JournalTOCs

Selbyana
Number of Followers: 2

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 0361-185X - ISSN (Online) 2689-0682
Published by U of Florida

[11 journals]

Opening Materials
- Authors: Yen-Chi Wu; Phyllis Boumans
  Abstract: Review of Irish Studies (RISE) 7.1 Remapping Irish Literary and Cultural Landscapes in the Mid-Twentieth Century
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
Introduction
- Authors: Yen-Chi Wu; Phyllis Boumans
  Abstract: This themed issue of RISE seeks to remap the Irish literary and cultural landscapes in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It defines this period as from the 1930s to the 1970s — roughly coinciding with the conservative years of ‘de Valera’s Ireland’, starting from the ratification of Bunreacht na hÉireann in 1937 supervised by de Valera through Seán Lemass’ programmes of economic expansion which led to Ireland’s European Economic Community membership in 1973. It understands literary and cultural landscapes in the broadest terms: horizontally as a geographic space with borders real and imagined; vertically as a space where high and low cultures clash and commingle. This issue includes six essays by contributors based across the globe. They show us the various forms of border-crossing — geographic, linguistic, generic — that contribute to a fuller map of Irish literature and culture in the mid-twentieth century.
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
Aural Interruptions: The Politics of Sound in Teresa Deevy's Radio
Plays
- Authors: Katherine M. Huber
  Abstract: Despite becoming deaf at a young age from Ménière’s disease, Teresa Deevy uses sound in radio dramas to critique how conceptions of the past were materially constraining the possible futures for women in mid-century Ireland. While Deevy remains an understudied playwright, scholars like Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin have shown how Deevy’s stage plays challenge gender hierarchies during the Cumann na nGaedhael government and rework forms of naturalism. Few scholars offer sustained analyses of Deevy’s later plays or work on radio, though Emily Bloom’s foundational work on Irish radio modernisms and theorisation of Deevy’s unique forms of engagement with radio and radio dramas inform my examinations of four plays Deevy wrote specifically for radio. Building on current scholarship, this article examines how Deevy drew on the aurality of radio and the in medias res feel of the one-act radio play to reimagine gendered relationships to narrative, place, history and material and built environments amid shifting media and cultural landscapes in mid-century Ireland. In heeding Deevy’s contributions to radio modernism through feminist, ecofeminist and media studies lenses, my analyses demonstrate methods for reading sounds in scripts that reframe how scholars approach Deevy’s later work as they expand studies of Irish radio modernism. Reading sound elements in Dignity (1939) and Within a Marble City (1949) shows how Deevy reworks realist and naturalist forms limiting women’s agency. The auralities in Going Beyond Alma’s Glory (1951) and One Look and What It Led To (1964) meta-critically reflect on the medium of radio to point to a more modernist multiplicity for women’s self-determination. Sounds and silences in and across Deevy’s four radio dramas revise and expand understandings of mid-century Irish naturalisms, realisms and modernisms as they establish an overlooked feminist Irish radio modernism that points to multiple narrative possibilities for women’s self-determination literally hanging in the air.
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
Reimagining Subversive Masculinities in J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man and
John Broderick's The Pilgrimage
- Authors: Loic Wright
  Abstract: This article investigates two banned novels, J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955) and John Broderick's The Pilgrimage (1961), to explore how the mid-century Irish novel explored themes of masculinity in opposition to official Church and State teachings on postcolonial Irish masculinity. In its analysis, the article focuses on each novel’s use of narrative and style to articulate thematic concerns over the rigidity of the expectations of mid-twentieth-century Irish manhood. Moreover, it demonstrates how both authors construct models of masculinity that reject contemporaneous teachings on an idealised masculinity and expose the contradictions that are inherent in such teachings. The article's examination of these works showcases how both novels sought to complicate these dogmatic images of masculinity, and were ultimately banned by the Censorship Board as a result.
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
The Celtic Strobe Light: Thomas Kinsella, Trevor Joyce and the Translation
of Nationalist Residues in the Mid-Twentieth Century
- Authors: Will Fleming
  Abstract: According to John Goodby and Marcella Edwards, ‘many Irish poets in the 1960s and 1970s turned to translation from Irish in a way that suggests the difficulty of coming to terms with rapid modernization’. Although this may sound like a reasonable conclusion to make of a period of significant social, cultural and economic upheaval, Goodby and Edwards rely on a false binary in their assertion. Referred to by Joe Cleary as the ‘repression-modernization dyad’ through which ‘all sorts of things get drastically simplified’, this is the notion that a clean break was effected by the transfer of power from Éamon de Valera to Seán Lemass in the late 1950s; that traditionalism and economic nationalism were replaced wholesale by dynamism and economic progressivism. According to such an unnuanced view of mid-century Ireland, then, the ‘difficulty’ faced by those poets who turned to translation from Irish appears to be the difficulty of reconciling traditional literary categories with the onslaught of a modernising agenda which apparently reserved no space for them. This article problematises such a ‘drastically simplified’ account by arguing that poetic translations from Irish in the Lemass years and shortly thereafter played a variety of conflicting cultural roles, as opposed to merely articulating the complexities of rapid economic and social change. The crux of such a claim revolves around a paradox in mid-century Ireland: namely, the persistence of what Raymond Williams would call ‘residual’ nationalism, which jarred with the expansionist economic agenda of the Lemass government. As such, this article juxtaposes Thomas Kinsella’s Tain (1969) with Trevor Joyce’ The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976) to illustrate how some texts proved amenable to the state’s newfound ‘paradoxical conflation of the “economy” and the “nation”’, as Conor McCarthy puts it, while others sought to expose the ‘contradictions and gaps within Irishness as it is now’.
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
'A Joycean Smutmonger': Echoes of Joyce in Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Rural
Modernism
- Authors: Niall Ó Cuileagáin
  Abstract: Since its publication, critics of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Irish-language masterpiece Cré na Cille (1949; Graveyard Clay) have consistently namechecked James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), usually for the sole purpose of conveying its perceived difficulty and/or vulgarity. Indeed, Cré na Cille was first refused publication because, in Ó Cadhain’s words, it was too long and too ‘Joycean’. Ó Cadhain himself evidently saw his work as existing in dialogue with his renowned progenitor and during a late lecture revelled in retelling an overheard conversation in which he was described as nothing more than a ‘Joycean smutmonger’. This article goes beyond such surface-level comparisons to unpick how Ó Cadhain proffers a radical portrayal of rural Irish modernity to compare with Joyce’s predominantly urban equivalent. It argues that Ó Cadhain’s characters, like those found in Joyce’s oeuvre, are consistently forced to navigate the forces of tradition and modernity, which existed at the heart of rural Irish society in the mid-twentieth century. This essay will first compare how Ó Cadhain and Joyce treat the predicaments of a young woman preparing for emigration in their respective short stories ‘An Bhliain 1912’ and ‘Eveline’, before moving on to treat Ó Cadhain’s experiments in form and language in Cré na Cille. In particular, it will examine such experimentation in the context of his lasting obsession with Finnegans Wake (1939), as evidenced by his stated belief that he ‘could write a work like Finnegans Wake’. Informed by recent developments in ‘alternative modernities’, this essay attempts to offer a nascent definition of what might be signified by ‘rural modernism’ in an Irish context.
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
Women Playwrights at the Crossroads: A Comparative Study of Ireland and
Korea in the Mid-Twentieth Century
- Authors: Moonyoung Hong
  Abstract: This paper examines plays by Irish and Korean women playwrights whose work is often neglected in their national canons and in the male-dominated theatre scene of the mid-twentieth century. The cases of Ireland and Korea overlap in compelling ways with discussions of modernity that are being reconstructed from the perspectives of colonial subjugation (under Britain and Japan) and wartime experience (in the Irish Civil War of 1922-23 and Korean War of 1950-53). There is a close relationship between these women writers’ marginalised place in their respective countries’ literary and theatrical scene and the process of Irish and Korean modernisation. The paper conducts a comparative analysis of works by Teresa Deevy, Kim Ja-rim, Maura Laverty and Jeon Ok-joo, highlighting the various thematic, political and formal strategies that these playwrights adopted at a time when their nations were ‘at the crossroads’. Against the grand narratives of ‘the nation’, women playwrights focused on depicting the aesthetics of daily life, emphasising aspects that had been neglected or marginalised in the discourse of modernity/coloniality. They dismantled clichés of dutiful wives and pacifist mothers, choosing instead to create complex and authentic depictions of femininity, endowing their female characters with a potent political voice in the public sphere. By reassessing their plays from a transnational feminist perspective, the paper seeks to expand feminist discourses in both Irish and Korean theatre history.
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
'Kilmalough won't know itself': William Trevor's 'The Ballroom of Romance'
as Cold War Fiction
- Authors: Keelan Harkin
  Abstract: Despite the recent attention of historians to the influence of Cold War politics in and on Ireland, literary scholarship has been more reticent when it comes to reading mid-century Irish writing as part of a broader international field of Cold War fiction. While some work has been conducted to situate individual writers, such as Samuel Beckett and John Banville, within an international political milieu, this essay proposes that the Cold War had a much broader impact on Irish writing than has previously been considered. This essay wades into the possibilities of this proposed area of interest through a reading of the Cold War political undercurrents moving within William Trevor’s 1972 short story ‘The Ballroom of Romance’. The story of Bridie’s disappointing evening in the eponymous dancehall has largely been read as an examination of rural disillusionment within an Ireland facing economic and cultural stagnation. Yet American influence suffuses the story. On the one hand, that influence can be felt in the presence of American cultural importation, or ‘soft power’; on the other hand, that influence can be found in the allusions to the shift in Irish economic policy in the mid-twentieth century away from protectionism and towards foreign investment. The most prominent dream amongst the locals who gather at the Ballroom of Romance – the rumours of American investment in a concrete factory in Kilmalough – places Trevor’s story firmly within the politics of global capitalism at the height of the Cold War in the early 1970s. Recognising that ‘Americanisation’ is bound up with Cold War policy affords the opportunity to read the dreams of rural Ireland within the context of global politics – and the failure of these dreams suggests that the reach of Trevor’s criticism need not necessarily be limited to boundaries of county and nation.
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
Review of Yeats Revisited: The Continuing Legacy, by David Pierce
- Authors: Jessica Bundschuh
  Abstract: Review of Yeats Revisited: The Continuing Legacy, by David Pierce (Sussex: Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2022), 216pp., ISBN: 9781913087869, £75.00 (hardback)
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
Review of Advertising and Consumer Culture in Ireland, 1922-1962: Buy
Irish, by Stephanie Rains
- Authors: Brandi S. Goddard
  Abstract: Review of Advertising and Consumer Culture in Ireland, 1922-1962: Buy Irish, by Stephanie Rains (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022), 252 pp., ISBN: 978-180-207-0583, £104.00 (hardcover)
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
Review of Unaccompanied Traveller. The Writings of Kathleen M. Murphy, by
Patrick Bixby (ed.)
- Authors: Brian Haman
  Abstract: Review of Unaccompanied Traveller. The Writings of Kathleen M. Murphy, by Patrick Bixby (ed.) (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2022), 344 pp., ISBN: 9780815637332, $39.95 (softcover)
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
Review of Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War, by
Síobhra Aiken
- Authors: Fergal Lenehan
  Abstract: Review of Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War, by Síobhra Aiken (Newbridge: Irish Academic Press, 2022), 336pp., ISBN: 9781788551663, £29.95
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
Review of Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Party and the Northern
Ireland Conflict, 1975-1990, by Stephen Kelly
- Authors: Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill
  Abstract: Review of Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Party and the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1975-1990, by Stephen Kelly (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 408 pp., ISBN 9781350115378, £85 (hardback)
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020
Review of A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in
Ireland, by Mark Coen, Katherine O'Donnell and Maeve O'Rourke (eds.)
- Authors: Niamh Meaney
  Abstract: Review of A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland, by Mark Coen, Katherine O'Donnell and Maeve O'Rourke (eds.) ( London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 264 pp., ISBN 9781350279063, £58.50 (hardback)
  PubDate: Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +020

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