‘Dark cognition’: W.B. Yeats,J.G. Herder and the imperfection of tradition

In this article I connect Revivalist politics in nineteenth-century Ireland to Enlightenment epistemology by exploring how the ideal of the Irish – or Celtic – folk tradition is embroiled in the problematic of theoretical modernity. I dispute Seamus Deane's ideological characterisation of the Irish tradition, emerging from his encounters with the work of Edmund Burke and Matthew Arnold, and propose an alternative characterisation using Johann Gottfried Herder's theories of the Volk and the origin of language. I show how, at a crucial point in European history, the folk tradition modelled a view of cognition and modernity, which stood apart from analytic rationalism and based itself upon a positive evaluation of the obscurity of sensation. Finally, I read this literary-aesthetic model of what Herder called ‘dark’ cognition into Yeats's early folkloric works of the 1890s, especially The Celtic Twilight; and I make the argument that this often-neglected text does not represent a degeneration of folkloric integrity into Celtic mysticism but a comedic trait of folk modernity.     

近代日本文学家的“东力学”——以芥川龙之介为中心

美国著名文学批评家爱德华·W·萨义德在《东方学》一书中提出了在西方实际上一直存在着与“先进的西方”相对的“落后的东方”,也就是所谓的“东方学”式的“二元对立”思维方式。它在西方国家以东方国家为对象大力推进殖民政策的过程中,已成为一种霸权话语。日本是一个东方国家,但是它在比西方国家落后几十年的状态下学习西方,并发展到以中国大陆为主要对象推进殖民政策。从日本近代文学家当时关于中国的言论当中也可以看出有类似于萨义德提出的“东方学”的思维方式。因篇幅的关系,本文试图通过借鉴萨义德在《东方学》里所提出的观点,重点围绕芥川龙之介这位作家,深入探讨他对中国的一些言论。     

Gaeltacht Thuaisceart an Oileáin Úir: post-territorial Irishness and Canadian multiculturalism

In 2007 a remarkable development for the Irish language outside of Ireland took place. A dedicated space for speaking and learning the language was established in Ontario, Canada, now known as Gaeltacht Thuaisceart an Oileáin Úir. While the adoption of the term ‘Gaeltacht’ may be controversial in an allochthonous context, this site is sustained by a diasporic community that endeavours to preserve an Irish cultural identity through learning and speaking the language. This paper presents the results of fieldwork conducted among Irish-language learners in Canada who have invested time and resources to establish a permanent space for the language. Data retrieved through an online survey reveal that the language serves as a vehicle for those wishing to maintain or connect with an Irish cultural identity, as well as for those outside of the diaspora who learn the language for other social, professional or educational purposes. Notably, such narratives are perfectly at ease within a modern, multicultural Canada.     

An Irish Party and the British Parliament: Conor Cruise O'Brien's Parnell and His Party

This essay reassesses the importance of Conor Cruise O'Brien's Parnell and His Party, 1880–90, originally published in 1957, with particular reference to its significance in the history of the British parliament. While establishing the book's continuing relevance, both as a study of a specific political phenomenon and as a model for analysing political movements, the essay questions aspects which do not hold up in the light of subsequent research. In particular, O'Brien's account and interpretation of Parnell's behaviour in 1890–1 in the aftermath of the O'Shea divorce case is shown to be inadequate in the light of more recent research and writing.     

The role of the Irish boundary commission in the entrenchment of the Irish border: from tactical panacea to political liability

The abortive saga of the Irish Boundary Commission has largely been dismissed as a minor footnote that warrants little elaboration in the discussion of Ireland's partition. This is unsurprising considering that its final report was hastily suppressed so as to prevent the destabilisation of the nascent regimes in Northern Ireland and the then Irish Free State. However, the concept of the Commission derives from the intensifying controversies of Irish Home Rule and partition, and the consequent difficulties in establishing how and where a boundary was eventually drawn as well as to the status of the entities it would be dividing. The Commission was legally conceived in Article 12 of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty but confusion over its wording protracted a sequence of events that ensured that it was almost three years before it actually met. Article 12 was eventually interpreted in a restrictive manner, which exposed inherent flaws that were either ignored or naively underestimated when it was originally adapted from part of the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles. Furthermore, the complexities of evidence were inadequately scrutinised by a small and under-resourced panel that operated under considerable political pressure to delimit a precise line that satisfied subjective terms of reference. Nevertheless, the revoked Commission served as a crucial catalyst in defining the Irish Free State's relationship with the British State and in entrenching the territorial framework of Northern Ireland's six counties that exists to this day.     

The Gothic and the Gaelic: Exploring the Place of Castles in Ireland’s Celtic Revival

This paper examines the conflict in early nineteenth century Ireland that emerged between the way castles were portrayed in academia on the one hand and romantic literature on the other. Focusing on a key text of the Celtic Revival, Sydney Owensons The Wild Irish Girl, the paper explores how this novel (with its strong gothic influences) established a lens through which Gaelic Ireland could be understood and how this in turn affected the representation of castles. The second part of the paper ties these themes into an analysis of the relationship between architecture, literature and identity in the occupation of Leap Castle, Co. Offaly during the changing political climate of nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland.     

Molly Bloom’s nostalgic reverie: a phenomenology of Modernist longing

ABSTRACT

I propose to reverse the prevailing understanding of the novel’s concluding episode, “Penelope,” as affirming and optimistic, and instead situate it as the wellspring of Modernist nostalgia. This darker reading of Molly Bloom’s nostalgic reverie depends, as we will see, upon Molly’s resonant psychological ties to her mythological antecedent: Homer’s Penelope. Despite Molly’s manipulative, contradictory, and at times self-deceptive consciousness, scholars still tend to read her famous final utterance as one of firm affirmation. Taking into consideration her semblance to Homer’s Penelope, Molly’s final “Yes” is likely less sanguine than previously considered. And even my own “reading” may confine her role too narrowly. Nevertheless, we should establish this countersign as a means of exploring the consequences of her nostalgic reverie.     

Estranging Ireland: The underground self of the Irish free state in Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England

Land Under England is an out of print, rarely-cited Irish science fiction novel by the author Joseph O’Neill. Written at a time of crisis in Irish society in the 1930s, the novel has been relatively ignored in studies of the literature of the period. Although critics of science fiction tend to situate the novel as a purely anti-fascist work, taking its cues from events happening in Europe, this article places the novel firmly within its postcolonial Irish context, opening up the text to alternative readings based on the writings of Irish historians, as well as Marxist, cultural materialist and postcolonial critics. The article also utilises documents such as work written by O’Neill in his capacity as a civil servant, letters to the author from the controversial author Francis Stuart, and reviews contemporary to the publication of the novel.     

Ecocriticism,Joyce, and the politics of trees in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses

This article explores the ecological and ideological context of a passage in which two nationalists lament Ireland's treeless state. Although Joyce satirises these professed tree-lovers and the cause of reforestation, the passage alludes to a lively, serious topic in fin de siècle discourse. While Catholic nationalists blamed the loss of the island's once-vast, oak-dominated forests on British colonialism, a history elided by unionists, they shared a belief in the economic benefits of reforestation. Like Joyce, both sides knew little of Ireland's post-Ice Age natural history and did not appreciate the cultural importance of forest ecosystems to ancient Celtic peoples. Today, the Republic's profit-based plantations of conifers enact the materialist ideology of c.1904 reforestation advocates while overlooking the environmental and cultural benefits of restoring the biodiversity of native deciduous forests.     

Putting the border in place: customs regulation in the making of the Irish border, 1921–1945

This paper explores the historical geography of the making of the Irish border through a focus on the practices of customs regulation through which it was constituted and on the impeded, permitted and concealed mobilities of people and objects across the customs boundary after 1923. It traces how legislative change at the level of the state – in this case the governments of the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom – was translated into the routine practices of those trying to regulate the movement of people and objects across the customs boundary, and considers the responses of those subject to, and regularly subverting, these efforts. Drawing on recent interests in the prosaic practices of the state, and in materiality and mobility more widely, our focus is both on the work of political power at the border through the practices, texts, tools and techniques of customs regulation, and on the experience and effects of customs control for those living near the newly defined line between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State.     

Avenging ‘Bridget’: Irish domestic servants and middle-class America in the short stories of Maeve Brennan

This article will examine the representation of Irish women servants in Maeve Brennan's short stories, first published in The New Yorker in the 1950s, and collected in The Rose Garden (2001). The Irish ‘Bridget’, the most publicly visible, if troubling, image of Irish womanhood in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, has received much-needed attention from historians and social scientists in the last decade, and is a central figure in discussions of Irish women and diasporic identity in the American context. Drawing on this body of work, and focusing in detail on key stories from the collection, including ‘The Bride’, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, ‘The Anachronism’, ‘The Divine Fireplace’, and ‘The Servants’ Dance', I argue that Brennan's reimagining of the Irish Bridget can be approached as a form of feminist revisionism, as Brennan's stories enter into a charged dialogue with the history of imagining the Irish woman servant as an undesirable but necessary presence in middle-class American domestic culture. Brennan's self-reflexive reworking of this paradigm is informed by her work as a satirist for The New Yorker, and proves an effective means of writing back to this problematic history, as she takes up recognisable tropes and motifs from earlier representations of Bridget in popular and literary culture, and alters them in knowing and subversive ways.