Border Tropes in Eugene McCabe's 'Fermanagh Trilogy'

This essay analyses Eugene McCabe’s short stories, ‘Cancer’, ‘Heritage’ and ‘Siege’ – known commonly as the ‘Fermanagh trilogy’ – focusing on them as border fictions. Written in the 1970s, the author argues that the stories share a material, cultural ‘borderliness’, a condition which is structured into McCabe’s writing about this part of Monahan-Fermanagh and the region along the border more widely. ‘Borderliness’ manifests itself as four thematic tropes that interconnect and complement each other. These tropes recur within and across the stories, expressing character and emotional states, defining dramatic conflicts, and shaping narrative structure. The origins of these literary tropes are indicated, selected examples are worked through and McCabe’s prose style is analysed. The essay situates the ‘Fermanagh trilogy’ within a lineage of cultural production from and about the border, and the interpretative frameworks that have arisen to understand the border’s socio-political significance

Introduction

RISE 6.2 offers new perspectives on the Irish border. Bringing together contributions from different disciplines and cultural fields – history, political science, film studies, constitutional law and the theatre – it seeks to provide a multifaceted and complex discussion of a phenomenon that is all too often simplified in the political discourse before and after the 2016 Brexit referendum. Following the agenda suggested by the short film-essay Hard Border (2018), directed by Juliet Riddell and performed by Stephen Rea, this themed issue of RISE approaches the Irish border by differentiating between internal and external – Irish and Northern Irish, British and continental – perspectives and by exploring historical dimensions as well as contemporary engagements with a border whose increasing (discursive and material) invisibility following the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998 has been crucial to the ongoing peace process

'It's a film' : medium specificity as textual gesture in Red road and The unloved

British cinema has long been intertwined with television. The buzzwords of the transition to digital media, 'convergence' and 'multi-platform delivery', have particular histories in the British context which can be grasped only through an understanding of the cultural, historical and institutional peculiarities of the British film and television industries. Central to this understanding must be two comparisons: first, the relative stability of television in the duopoly period (at its core, the licence-funded BBC) in contrast to the repeated boom and bust of the many different financial/industrial combinations which have comprised the film industry; and second, the cultural and historical connotations of 'film' and 'television'. All readers of this journal will be familiar – possibly over-familiar – with the notion that 'British cinema is alive and well and living on television'. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when 'the end of medium specificity' is much trumpeted, it might be useful to return to the historical imbrication of British film and television, to explore both the possibility that medium specificity may be more nationally specific than much contemporary theorisation suggests, and to consider some of the relationships between film and television manifest at a textual level in two recent films, Red Road (2006) and The Unloved (2009)

Haematological malignancy and nosocomial transmission are associated with an increased risk of death from COVID-19: results of a multi-center UK cohort.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a disruptive event for cancer patients, especially those with haematological malignancies (HM). They may experience a more severe clinical course due to impaired immune responses. This multi-center retrospective UK audit identified cancer patients who had SARS-CoV-2 infection between 1 March and 10 June 2020 and collected data pertaining to cancer history, COVID-19 presentation and outcomes. In total, 179 patients were identified with a median age of 72 (IQR 61, 81) and follow-up of 44 days (IQR 42, 45). Forty-one percent were female and the overall mortality was 37%. Twenty-nine percent had HM and of these, those treated with chemotherapy in the preceding 28 days to COVID-19 diagnosis had worse outcome compared with solid malignancy (SM): 62% versus 19% died [HR 8.33 (95% CI, 2.56-25), p p = 0.001). Patients with haematological malignancies and those who acquire nosocomial transmission are at increased risk of death. Therefore, there is an urgent need to reassess shielding advice, reinforce stringent infection control, and ensure regular patient and staff testing to prevent nosocomial transmission

"In the crack somewhere between cultures": art, cinema and migrant memory

This introduction to a critical edition of Thaddeus O'Sullivan's short but pivotal film, 'The Woman Who Married Clark Gable' (1985), based on Sean O'Faolain's short story published in 1947, details how the director responded to the material conditions of Irish migrancy in visually creative ways, and in particular how his work has striven to find formal correlates for different modes of memory

William Trevor’s Screen Fictions: "No Interest. Not Suitable for Treatment"

This essay contests the view that Trevor's work for the screen is somehow secondary to his many and notable accomplishments as a novelist and short-story writer. Instead, it suggest that his career demonstrates the pervasive inter-connections between these different forms, and that this might be linked to his successful adaptation not only to life in England but to thriving professionally across these media. The essay calls for a re-alignment from the exclusive literary-critical approach that has dominated assessments of Trevor as a writer, which can be seen as an obstacle to a fully rounded evaluation of his career. It offers instead an approach to his work for television that combines the historical consideration of his TV archive, textual analysis of televisual form and contemporary theories about 'adaptation', taking its cue from Deborah Cartmell's injunction to 'distance adaptation studies from fidelity criticism'

Irish exilic cinema in England.

Irish exilic cinema is defined by the nexus of entanglements between Ireland and England as a subset of wider Irish–British relations. A case study of a Belfast-born director Hans – later known as Brian Desmond Hurst (1895–1986) – is offered as axiomatic of the Irish exilic manifest in cinema. Using the idea of the ‘slipzone of anxiety and imperfection’ (Hamid Naficy, ‘Situating Accented Cinema’, in Transnational Cinema (London: Routledge, 2006), 111.) to characterise the London hub of the cinema business mid-century as an uneasy socio-cultural space, it explores Hurst's career arc within this phase of Britain's imperial history, including Ireland's (re)positioning. Applying a queered concept of the auteur, Hurst's exilic Irishness and sexuality are considered as ‘performed within material and semiotic circumstances’ pertaining to a specific historical juncture (Richard Dyer, ‘Believing in Fairies’, in The Culture of Queers (London: Routledge, 2002), 35). Analysis of films from Dangerous Moonlight (1941) to Dangerous Exile (1957) shows that Hurst's most telling cinematic insights come not in films set in or about Ireland but rather in narratives of outsiders/exiles in British war and colonial films that expose socio-cultural anxieties about Englishness, class and decolonisation

Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation

An examination of a century of screen representations of Ireland from a cultural studies perspective. Analyzing historical and contemporary examples from both film and television, the book offers a thematically-informed synthesis of the most influential research on Irish audio-visual culture. The opening chapters discuss the pertinent features of Irish history and analyze critical debates about Ireland's cultural development in the 20th century, favouring and exploring postcolonial representations. Part Two opens with a concise history of television in Ireland, from its radio precedents to a consideration of its global satellite future and goes on to discuss chat shows and soaps, sitcoms and documentaries and dramas of the Troubles. There are key bullet-pointed header questions and relevant statistical data