Book Review: A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet

For those familiar with Eavan Boland\u27s book, Object Lessons, her latest defense of the woman poet begins in well-traveled territory. A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet) reiterates her struggles to find an authentic voice in a poetic and political history that has largely excluded the voices of women. She again notes her sense of dislocation-Irish but not raised in Ireland-and recognizes the effect of such dislocation on her participation in the project called Irish poetry. She repeats her observation that poetry has traditionally been confined to the recondite, defined as war, death, and God, a definition excluding the domestic sphere in all its humanity and intensity. All of this is discernibly conventional when: Boland is concerned. The key difference between Object Lessons and A Journey, however, appears to be in her conclusions: where Object Lessons reconstructs her struggle to become a woman poet, A Journey with Two Maps seems to signal her arrival

Caroline Emelia Stephen

Excerpt: Caroline Emelia Stephen, born on December 8, 1834, was notable for a number of reasons. Her connections were impressive: she was the unmarried daughter of Sir James Stephen (the noted Under-Secretary for the Colonies in 1836-1847), the sister of Leslie Stephen (author of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), sister-in-law to Minny Thackeray Stephen and Anny Thackeray Ritchie (daughters of William Makepeace Thackeray), and aunt to Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Her grandfather, also Sir James Stephen, wrote the legislation that ended slavery in England. Known as a Quaker mystic, she is credited with bringing about the revival of the Society of Friends in the latter part of the nineteenth century through writings about her conversion

“Untiring Joys and Sorrows”: Yeats and the Sidhe

Excerpt: In popular culture, the idea of Irishness has long been associated with the idea of fairies and leprechauns. This association has been explored by scholars who treat the Sidhe—also known as the daoine maithe, or the “good people”—as either a sociological or a literary construct. Most often, the sociological con- struct is somewhat insidious and the literary construct tends to be romantic. Recently, Angela Bourke has explored how the folkloric understanding of the fairies may be used to explain the otherwise inexplicable—for instance, when hormonal changes that come about through puberty or menopause were explained by saying that the fairies have taken the real person and left a changeling instead. Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999) examines the case of Michael Cleary, who burned his relatively independent wife to death in the hopes of forcing the fairies to change her back to the acquiescent wife that he desired. Bourke finds the mythology of the fairy world so deeply ingrained in Irish culture that it blurs the lines between the literary construct and the sociological us

Book Review: Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle

In a book about drama and Irish spectacle, one would naturally assume that the reactions to Synge\u27s The Playboy of the Western World, Yeats\u27s and Gregory\u27s The Countess Cathleen, and O\u27Casey\u27s The Plough and the Stars would be discussed, and one might be concerned - that this is all well-worn territory. While the reactions to these plays are discussed in Modernism, Drama. and the Audience for Irish Spectacle, by Paige Reynolds, and while the treatments of the plays and the concomitant situations themselves offer little that is really surprising or new, what is surprising and new is the context of these treatments amid other much less familiar incidents of Irish spectacle. By including .chapters on Dublin Suffrage Week, the death and funeral of Terence MacSwiney, and the 1924 Tailteann Games, Reynolds expands our conception of Irish spectacle,in exciting and provocative ways

The Search for God: Virginia Woolf and Caroline Emelia Stephen

As a Modernist follower of radical individualism, Virginia Woolf is thought to be antipathetic to religious thought; Woolf’s own spirituality, however, is certainly more complicated than most critics have allowed, especially in light of the influence of her aunt, Caroline Emelia Stephen, a well-known Quaker mystic and writer who rejected the established church in favor of a less traditional version of Christianity. The intellectual relationship between niece and aunt has been little discussed; aside from Jane Marcus’s “The Niece of a Nun: Caroline Stephen and the Cloistered Imagination” and Alison Lewis’s “A Quaker Influence on Modern English Literature: Caroline Stephen and her Niece, Virginia Woolf,” few critics seem to have considered the implications of Stephen’s influence on Woolf’s works and ideas

The Search for Irishness (Chapter One of Buffoonery in Irish Drama: Staging Twentieth-Century Post-Colonial Stereotypes)

Excerpt: A striking feature in Irish culture since at least the late 19th century is an impulse to define what constitutes Irish, seemingly to establish the qualifications of those who claim to be Irish. It is an impulse that manifests itself in literature as diverse as George Bernard Shaw\u27s play, john Buff\u27s Other Island, James Joyce\u27s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Seamus Heaney\u27s Station Island. The same impulse is at work in the public lives of figures like Oscar Wilde, who while exiled created a fascinating persona for himself; Patrick O\u27Brian, who refashioned himself as an Irishman despite no Irish background at all; or Martin McDonagh, who has only summered in Ireland but who represents himself as an Irish playwright writing about Ireland. One\u27s proximity to Ireland, whether through heritage or other association, is used both to embrace identity and to gain distance from it

Irish Renaissance (Chapter Seven of Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature)

Excerpt: Critics have several names for the movement that took place in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century. Each name seems to suggest a different interpretation of the events at that time, and each interpretation, in turn, reflects a different idea of Ireland’s relationship with the rest of the world. The Irish Revival, a term most often used to discuss the literary movement, implies that the greatness of a people can be resuscitated after it has been nearly lost, and is thus a term in keeping with a nationalist agenda. The Celtic Twilight, a term coined by W. B. Yeats, is a more sentimental and mystical rendering that suggests the illumination and reinterpretation of a previously underappreciated culture, and is a term in keeping with the transition from a romanticized concept of tradition to a modernist consciousness. The Irish Renaissance seems to be the term currently used most often, a term that appears to acknowledge the colonial (and postcolonial) implications of Irish history. Implying rebirth and renewal, a new beginning rather than a resuscitation, the term “renaissance” carries plenty of political resonance especially when deployed to refer to a movement that coincides with the various cultural elements of nationalism beyond literature. In fact, the use of “renaissance” seems to conflate the events that move from nationalism, through modernity, to postcolonialism. There is, then, a certain tension in the ways these terms are deployed, particularly when we examine the terms against each other and against the way “renaissance” is used traditionally

Stephen King

Stephen King, popularly known as “The King of Horror,” is one of the more prolific and successful writers of the twentieth century. Despite a reputation for writing only horror and gore, however, King has written works that do not qualify as either horror or supernatural but rather are thoughtful, intricate slices of human experience that often cause us to reflect on our own childhoods, not always with fond nostalgia. He encourages his readers to get in touch with their own memories of what being a child really means, and innocence has little to do with King\u27s version of childhood. Believing that most adults have lost touch with their imaginations and a sense of the mythic, King constantly challenges his readers to expand their concepts of memory and experience

Observe the Sons of Ulster Talking Themselves To Death (Chapter in The Theatre of Frank McGuinness: Stages of Mutability)

Excerpt: Within Irish drama of the late 20\u27h century, the use of language as a marker for lrishness begins to shift away from a focus on accents and Hiberno-English, towards a use of language that attempts to actually establish new truths: truths about relationships and alliances, truths about history, truths about memory, and especially truths about identity. Language becomes the very means of change and hope, in drama that has become concerned with the use of language not as signifier of nation but as reiteration of the stories that might be able to change through that reiteration. What is \u27true\u27 is no longer shaped by someone else\u27s language, but by the incantatory retelling and recasting of stories in versions particularized by individuals. The words themselves become a means for an imposition of identity. Language is not only the tool, but also the subject for discussion and performance. Whereas some others, including Tom Murphy, Christina Reid, and Enda Walsh, have concluded that language does indeed change at least the perception of truth, Frank McGuinness, in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), concludes that language cannot always succeed in its efforts to create a new reality. A play in which eight men try to come to terms with the events leading up to the Battle of the Somme in France during WWI, The Sons of Uifter shows us that language may be able to change personal identity, but it can never change history, desirable though that may be

Living by the Code: Authority in Gerard Stembridge\u27s The Gay Detective

Irish drama has few representations of police officers as anything but a trope for authority, tending to avoid any substantive character development. Likewise, it has few representations of homosexual characters, and when such representations do exist they are often caricatures. Reductive portrayals of police often arise from the complex relationship the Irish have with authority and with the legal system. But one of the few exceptions to this trend, and the only play to tackle the representation of a police officer and a homosexual at once, is Gerard Stembridge’s play The Gay Detective (1996). The play offers up the character of Pat, a ‘gay detective’, a fascinating dramatic portrayal of the collision of two identities which, on the surface, contest each other. Alternately comic and tragic, poignant and gruesome, with an ambiguous ending, Stembridge’s work defies attempts at easy categorization. He explores the comic possibilities in the tension between the codified identifiers of Irish police officers and of gay men, two codes which don’t often ‘speak’ to each other, but he also demonstrates the tragedy in the misunderstanding between these two cultures. The collision provides a fascinating study of codified behaviour and the way different codes of identity recognition can clash in one individual. This paper will explore the implications of Pat’s seemingly incompatible persona, implications that force a consideration of his adoption of these codes in terms of Judith Butler’s concept of ‘masquerade’ allowing for a kind of interpellation