Translocational Irish identities in Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl (2012)

A rural-urban exodus subsequently followed by overseas migration has characterised geographical movement in Ireland. While Irish women have outnumbered men in their diaspora, physical and symbolic identification with Ireland has been decisive to the polemic of Irish female migration. This article explores how real and symbolic contradictions in Irish women experiencing displacement are reflected in Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl (2012). Using translocational positionality as an intersectional research framework, the article reveals the importance of spatiality in the ‘life writings’ of a particular situational subject and its major role in identity construction processes. Furthermore, this article relates the individual biography to the collective and complex construction of identity of Irish women abroad in the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis sheds light on many unvoiced experiences shared by female migrants and discloses key aspects of Irish migration that result in a problematic gendered relation with the land still unresolved.     

Western plague literature,the Irish Famine and Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond

This article places Castle Richmond, Anthony Trollope’s controversial Irish Famine novel, within the context of Western plague narratives as outlined by recent plague narrative scholars and by René Girard in his seminal 1974 essay “The Plague in Literature and Myth”. By demonstrating Castle Richmond’s conformity to a very particular cluster of attributes found in Western plague literature, this article helps expand our reading of Trollope’s novel, a work that is otherwise often seen as an incoherent failure. This article proposes that Trollope used Western plague discourse to structure and organise his response to Ireland’s Great Hunger. I contend here that we see in his novel’s construction the scaffolding of Judaic, Greco-Roman, Medieval and Renaissance plague narrative traditions, traditions that follow a predictable pattern of transgression, punishment, near social collapse, atonement achieved by expelling or sacrificing a scapegoat or scapegoats, followed by the restoration of an improved social order. This line of reasoning encapsulates Castle Richmond’s overt logical structure. Yet, this article goes on to argue that there are numerous ways in which Trollope undermines the logical “inevitability” and the “divine ordination” of the Famine which his use of Western plague discourse implies.     

The famished soul: resonance and relevance of the Irish famine to Irish men’s accounts of hunger following immigration to England during the 1950s and 1960s

This paper uses a hermeneutically informed analysis to reveal how Irish men’s accounts of acute hunger on arrival in England during the 1950s and 1960s resonate with archival oral accounts of the Great Hunger in Ireland during the 1840s. The paper makes the case for a new continuum of memory which foregrounds the corporeal and spiritual dimensions of acute food deprivation and its significance over space, place and time. I argue that a corporeal-spiritual medium of memory represents a two-sided reality, a pivotal yet nebulous point of contact which exemplifies our understanding of how discourses of hunger recounted over the course of a century help shape reconstructions of Irish sociocultural identity. The symbolic potency of hunger and particular foods to expose a distinct moral and social order during both time periods is examined. I also show how this more burnished and fluid medium of corporeal and spiritual memory highlights the importance of intracultural diglossia in respect of Irish sociocultural identity and with it, the interface between individual, collective and folk memory.     

Joyce Family Values: Treason,Nationality and the Case of ‘Lord Haw-Haw’s’ Irish Cousin

The conviction and execution of William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) for treason to the British crown remains controversial to the present day. He was not, however, the only wartime traitor in the Joyce family. His first cousin, the Irish-born Sergeant Michael Joyce, RAF, also volunteered his services to the Nazis while a prisoner of war in Germany, and arguably compromised himself even more seriously than his more notorious relative. In contrast to the avidity with which William Joyce was pursued, however, Michael Joyce’s crimes — which came to light as the trial of ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ opened at the Old Bailey — were efficiently concealed by prosecutors. The difference in the treatment of the cases of the two Joyce cousins not only sheds new light on the determination of the British authorities to secure a conviction against ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ at all costs, but also reveals the ambiguity and instability of ‘Britishness’ at a moment when, paradoxically, patriotism and national self-confidence were at their twentieth-century zenith.     

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.     

‘Comfort’ and Conviction: A Response to Bernard Porter

Bernard Porter's efforts to answer the critics of his book The Absent-Minded Imperialists (there were many favourable responses too) contain much that is helpful and conciliatory, but some remain, in my view, largely unconvincing. The debate is immensely complex and I could have operated on a much broader front, but, in the interests of brevity, I concentrate (as well as agreeing with some aspects of Porter's arguments) on schools, the theatre, the church, popular literature, class and ethnicity. Prospects for further research are also mentioned.     

Making difference: conflict over Irish identity in the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade

The controversy surrounding the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade suggests that Irish ethnicity in the United States is still an important site of identity formation and fragmentation. In this paper I examine the New York City parades between 1990 and 2001 where a conflict has developed between the organizers of the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, who want a place in the parade but have been denied entrance. The identity politics that surround the St. Patrick’s Day parade controversy suggest that for diasporic communities, ethnic and national identities are highly contested and that boundaries—some hard and fast, others more permeable—are constructed along any number of axes. For the construction of Irish identity in New York City within-group identity is disputed across a number of these axes with the most important difference being sexual identity, particularly when it is being performed in a public space.