Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies articles from September 2004

Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies archives from September 2004

Richard Head's The Miss Display'd and Irish restoration society.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Ways of reading Irish literature have been significantly changed by the realization that each literary text is embedded in a material world and participates in the society that it describes. Such re-reading has concentrated on...

'Of the dark past': the brittle magic nation of Joyce's poetics.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... ... a play or a novel necessarily describes people in their relation to one another, and is, therefore, frequently concerned with the conscience in the ordinary sense of that word, but lyric poetry is the voice of what metaphysicians call...

'Tell me this, do you ever open a book at all?': portraits of the reader in Brian O'Nolan's At Swim-Two-Birds.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Reviewing At Swim-Two-Birds on its publication in 1939, Jorge Luis Borges aptly described it as an exploration of 'the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel'. (1) However, At Swim is not simply a collage of literary styles; it dramatizes the...

A minority of one: Francis Stuart's Black List, Section H and the end of the Irish Bildungsroman.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... [A]utobiography in Ireland becomes, in effect, the autobiography of Ireland. To read the autobiographies of Yeats, George Moore or Frank O'Connor is... to be constantly impressed and unnerved by the casual ease with which they...

'More than a language ... no more of a language': Merriman, Heaney, and the metamorphoses of translation.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... It is impossible, according to Jacques Derrida, to give a brief synopsis of the meaning of deconstruction, but in a manner typical of such assertions, this statement is immediately followed by exactly such a description. Writing in Memoires:...

The legacy of yeats in Contemporary Irish Poetry.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Derek Mahon and Peter Fallon opened their Penguin anthology of Contemporary Irish Poetry by declaring unequivocally that 'Among the contours of modern Irish poetry the work of Yeats is Everest. His poems and his other activities in the pursuit...

'To fly by those nets': violence and identity in Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... In 2001, the Abbey Theatre staged a season devoted to the plays of Torn Murphy, a playwright rated by Michael Billington as one of Irish theatre's proudest possessions. As Billington goes on to remark, however, Murphy is also one of Ireland's...

Race, cosmopolitanism, and modernity: Irish writing and culture in the late nineteen fifties.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... In a recent essay Joe Cleary observes that contemporary Irish culture relies heavily on representations of the mid-century decades as 'a grimly oppressive "dark age"' in order to legitimate its own sense of enlightenment and liberalism, (1) The...

Pastoral exhibits: narrating authenticities in Conor McPherson's The Weir.
September 22, 2004... With the international successes of Irish theatre since 1990 there has been a specific cycle of accomplishment that needs to be astutely interrogated, in order to account for these triumphs, from Martin McDonagh's Leenane trilogy, especially,...

IASIL Bibliography bulletin for 2003.
September 22, 2004... This is my first year as chair of the Bibliography Committee, and thanks to the good work of my predecessor, Turlough Johnston, and the members of the committee, I have taken over a project that is in good shape. This will be Jackie...

IASIL Bibliography for 2003.(Bibliography)
September 22, 2004... General Studies ABBATE BADIN, Donatella, 'Una storia di donne: nascita e sviluppo del romanzo femminile irlandese / A story of women: the birth and growth of the Irish feminist novel', in Quaderni del Premio Letterario Giuseppe Acerbi. 11a...

James Clarence Mangan, Collected Works: Prose 1832-1839 and Prose 1840-1882.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... James Clarence Mangan, Collected Works: Prose 1832-1839 and Prose 1840-1882. Edited by Jacques Chuto, Peter Van de Kamp, Augustine Martin, and Ellen Shannon-Mangan. Dublin and Portland, Oregon: Irish Academic Press, 2002. xiii + 398 pages; xiii...

Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890-1916.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890-1916. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. xii + 265 pages. GBP 35.00 (hardback). At a first glance, this book appears to be just another contribution to the large...

Eberhard Bort (editor), Commemorating Ireland: History, Politics, Culture.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Eberhard Bort (editor), Commemorating Ireland: History, Politics, Culture. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004. 293 pages. EUR 40.00. The choice of title for this volume is in line with current trends in cultural criticism, introduced to...

Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan (editors), The Theatre of Marina Carr: 'before rules was made'.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan (editors), The Theatre of Marina Carr: 'before rules was made'. Dublin: Carysfort, 2003. 255 pages. EUR 20.00 (paperback). The beautifully chosen cover photo gracing The Theatre of Marina Carr, shows Olwen...

Colm Toibin, The Master.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Colm Toibin, The Master. London: Picador, 2004. 359 pages. GBP 15.99. Ventriloquizing the past is not necessarily a profitable activity for a writer, as Henry James recognized. Tolstoy's War and Peace, with its mixture of historical...

Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: a Biography.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2001. xix + 524 pages. No price given. Over the last one-and-a-half decades, Antoinette Quinn has worked to firmly establish herself as the foremost authority on the...

Medbh McGuckian, The Book of the Angel.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Medbh McGuckian, The Book of the Angel. Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2004. 85 pages. EUR 17.50 (hardback). In the Old Irish Liber Angueli, or 'Book of the Angel' Saint Patrick discusses his ecclesiastical position in Armagh with an angel....

Angela Bourke, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the 'New Yorker'.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Angela Bourke, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the 'New Yorker'. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004. 333 pages. GBP 16.99 (hardback). Since her rediscovery less than a decade ago, there has been growing interest in Maeve Brennan. Angela Bourke's...

P. J. Mathews, Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, The Gaelic League and The Co-operative Movement.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... P. J. Mathews, Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, The Gaelic League and The Co-operative Movement. Cork: Cork University Press in Association with Field Day, 2003. viii + 208 pages. EUR 29.00; GBP 19.95. The Irish revival has for many...

Neil Jordan, Shade.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Neil Jordan, Shade. London: John Murray and Hodder Headline Ireland, 2004. x + 319 pages. EUR 23.65. Jordan's latest novel is a marvel of intertextuality, with its shades of Irish mythology, Shakespeare, Dickens, Boucicault, Yeats,...

List of books received.
September 22, 2004... Allen, Robert, No Global: The People of Ireland Versus the Multinationals. London: Pluto Press, 2004. 288 pages. GBP 14.99 (paperback). Antoine-Dunne, Jean with Paula Quigley (editors), Critical Studies. Vol. 21. The Montage Principle:...