013. She earned her BA in Theatre and Minor in International Arts from Pennsylvania State University Schreyer Honors College in 2007, during which time she studied abroad in Dublin, Ireland, where she interned at the Ark. Between her undergraduate and graduate education, she worked and performed for venues including Historic Philadelphia, Inc. in her home state of Pennsylvania. Her scholarship, which includes topics in Irish studies, performance studies, and women's and gender studies, has been presented at conferences including the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the American Conference for Irish Studies, and the American Literature Association and published in journals including Ecumenica: A Journal of Performance and Religion, Frontiers: A Journal of Women 's Studies, and the Wyrd Con Companion Book. Dr. McCabe currently lives in Oklahoma with her spouse and children.
Dhà Leagan Déag: Léargais Nua ar an Sean-Nós Philip Fogarty, Tiber Falzett, and Lillis Ó Laoire, eds. Ció lar-Chonnacht, 2022. 404 pages. ISBN : 9781784442378
Reviewer: Ciarán Ó Gealbháin (University College Cork)
This new work, edited by Philip Fogarty, Tiber Falzett, and Lillis Ó Laoire, comprises a highly stimulating collection of essays - fifteen in all - exploring various aspects of the Irish-language song tradition and, to a lesser extent, that of the wider Gaelic world. Being largely the proceedings of an academic conference held in the University of Galway in June 2015, at which twenty-five listed participants (and many more besides) assembled to discuss the current status, vicissitudes, and challenges faced by the native Gaelic or sean-nós style of singing in the twenty-first century, the collection understandably focuses principally on the Conamara tradition. It does, however, also feature a number of important contributions focusing on the Munster and Ulster styles, while an international dimension is introduced with contributions from Gaelic Scotland and Nova Scotia, these by Tiber Falzett, Griogair Labhruidh, and Seumas Watson. (Watson, whose contribution to our understanding of Gaelic Atlantic Canada has been immense, sadly passed away prior to publication. He is fondly remembered in the introduction, along with two other stalwarts of the tradition, Josie Sheáin Jeaic Mac Donncha, and Liam Mac Con lomaire, to whom the collection is dedicated.)
The title of the work, echoing the old proverb that "there may be two versions of every story but twelve of every song",2 is highly reflective of the papers within - a stimulating mix of personal experience and theoretical perspectives. It is also in some ways resonant of Albert Lord's memorable line that, when considering song performances in an oral context, every telling must be regarded as, in a sense, "'an' original if not 'the' original" (101), each as valuable as the next, links in complex chains of transmission. As one might expect, and again, as the title might hint, the authors here are not always to be found in agreement: one, for instance, counselling that sean-nós singers should look more to the future than to the past, another advising that they promptly return to the wellspring of ancestral heritage for redemption!3
In their introduction, two of the editors, Ó Laoire and Fogarty, play on English novelist L. P. Hartley's oft-cited maxim, "the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". As culture is fluid and ever-evolving, the future, they propose, is an equally strange place: change in all things - society, politics, religion, language - is inevitable, as it is for culture, music and song. "We are all", they suggest, "exiles after a fashion, even if we are never to leave our birthplace: we are in exile from earlier times and eras to which there can be no return" (18).4 The contributions here in a sense reflect the entire spectrum, some focusing on the past, others on the present, still more looking to the future and to what lies in store for this venerable art form as we move into the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
Certain recurring themes emerge again and again throughout the work, from the critique of revivalist efforts in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, to questions of authenticity, identity, and the "displacement" of the tradition in light of the present-day emphasis on the competition stage. Unsurprisingly in this regard, Oireachtas na Gaeilge (and particularly Oireachtas na Samhna, the annual festival of Irish-language culture, home to the most prestigious prizes in Irish-language singing, including the much coveted Corn Ui Riada) attracts special attention.
A number of contributions touch on the tremendous change that An tOireachtas has witnessed since its inception in 1897. Eamonn Costello, in an absorbing discussion, speaks of the dynamics at play when certain aspects of regional culture may be appropriated and pressed, as it were, into the service of the nation. While emphasis on the various regional singing styles is maintained in competitions staged by An tOireachtas, a somewhat contradictory view nonetheless prevails, he suggests, of traditional singing as a national art, leading him to detect a certain "cognitive dissonance" (Festinger) in the ideologies informing the establishment of An tOireachtas, which he describes as a "complex, paradoxical mix of cultural nationalism and cultural regionalism" (324).5
Costello shows how many within the Revivalist movement at the turn of the twentieth century felt that a musical style which conformed with the conventions of Western art music, but which was nonetheless informed by living Gaeltacht culture, would best serve as a national style. Recalling writings of Herder, Pearse, for instance, suggested that "those who would build up a great national art - an art capable of expressing the soul of the whole nation, peasant and non-peasant - must [...] take what the peasants have to give and develop it" (cited in Costello 331). This tension or conflict between the literary and the oral tradition, formal and aural training - the subject of much debate in the early part of the twentieth century - is also explored by Eadaoin Ní Mhuircheartaigh who shows how, ironically, the agenda was often set by those outside of the tradition, functioning as "adjudicators, critics, and administrators of the native arts", while the communities who had practiced and preserved them over many generations were seldom consulted (292).
Co-editor Lillis Ó Laoire remarks amusingly on how little of the celebrated homespun tweed of earlier times is on view at Oireachtas na Samhna in the present day, competitions taking place in an entirely modern context, some being broadcast live across the globe, and featuring participants who are entirely "entangled" (/ bhfostu) in contemporary life, fully engaged with the modern world (314). As one who has experienced these contests from multiple perspectives, as spectator, both in person and via the various media (radio, television and online), as adjudicator and, indeed, as two-time winner of Corn Ui Riada, Ó Laoire's call for debate with regard to current practices and protocols relating to the staging of these competitions is surely deserving of deep reflection and further consideration.
Given the influence of An tOireachtas over so many years, there may be a certain tendency to think of competition as being the sole or principal focus of the sean-nós singer today. Síle Denvir, however, in addressing issues of authenticity in native Irish-language singing, highlights the myriad contexts and loci in which these artists can be found performing in the present, posing a certain challenge to the more conservative view that singing of this kind is most authentic when shared in small groups, unaccompanied (35-36). Again, interrogating the rather prescriptive rules that now often govern the performance of sean-nós, most especially in the competition environment, Antaine Ó Faracháin asks, rather provocatively, how the celebrated song-makers of the past, whose compositions remain highly popular in such settings, would fare were they to compete today. He asks, for example, if the highly acclaimed Mayo-born poet Antaine Ó Raiftearai (1789-1845) would even be allowed to contest Corn Ui Riada in this day and age: in this hypothetical situation, his songs would be considered newly composed (and therefore proscribed or ineligible) and were he to accompany himself on his fiddle, which he was known to do, he would find himself instantly disqualified! Leading us away, as it were, from the competition stage, Ó Faracháin proceeds to share some highly interesting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources that illuminate the myriad other contexts in which song was practiced in former times.
Like Denvir and Ó Faracháin, Máirín Nic Eoin, again considering the performance context, explores the many different circumstances and situations that may give rise to song, this time through the prism of the modern and contemporary Irish-language prose tradition. Drawing somewhat from the writings of Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko (1991), she suggests that something of the "second life of folklore" is in evidence in the (surprisingly) many instances in which the act of singing has been woven into twentieth-century Irish-language literary works. Traditional song, she says, is one of the verbal arts which has witnessed great change in both context and function over the past 100 years, being practiced, imagined and experienced in many diverse settings that differ greatly from those from which it emerged (135).
A number of contributions give highly personal accounts of experiences from within the tradition. Virginia Stevens Blankenhorn, for instance, tells of her odyssey from California to Conamara in the pursuit of song (213-228). Though born in America with apparently no Irish connections, over her lifetime Stevens Blankenhorn has acquired a thorough mastery of the Conamara style of sean-nós singing, has issued a number of highly acclaimed commercial recordings, and authored many important works on both the Irish and Scottish Gaelic song traditions, in addition to publishing a full-length monograph on Irish accentual verse meters. Y et here she seems to grapple somewhat with her own place within the tradition, questions of identity, of belonging, ownership, and cultural appropriation coming very much to the fore.
Likewise, Seosamh Mac Donnacha shares something of his own interesting journey growing up in An Cheathrú Rua, Conamara, where other kinds of music, in addition to sean-nós, informed his musical formation. He warns against an over-prescriptive approach to the art and the present tendency to often discuss sean-nós "in terms of what is 'right' or 'acceptable' according to tradition" (102).6 He wonders whether singers today are, perhaps, too often lead by the record of the past. Being of their time, the early collections, he suggests, can sometimes be likened to old black and white photographs, devoid of "colour", yielding little or nothing that may cast light on the style of the performance as delivered (103).
The effects of print and other technologies on the tradition over time are also considered by Roisin Nic Dhonncha in her exploration of the ways in which songs and the act of singing may nurture and reinforce the unique identity of a community. She argues that in the case of the sean-nós tradition, print and the publication of texts have in a sense lead to "the displacement of songs", as they were taken from their natural interactive setting and introduced into "the strange, depersonalized world of commerce" (H9).7 Likewise, the commercial recording may offer wonderful possibilities, but these come at a cost: the performance context and the lived communal experience are once again lost to the listener (120). For Nic Dhonncha, in its locus classicus, the art of sean-nós singing is a social practice, highly dependent on an appreciative and responsive audience, and she advises a keener awareness of the desocialization of music that can occur with the loss of face-to-face engagement. The relationship between singer, song, and audience is a theme also explored in depth by Triona Ní Shíocháin in a wide-ranging contribution (51-78), where she contemplates the "time out of time" that the act of singing can create in our lives. Rather than thinking of song as merely echoing historical, social, or contemporary events, she proposes that we view this cultural form as a "liminal play space, from which innovative ideas and challenging discourse may emerge" (53).8
Odí Ní Chéilleachair discusses the unique and invaluable platform that RTE Raidió na Gaeltachta has provided (and continues to provide) for sean-nós singing, since its inception in 1972. Exploring present-day trends at the station, the paper is supported by an extensive survey of the airtime devoted to sean-nós, among other genres of song, over the period of a single month (May 2015), revealing highly interesting findings ranging from play frequency to regional distribution. Earlier audio technologies inform Pádraig Ó Cearbhaill's examination of the "long note" lan nóta rifhada), among other distinctive features of Munster singing in former times, as he analyses a number of recordings made in 1928 by German phonetician, Wilhelm Doegen (1877-1967). Originally made on wax matrices, but later converted to shellac, the chosen examples feature the singing of Tomás Ó Corcráin (b. c. 1846) of Both an Dúin, Co. Waterford and Peats Ó Ceallaigh (b. c. 1868) of Cili Rialaig, Co. Kerry. He memorably likens their employment of the extended note - a striking, irregular musical feature - to "breaking waves", the singers' voices "soaring to a peak before falling off once again" (240).9 We are in the fortunate position today of being able to access archival recordings relatively easily, and Ó Cearbhaill wisely counsels that the study of such material will aid us greatly in arriving at new and deeper understandings of the tradition.
Dhå Leagan Déag is an important collection, the first of its kind, offering a wide array of unique perspectives from within the Irish and wider Gaelic song tradition, in many instances those of well-known and highly regarded exponents of the sean-nós style. The editors, contributors, and publishers of the collection (Irish-language publishing house, Ció lar-Chonnachť) are to be congratulated for gauging the temperature and capturing such a rich snapshot of a particular moment in time. Essential reading for anyone with an interest in the native Irish-language song tradition, it more than delivers on the promises of its subtitle, sharing many new, often emic insights into this aspect of our native arts.
Works Cited
An Seabhac [Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha] (1926). Seanfhocail na Mumhan. Dublin: An Gúm.
Festinger, Leon (1962). "Cognitive Dissonance." Scientific America 207 (4): 93-107.
Honko, Lauri (1991). "The Folklore Process." Folklore Fellows Summer School Programme. Turku. 25-47.
Lord, Albert B (1960). The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ciarán Ó Gealbháin is a Lecturer and Head of Department in Roinn an Bhéaloidis / the Department of Folklore and Ethnology, University College Cork. A musician and singer, his research interests include various aspects of Irish oral tradition, including the very rich narrative and song traditions. Along with Ilona Tuomi, John Carey and Barbara Hillers, he co-edited Charms, Charmers and Charming in Ireland: From the Medieval to the Modern (UW Press, 2019) and he is editor of Béascna: Iris Bhéaloideasa agus Eitneolaíochta / Journal of Folklore and Ethnology.
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-0862-767X
Ireland and Cuba: Historias intertejidas/ Ireland & Cuba, Entangled Histories Margaret Brehony and Nuala Finnegan, eds. Ediciones Boloňa, 2019. 270 pages. ISBN: 9789592942073
Reviewer: Dúnyer J. Pérez Roque (University of Oviedo)
Summary
Cuba and Ireland share much more than the Atlantic Ocean or island similarities. Their respective pasts of resistance and anti-colonial struggle - Cuba from Spain and Ireland from the United Kingdom - forged the character of each nation's citizens and marked the history of both countries. Their location on the periphery of the areas of influence of both empires contributed to them becoming a transit or destination site for multiple nationalities, which resized their ethnic composition and enriched their cultural legacy. But the most important thing about this connection was the relationship established between the nationals of both countries, whose traces remain anonymous or mostly unknown, and formed the basis of a deep and solid bond in the past.
Exordium
Although academic, cultural, tourist, and political activities have been carried out in Cuba in recent years that intertwine both countries, Cuban bibliography and historiography have suffered, and no significant scholarly work that presents an introductory approach to historical connections between Cuba and Ireland has yet to be published. The peak between these relations is found in the presidential visits of both leaders: that of the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, to Cuba in 2017, and that of the president of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermúdez, to Ireland in 2019.
The Historical Center of Old Havana has witnessed, since the beginning of the 2000s, the work of a former researcher of the Habaguanex Tourist Company, Rafael Fernández Moya, who investigated this presence in Cuba and compiled a list of place names of origin, indicating the Irish presence in the history and geography of Cuba (Fernández Moya 2007: 193), and traced all activities linked to the Irish in the Hotel Palacio O'Farrill. From hosting ambassadors, to talks, conferences, presentations of Irish music and literature, it has become an important center for the rescue of the Irish legacy in Havana and Cuba.
Imbued with this growing interest in Celtic culture in general, and Irish in particular, I was inspired to write an article about José Marti's vision of the Irish presence in American culture and politics (Pérez Roque 2012), but these and many other efforts were insufficient to address this comprehensive and controversial issue. Hence, after so many years of research, it was strange that no book had been written about these relationships, a debt that is partly settled by the text at hand.
Scanning the book
First of all, the bilingual edition (Spanish and English) of the book is appreciated by readers of both languages, allowing them to observe and learn from its translation. This detail from the editors, rare nowadays, expands the dimension and scope of this work. The book is composed of the Introduction, seven chapters by Cuban and Irish authors (Gera Burton, Julio David Rojas Rodriguez, Margaret Brehony, Giselle González García, Rafael Fernández Moya, José Antonio Quintana García, and Félix Flores Varona) and the biographies of the contributors. The scientific rigor of the investigations is supported by documentary sources consulted in the National Archive of Cuba, parish archives, cemetery books, period newspapers, and travelers' chronicles. Also, the final bibliography demonstrates the variety, quantity, and quality of sources consulted.
According to its editors, Irlanda y Cuba: historias entretejidas / Ireland and Cuba: Entangled Histories threads together disparate stories about diaspora and movement; stories about suffering, triumph, integration, and isolation" (11). Although disparate, and covering topics apparently disconnected from each other, the contributions all demonstrate the physical, philosophical, marital, commercial, military, etc. contacts between Irish people - or their descendants - and Creoles, generally with members of the Havana aristocracy, in a historical symbiosis marked by constant exchanges and influences. On the other hand, its authors maintain that
The idea of entanglement suggests a level of interconnection that is complex and sometimes ambivalent. For this reason, we consider the concept to be most apposite for this examination of the sometimes uneasy relationships sustained between Irish communities, or noted Irish figures, and Cuban society at different stages of their islands' histories. There is no one single narrative about the Irish diaspora in Cuba nor is there any discernible coherent thread that unites the different figures that are the subject of study in the book's chapters. Rather, the scholarship here shows that certain Irish figures such as O'Kelly and Madden were inspired by their experiences and encounters with Cuba. (14).
The book begins with two chapters focused on the Irish presence in the slave trade in Cuba. In chapter one, entitled "Liberty's Call: Richard Robert Madden's voice in the anti-slavery movement", Gera Burton carries out a historical analysis of the role played by Richard Robert Madden in the construction of international alliances against slavery. The "Madden case" introduces us to the theme of the progressive Irish, defenders of the abolition of slavery, and is the result of the era in which he lived, of great changes in the legislative conceptions of human rights in early-nineteenth-century Britain. Following the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1807, Madden was one of many special magistrates sent to the "western sugar colonies" to enforce the Emancipation Act signed in 1833. Additionally, Burton extends the analysis of the influence of Madden as part of a much larger discourse of growing international opposition to slavery.
On the opposite side, chapter two, "Conquering Atlantic Space Upon Black Shoulders: The O'Farrill family and the slave trade (1716-1866)", by Julio David Rojas Rodriguez, examines the renowned Irish-Cuban-Spanish O'Farrill family and their active participation in the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Taking these contrasting stories as a starting point for this book gives an idea of the complexity of the analysis of Irish migration. Clearly functioning as imperial agents, the O'Farrills sadly built their fortune on African slaves, also revealing the complicity of Irish men and women in this disastrous commercial practice and their commitment to maintaining slavery in Cuba. Rojas Rodriguez begins this story at the beginning of the eighteenth century with the arrival of Ricardo O'Farrill O'Daly, from Montserrat and patriarch of the family, representing the interests of the South Sea Company in Cuba in the slave trade. It was established from its beginnings as one of the most powerful houses on the Island, as it also owned sugar plantations. They continued to trade slaves even after the slave trade was abolished, a practice that ceased in 1866 when members of the family were put on trial.
Chapters three to five shift focus from specific figures or family stories to offer a more concentrated examination of other facets of Irish migration. Chapter 3, entitled "Ethnic Whitening Processes and the Politics of Race, Labour, and National Identity in Colonial Cuba: A Case Study of Irish Immigrants (1818-1845)", by Margaret Brehony, takes us into the wave of Irish immigrants imported as skilled workers that occurred in the 1830s. It investigates the demographic, ethnic, and racial components of their interactions with the need for labor that Cuba had at the time. In addition to fulfilling labor requirements, Irish immigrants addressed the need to "whiten" the Cuban population and the workforce, and thus counteract the progressive increase in the number of enslaved Africans, serving as an ethnic experiment for the dominant white sectors in Cuba. Brehony also addresses the discursive strategies used by colonial elites, who only conceived of a workforce of which they could be owners (see also, Brehony 2012). She also clarifies the circumstances under which the protests and resistance of Irish railroad workers threatened the colonial social order, with the ruling classes experiencing some of the consequences that the transition from slavery to free labor would bring.
For its part, chapter four, "Dying in Havana: A Microhistory of the Irish immigrants Buried in the General Cemetery (1859-1862)", by Giselle González García, explores local spaces and microhistories in the funerary records of Havana. This essay reconstructs the fragmented history of a group of Irish who died in the Cuban capital between 1859 and 1862. The fundamental source she uses points to the ways in which Cuban bibliography and historiography have suffered, as the only available source in some cases for tracking these Irish migrants are death certificates, from which González García extracted fragments of information such as age, marital status, social class or religion, which constitute the only extant reliable data on practically unknown processes about these people in Cuba. Thus, the author states, the General Cemetery of Havana becomes a powerful instrument of memory.
Chapter five, "Women in the Irish Diaspora in Cuba: Their Role in Economic and Social Development", by Rafael Fernández Moya, focuses on gender studies and the role of Irish migrant women in Cuba. With an almost forensic evaluation of archival sources, Fernández Moya maintains that Irish women in Cuba contributed significantly to Cuban society and intervened in the formation of identity on the island during the nineteenth century. Their status as foreigners allowed them to enter certain labor markets, though they had to battle the patriarchal limitations of the time. They came to work as dentists, in sales, as domestic workers, businessmen, sex workers, and even in medicine. He also highlights how key family roles, such as mothers or grandmothers, allowed Irish women to influence the lives of prominent Cuban figures, such as Julio Antonio Melia McPartland and Antonio Guiteras Holmes.
The final two chapters analyze key figures of political and cultural resistance: James O'Kelly, Oscar Wilde, and José Marti, both Cuban and Irish. Chapter six, "James O'Kelly: War Correspondent in Cuba", by José Antonio Quintana Garcia, focuses on the book "La tierra del mambí" (a collection of chronicles, short essays, and reports), which has become one of the quintessential examples of literary journalism. Quintana Garcia examines the role of James O'Kelly (1840-1910) as a chronicler of the first war of independence against Spanish colonialism, between 1868 and 1878. He points out that foreign correspondents were key in the spread of news about the war and highlights the exceptional reportage carried out by this Irish figure, who arrived in Cuba as a reporter for the New York Herald in 1872. O'Kelly opted in his book for a combination of self-critical satire and unquestionable solidarity with the separatist cause, providing interesting perspectives and first-hand information about this historical moment on the Caribbean island.
Finally, chapter seven, "José Marti's Forgotten Portrait of Oscar Wilde", by Félix Flores Varona, concentrates its analysis on a little-researched essay in Marti's work and an often equally ignored chapter of his life: his encounter with this important Irish figure in New York in 1882. This work of his, simply titled "Oscar Wilde", is a prelude to a more extensive one, and, in Flores Varona's opinion, it is among those of greatest interest in Marti's work from a stylistic and poetic point of view since it expresses a realistic vision of the Irish author. Through a perceptive analysis of Wilde, Marti brings us closer to this important figure of European letters, and it should not be considered a "minor work" within Marti's oeuvre. Flores Varona also considers that it is a representative piece of literary journalism in Marti's universe, demonstrating his international connections.
Final words
It will be the mission of future generations of researchers to continue delving into this fascinating topic, the connection between two peoples who, although geographically distant, have similar connections and were united by their desire for independence. The similarity in their histories speaks of a common past of struggle and resistance that we must not forget in moments where the loss of historical memory and cultural hegemonies seek to impose themselves.
Works Cited
Brehony, Margaret (2012). "Irish Free Labor and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 18321844."Eire-Ireland 47 (l):70-94.
Brehony, Margaret and Nuala Finnegan (2019). Irlanda y Cuba: Historias entretejidas/Ireland & Cuba, Entangled Histories. Havana: Ediciones Boloňa.
Fernández Moya, Rafael (2008). "The Irish Presence in the History and Place Names of Cuba." Journal of Irish Migration Studies in Latin America 5 (3): 189-97. http://www.irlandeses.org/imsla0711 .htm.
Pérez Roque, Duny er (2012). "Algunas consideraciones martianas sobre la presencia irlandesa en la cultura y política estadounidense." Revista Honda 35: 59-64.
Dúnyer Pérez Roque (Havana, 1985). Degree in History (2012) and M.Sc. in History (2017) by University of Havana. Currently is a PhD candidate at University of Oviedo (Spain). He is a member of National Cuban Historian Association, Society for Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS) and Cuban section of Latin American Studies Association (LASA). He had published in cultural and academics journals, and is co-author of Museo Casa Natal Jose Marti (19252020): Historia y proyección sociocultural. He participated as an interviewed researcher, scriptwriter, and documentary assistant in the audiovisual production Cuba and Ireland: two islands in the same sea of struggle, made by the Palacio del Segundo Cabo: Center for the Interpretation of Cultural Relations Cuba-Europe, of the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana, within the framework of the city's 500th anniversary, in 2019. He received the recognition "With everyone and for the good of all", from the Casa José Marti in Zaragoza, Spain,2 December 2023.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1980-Q318
A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland Mark Coen, Katherine O'Donnell, and Maeve O'Rourke, eds. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023. 288 pages. ISBN: 9781350279063
Reviewer: Pilar Iglesias (Independent Scholar)
The reader unfamiliar with other studies about Ireland's institutional abuse may find in this volume's thirteen-page introduction: general information about the Magdalene Laundries in operation both in the Republic and Northern Ireland between 1922 and 1966, as part of a crossborder network for the control and internment of girls; the history of the asylums for women whose existence may be dated back to medieval times throughout Europe, America and Australia; a brief summary of the campaigns and advocacy processes carried out by Justice for Magdalenes (since 2013 Justice for Magdalenes Research) and references to the 2013 IDC Report, the Restorative Justice Scheme designed by Judge Quirk and the 2017 Ombusdman Report. The division of women into "virtuous" and "corrupt" is shown in the clear distinction between honourable institutions for virtuous women, and the Magdalene Laundries "regarded as places for the containment and punishment of women and girls deemed incorrigible and morally corrupt" (3), something of which Irish society was well aware. According to the IDC Report, "in the late 1800s there were more than 300 Magdalene institutions in England alone and at least 41 in Ireland", not only Catholic or Protestant-run but also run by lay Committees. After this general view, the introduction concentrates on the asylum initially located at Townsend Street, Dublin, and later moved to Donnybrook in 1837 under jurisdiction of the Religious Sisters of Charity (RSC), "the first Magdalene asylum in Ireland to change from being an institution under lay management to one located within, and controlled by, a convent" (6), a model "for what would be the archetypal Irish Magdalene laundry; owned and overseen by nuns" (6). As chapter 5 extensively documents, the building was "designed to be carceral" (6). Reference is also made to actions by Claire McGettrick, Katherine O'Donnell, Maeve O'Rourke and Mark Coen, following the publication on the Dublin Council website of a planning application seeking permission for a luxury development on an area which made part of the original Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry (DML) site. As a result, the developers agreed to support the research work, carried out by Laura McAtackney, and consented to the National Museum of Ireland buying the contents of the site, including correspondence, while the rest of the documents have been kept at the University of Galway Archives. The book is based on this material together with the transcripts of oral testimonies gathered at the 2018 Dublin Honours Magdalenes (DHM) Listening Exercise. RSC denied their collaboration, neither were the editors allowed to get access to the records consulted by the IDC Report. Chapter 1, "The Religious Sisters of Charity: Origins, Developments and Controversies", by Mark Coen, offers a brief history of the foundation of the RSC by Mary Aikenhead (1787-1858), its internal structure and hierarchical organization, and its expansion within Ireland and abroad, since its first foundation, with the establishment of the orphanage of North William Street, Dublin, in 1815. The main differential and innovative characteristic of the RSC, together with the Sisters of Mercy, founded by Catherine McCauley in 1828, was the fact that their members were not enclosed. "Visiting the poor and the sick in their homes was to be a central task of the sisters" (22), which made it difficult to gather for praying at several fixed times during the day. Nuns in both congregations took a fourth vow, "to devote themselves perpetually to the service of poor" (24), including the "rescue" of unmarried mothers, and, in contrast with other more specialized orders, both run a variety of institutions: schools, orphanages, industrial schools, hospitals and Magdalene asylums. In spite of their fourth vow, the RSC ran both public and private hospitals, nursing homes, and schools, generating important financial benefits as shown in chapter 7. Since the nineties, the congregation has been involved in various controversies, including accusations of property speculation: in 1997 "the RSC admitted that it had deliberately provided false and misleading information to people adopted through St Patrick's Guild (SPG), an adoption society it controlled" (36); two industrial schools run by the RSC were included in the 2002 Residential Institutions Redress Scheme; the congregation pledged to contribute €5 million euros to the Scheme but contributed only €2 million and refused to contribute any money for the Magdalene Restorative Justice Ex-gratia Scheme, which affected three laundries run by them.
Chapter 2, "Donnybrook Magdalene Asylum and the Priorities of a Nation. A History of Respectability", by Lindsey Earner-Byrne, contextualizes DML "in the history of modernization and nation-building, one in which Irish women paid a high price for 'threatening' the emerging social order" (47). Women would be considered "both the guardians of and biggest potential threat" (49) to the project of building a respectable society and unmarried mothers would become the main problem of the Irish nation, which would justify sending them to the Workhouses first and, then later, to the Mother and Baby Homes and the Magdalene Laundries, classifying children as "legitimate" and "illegitimate". Chapter 3, '"Cheap in the End': A History of Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry", by Mark Coen, provides deeper insight into the history of DML, its origins, and the conditions for admission, duration of stay, including institutionalization for life, involuntary detention, living conditions, and some sporadic forms of entertainment for the inmates, together with information about the organization of the religious community living in and running the convent, the operation of the laundry itself, and the relation of DML with the Archbishops of Dublin, the Gardai and general society, up to the closing of the laundry in 1992. Chapter 4, "'Magdalene': Testimony from the Donnybrook Laundry", by Katherine O'Donnell, highlights how several factors would reinforce the role of Catholic institutions as "voluntary" bodies to run educational, health, social welfare, and carceral establishments in a subsidiary system in operation since the second half of the nineteenth century, well before the constitution of the Irish Free State, strengthened by the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931). Laundries and needlework enterprises run by religious sisters were not subject to state oversight and regulation, which allowed them to profit from women's unpaid labour. The carceral and punitive character of the Magdalene Laundries was considerably reinforced during the revolutionary period and after the establishment of the Irish Free State, as evidenced in the survivors' testimonies gathered by the author for the Oral and Archival History Project in 2012 and the DHM Listening Exercise in 2018. Chapter 5, "Designing Donnybrook: Conceiving Ireland's 'Architecture of Containment'", by Chris Hamill, analyses how the architectural design of the Donnybrook convent, church, laundry and nuns and inmates' rooms, evidences the institutions' tendencies towards "imprisonment, segregation, surveillance and control" (145). Chapters 6, "'Benefactors and Friends': Charitable Bequests, Reparation and the Donnybrook Laundry", by Máiréad Enright and 7, "Accounting at the Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry", by Brid Murphy and Martin Quinn, deal with the economic and entrepreneurial character of the institution. Charity, in the form of donations and bequests was an important source of income for the RSC, together with wealth accumulated by investing in property and the laundries' benefits. According to the IDC Report no financial records of the DML have survived; however, accounting records for the period 1962 to 1990 were found at the site and constitute part of the documents donated by the new owners to the University of Galway Archives. They are analysed in Chapter 7, providing information about customers, expenses, revenues, and the fact that the women and girls who worked in the laundry were unpaid. DML was not only a viable enterprise, thanks to zero labour costs, but it also "contributed funds over the years to the order in pursuit of its charitable/religious objectives" (181). Ironically, women's slave labour financed the nuns' expenses and the congregation charitable work. Chapter 8, "'Women of Evil Life': Donnybrook Magdalene and the Criminal Justice System", by Lynsey Black, presents several cases of women prosecuted for different crimes, including infant murder, who were sent to Donnybrook and other Magdalene Laundries. In fact, "female offenders were regularly subject to religious rather than state control" (187), which caused a reduction in the numbers of women in state-run prisons while the slave labour force at the Magdalene Laundries increased. Chapters 9, "Contemporary Archaeology and Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry: Working with the Material Remnants of an Institutionalized Recent Past", by Laura McAtackney and 10, "The Material Evidence of Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry", by Brenda Malone and Barry Houlihan, show the importance of contemporary archaeology, material culture, and human rights museums and archives in the recovery and analysis of historical institutional abuse memory. The final Chapter, "Guerrilla Archive: Donnybrook and the Magdalene Names Project", by Claire McGettrick, provides information about the Magdalene Names Project (MNP), which acts as "an accountability mechanism, providing evidence, documents and resources to survivors, relatives and advocates who are denied access to the records of both Church and State" (255), concentrating mostly on cases related to Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry.
A Dublin Magdalene Laundry is not only an excellent, well-documented account of one of the biggest Magdalene Laundries in Ireland; it also constitutes an account of the Irish system of institutionalization since its origins in the nineteenth century up to the closure of the last laundry in operation in 1996, showing how Magdalene Laundries were both carceral establishments and commercial enterprises obtaining benefits thanks to the unpaid forced labour of women and girls. It analyses the social, cultural, religious, and political ideologies, as well as the class and gender biases that contributed to the construction of a deeply patriarchal society which defended a national identity based on sexual morals that placed a burden on women's lives, bodies, and sexuality. The alliance between the State and the Catholic Church is also well illustrated, as is society's complicity. The Magdalene Laundries were not places hidden in the dark. Commercial advertisements offering the laundries' services with no mention of the slave labour carried out by the "penitents", as well as those ads asking for charitable donations, which appeared in common newspapers and religious publications, made the DML, as well as the rest of the Magdalene Laundries, a common feature of Irish society for decades. The book also gives a voice to survivors, something that official enquiries have denied them. For all these reasons, it constitutes an important contribution for those researchers, survivors, and members of the general public interested in Irish history, historical abuse, institutional violence against women and children, and processes of transitional justice.
Pilar Iglesias has a PhD in English Philology from Malaga University. She is an independent researcher who acted as Language Advisor for the Spanish Embassy in Brazil from 2006 to 2008. She was awarded the First Kate O'Brien Prize by Malaga University Transatlantic Studies Institute in 2020, for a comparative study on Ireland Magdalene Laundries and the Spanish Patronage for the Protection of Women developed in 2021 into the book Políticas de represión y punición de las mujeres. Las Lavanderías de la Magdalena de Irlanda y el Patronato de Protección a la Mujer de España (Politics of Women 's Repression and Punishment. The Irish Magdalene Laundries and the Spanish Patronage for the Protection of Women).
https://orcid.org/0000-00Q2-8825-6558
Imagining Ireland's Future, 1870-1914: Home Rule, Utopia, Dystopia Pauline Collombier Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. 362 pages. ISBN: 9783031188244
Reviewer: Bree T. Hocking (Independent Scholar)
In 1893, the same year the second home rule bill for Ireland was defeated, journalist Frank F. Moore published his satirical Diary of an Irish Cabinet Minister. The novel's cover, depicting a group of fictitious future Irish cabinet members engaged in a raucous brawl of trampled bodies and broken furniture - a Catholic cleric gawking from an inset - serves as a visual shorthand for the unionist fearmongering of the era. As Pauline Collombier writes in Imagining Irelands Future, 1870-1914: Home Rule, Utopia, Dystopia, a self-governing Ireland as conceived by the anti-home rule contingent was "a lawless zone" (168), intolerant and querulous, patently unfit for the democratic experiment (173).
During a thirty-year span, beginning in the late 1880s, three attempts (1886, 1893, 1912) were made by Liberal British prime ministers to enact home rule for Ireland within the United Kingdom. The movement for home rule inspired an outpouring of speculative reaction from writers, politicians, journalists, editorial cartoonists, and others across the pro- and anti-home rule spectrum. Imagining Ireland 's Future draws on their body of work to consider the range of possible futures envisioned by both home rule's opponents and champions. The predicted outcomes, fleshed out most fully in Collombier's trenchant survey of home rule fiction, fell into three distinct types of utopias: positive, negative (dystopian), or anti-utopias, that is, where home rule represents a "transient phase [...] to be overcome so that Ireland may become fully and truly independent" (6).
The modern home rule movement emerged in 1870, when Isaac Butt, a Protestant MP who began his political life as a Tory Orangeman, founded the Home Government Association to secure limited self-rule for Ireland, long subordinate to the British Crown. Reconstituted three years later as the Home Rule League, the party would first find success in the 1874 parliamentary elections. Born of moderate, conservative inclinations to ensure the "preservation and transformation of the [1801] Union" (24) of Ireland and Great Britain, the league's aims would soon be forwarded more aggressively by Charles Stewart Parnell. As head of the home rule movement, Parnell transformed the league into the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), the dominant force in Irish politics from the 1880s until the regional and global upheavals precipitated by the 1916 Easter Rising and World War I.
If a nation, as Benedict Anderson famously asserted, is fundamentally an "imagined community", then the act of its creation ipso facto involves certain flights of fancy, even delusion. After all, true believers of all stripes are united by a shared proclivity for millenarism, demonstrating an almost congenital inability to imagine that the change or future they so desire will bring about anything other than the predicted utopia, and home rulers, as Collombier aptly demonstrates, were no exception.
Rising literacy rates coupled with the growth of the press, and specifically the illustrated press from the 1870s, created the conditions and platform to amplify the message of home rule as paradise found or at the very least reclaimed. As home ruler and Irish MP John Francis Maguire predicted in his novel The Next Generation (1871), Ireland under the federal union envisioned by Butt would be a veritable "Arcadia", where "the potato had not exhibited the slightest appearance of blight" (cited in Collombier 107). Pro-home rule political cartoons portrayed Ireland as oppressed by both the British and the northern monster of Orangeism. The obvious liberator was home rule, communicated by parliamentary buildings limned in sunbursts, veritable Reaganesque "shining cities on the hill". Intended to dispel "unionist fears" (49) and rally support for the cause, cartoons and images produced by publications such as the Weekly News, the Freeman 's Journal, and the satirical Pat cast home rule Ireland as civilized and deliberative, indicative of a future in which Catholic-Protestant sectarianism would be transcended and economic justice and prosperity reign.
Such hopes would prove wildly naïve. The first and second home rule bills introduced by Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone suffered resounding defeats at the hands of the Conservatives (the first would split his party) and precipitated widespread rioting in Belfast, the island's industrial center and a hotbed of unionist sentiment. Resistance to the third home rule bill (which passed Parliament and received royal ascent but was never implemented due to the outbreak of WWI) would prove so strong among unionists it led to the 1912 Ulster Covenant, in which hundreds of thousands of people pledged "to defeat the present conspiracy" by all means necessary, including the creation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, an armed militia, the following year (cited in Collombier 203).
In contrast, the dystopias imagined by anti-home rulers predicted societal breakdown and economic implosion. Most speculative fiction was written by home rule's opponents, and Collombier is to be applauded for shining a light on a lesser-known aspect of this faction's PR campaign. Here, the coming darkness of Irish self-rule manifests in poverty, chaos, and Catholic-directed oppression, commonly dog whistled as "Rome Rule". Tellingly, in another satire by Moore, The Viceroy Muldoon (1893), every Irish legislator is allowed a personal well-paid chaplain (no doubt to ensure papal control over policy) with the post of lord lieutenant occupied by a louche "spirit grocer in Ballynamuck" (cited in Collombier 168) whose combative and ribald traits, Collombier notes, embodied "all the cliches associated with the figure of Paddy" (168). Echoes of Donald Trump's MAGA rallying cries are evident in the bleak vision such authors conjured of home rule Ireland as a place of high taxes (for the industrious Protestant Ulster) and mob rule (168), where Protestant guns are outlawed and arson common (198).
Nevertheless, for many Irish revolutionaries, the debate over home rule was a red herring, "only a first step" (149) at best on the road to full independence, and a "simulacrum" at worse (cited in Collombier 140). As early as 1876, the more radical Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) parted ways with Butt over his inability to deliver some form of self-governance, and the IRB newspaper Irish Freedom would later attack the IPP, accusing it of being an "Imperialist Party" whose alliance with the ruling Liberal Party, particularly under the leadership of moderate nationalist John Redmond, left it vulnerable to accusations of "helping England to govern this country" (cited in Collombier 145). Along these lines, Fenian novels such as The Battle of Moy (1883) bemoaned the dangers of anglicization, depicting a European conflict between England and its rivals Germany and Austria as an opening by which to declare an Irish Republic (135).
Throughout the book, Collombier explores some interesting rabbit holes, particularly the way in which New Zealand served as a model and exemplar for home rulers' aspirations as well as its reputation as a utopian laboratory for visiting progressives (280). The modern reader may also be struck by New Zealand's remarkably resilient appeal for factions across the political spectrum as Silicon Valley "techno-libertarians" such as Peter Thiel have more recently identified the tiny island nation as the ideal utopia from which to retreat in the event of looming world apocalypse (O'Connell 2018).
Less successful are Collombier's concluding trio of chapters, which focuses on the home rule movement in relationship to British positivists, the Irish nationalist and land reformer Michael Davitt, and the English artist, designer, and socialist William Morris. Coming at the end of a body of work primarily concerned with considering literary and editorial representations of home rule Ireland, these chapters feel oddly inconsonant, littered with curious digressions and details that distract to the detriment of an overarching cohesive argument. To wit, the chapter on Morris includes Irish journalist and IPP propagandist Stephen Gwynn's characterization of Morris on a visit to Dublin as "a puzzle-headed old gentleman" reduced to rambling about obscure artistic subjects "in a corner" (cited in Collombier 317). Collombier proceeds to describe Morris as "a marginal figure for the Irish home rulers" (319). If so, why include the chapter at all? One wishes the author had heeded the trenchant writerly advice to "kill all your darlings". And then some.
Though Collombier's exhaustive survey of her material is to be commended for its ambition and obvious scope, its very thoroughness lends itself to repetition and what can at times feel like an endless succession of quoted material see-sawing between the tropes of feverish demagogic unionism and rose-tinted glasses-wearing nationalism. As a result, the flow of the narrative suffers, and the book's analysis remains undeveloped.
The fourth home rule bill, the Government of Ireland Act 1920, while not the focus of Collombier's work, remains the elephant in the room, an unfished project that divided the island in two with proposed devolved parliaments for the Protestant north and Catholic south. By then the radicals were in ascendance, and the Irish War of Independence in full swing. Southern Ireland would become the Irish Free State under the terms of the treaty that ended the conflict with only Northern Ireland ever realizing the much-imagined home rule parliament. A fundamentally sectarian institution, that parliament's foundational flaws would set the stage for the Troubles to come and continue to reverberate in the deadlock that has plagued (and repeatedly collapsed) the current power-sharing assembly in the years since the Good Friday Agreement.
Nevertheless, for better or worse, the pro- and anti-home rule visions of a self-governing Ireland continue to animate the post-Brexit landscape, as politicians on both sides of the debate consider the combined impact of the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union and shifting demographics on Northern Ireland's future constitutional position. With predictions of a reunification vote on the horizon, unionists like former Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson have once again adopted a dystopian outlook, bemoaning a potential united Ireland as a place where their interests would be "trampled on" (Robinson 2023). In contrast, the current Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has forwarded a far more inclusive picture of Ireland where British unionist identities must be accommodated and made to feel welcome (Crisp 2023). Meanwhile, the historic appointment of Irish republican Michelle O'Neill, a Catholic, as first minister of the erstwhile "Protestant state" of Northern Ireland in February 2024 suggests that in the end perhaps the anti-utopians will have the last laugh after all.
Works Cited
Crisp, James (2023). "Ireland will unite in my lifetime - and must protect its British minority, says Leo Varadkar." The Telegraph (September 8). https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/08/leo-varadkar-ireland-unite-in-my-lifetime-british-minority/.
O'Connell, Mark (2018). "Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand." The Guardian (February 15). https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand.
Robinson, Peter (2023). "A 'united Ireland'? Not in my lifetime - or yours." DUP (September 5). https://mydup.com/news/a-united-ireland-not-in-my-lifetime-or-yours.
Bree T. Hocking, PhD, is an editor and independent scholar who has published numerous articles on the intersection of spatial politics, art, and identity. Her background in journalism and academia includes stints at U.S. News & World Report, Roll Call, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and The Open University in Belfast. She is the author of The Great Reimagining: Public Art, Urban Space, and the Symbolic Landscapes of a 'New 'Northern Ireland (Berghahn Books, 2015).
1 Work on this review was made possible with the financial support of the Charles University Grant Agency, project no. 128323, entitled "The Young Woman in Recent Irish Fiction", implemented at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.
2 See An Seabhac (55), for example: "Bíonn dhá insint ar scéal (agus dhå ghabháil déag ar amhrán)".
3 "Caithfidh amhránaithe an tsean-nóis a bheith ...ag breathnú chun cinn seachas a bheith ag breathnú ar gcúl" (Mac Donnacha 111); "Measaimse gurfiú dúl siar ag triall ar thobar an ducháis faoi dhéin íocshláinte" (O Cearbhaill 248).
4 "[I]'s deoraithe muid uile ar bhealach,fiú ámháin mura mbogaimid riamh ón åit inar rugadh muid: is díbeartaigh muid ón am ata thart, agus niféidir linn filleadh air"
5 "[T]á mé ag áitiú anseo go bhfuil idé-eolaíocht an Oireachtais bunaithe ar mheascán casta, paradacsúil den náisiúnachas cultúrtha agus den réigiúnachas cultúrtha araon"
6 "Is i dtéarmaí céard atá 'ceart ' agus 'inghlactha ' de réir an traidisiúin aphléann muld an sean-nós go rimhinic"
7 "[D]éanann ció agus foilsiú théacsaí na n-amhrán diláithriú amach as an bpobal ar na hamhráin sin agus ... scaoiltear isteach i bhfearann anaithnid, díphearsanta na tráchtála iad".
8 "[Is ceart] foirm an amhráin a thuiscint mar spás imearthach tairseachúil ina dtagann nuálachtaí machnaimh agus dioscúrsaí dúshlánacha chun cinn".
9 "[I]s cosúil le tonnta iád a bheadh ag briseadh, mar go n-ardaíonn a nguthanna ina lár agus go n-íslíonn".
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1 University College Cork, Ireland