A Companion to Irish Literature

Julia M. Wright

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405188098
• eBook ISBN: 9781444351699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Featuring new essays by international literary scholars, the two-volume Companion to Irish Literature encompasses the full breadth of Ireland's literary tradition from the Middle Ages to the present day.

• Covers an unprecedented historical range of Irish literature
• Arranged in two volumes covering Irish literature from the medieval period to 1900, and its development through the twentieth century to the present day
• Presents a re-visioning of twentieth-century Irish literature and a collection of the most up-to-date scholarship in the field as a whole
• Includes a substantial number of women writers from theeighteenth centuryto the present day
• Includes essays on leading contemporary authors, including Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Roddy Doyle, and Emma Donoghue
• Introduces readers to the wide range of current approaches to studying Irish literature

VOLUME I

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank, first and foremost, my contributors for all of their work on this project, many of them completing their essays under especially challenging circumstances – including a happy total of seven births across the two volumes. Their steady good humor, thoughtful responses, and patience with my queries, requests, and nudges helped to make editing these volumes a very pleasant experience as well as an intellectually rewarding one.

I am also grateful to the Canada Research Chairs Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their indispensable support, and to Gordon Miller for his very careful and thorough work as a research assistant. My thanks as well to Dalhousie University for providing me with a sabbatical essential to the timely completion of the manuscript and to the Killam Library, and especially the incredibly efficient Interlibrary Loan Department, for its invaluable assistance. My colleagues at Dalhousie have, as always, been a source of both collegial calm and intellectual excitement, creating an energizing environment for scholarship. Isobel Bainton and Emma Bennett at Wiley-Blackwell offered their usual excellent advice and they, along with others at the press, made Wiley-Blackwell once again a joy to work with. And, above all, I thank Jason Haslam, for everything and always, including steady encouragement about work and much laughter (and sci-fi) at home.

Notes on Contributors

Guinn Batten is the author of The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism (1998), a contributor to The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, the editor (and author of an Afterword for) Medbh McGuckian’s The Soldiers of Year II (2002), and the author of a dozen essays on contemporary Irish poetry that include contributions to two Cambridge Companions.

Scott Boltwood is the author of Brian Friel, Ireland, and the North (2007) and articles on Dion Boucicault, Augusta Gregory, Brian Friel, and the Ulster Group Theatre. He has been a Research Fellow at the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages, University of Ulster, and Visiting Professor at Queen’s University Belfast. He is currently an Associate Professor at Emory & Henry College.

Joseph Brooker teaches modern literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading & Culture (2004) and Flann O’Brien (2005). He has co-edited special issues of the Journal of Law & Society (on law and literature) and New Formations (on the 1990s). His next book concerns the literature of the 1980s.

Helen M. Burke is a Professor of English at Florida State University. She is the author of Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theatre, 1712–1784 (2003), and is currently completing a book on the Irish diaspora and the eighteenth-Century London stage.

Matthew Campbell teaches English literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Poetry (2003), as well as co-editor of two volumes on nineteenth-century literature.

Andrew Carpenter is Emeritus Professor of English at University College Dublin and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His most significant publications in recent years are two anthologies, Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (1998) and Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (2003).

Gregory Castle is Professor of British and Irish Literature at Arizona State University. He has published Modernism and the Celtic Revival (2001), Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman (2006), and the Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory (2007). He also edited Postcolonial Discourses (2000) and is editor of volume 1 (1900–66) of the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (2010). He is currently working on a book project, “Inventing Souls: Pedagogies of Irish Revivalism.”

Heather Clark is Professor of Literature at Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vermont, and teaches at NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House. She is the author of The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1 972 (2006), and a forthcoming book on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. She reviews Irish poetry for the Harvard Review, and is currently working on a book about Paul Muldoon.

Bernadette Cunningham is Deputy Librarian of the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. She is author of The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth and Religion in Seventeenth Century Ireland (2000) and The Annals of the Four Masters: Irish History, Kingship and Society in the Early Seventeenth Century (2010).

Paul Delaney is a Lecturer in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. His work includes the edited collection Reading Colm Tóibín (2008). He has written widely on Irish literature and on representations of Travelers in Irish writing. Current projects include an essay collection on William Trevor (co-edited with Michael Parker) and a study of Seán O’Faoláin.

Dennis Denisoff is the Chair of English at Ryerson University, Toronto. His current research focuses on nineteenth-Century decadence, paganism, and non – human animals’ subjectivity. Past publications include Aestheticism and Sexual Parody: 1840–1940 (2001) and Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film: 1850–1950 (2004).

Elke D’hoker is an Associate Professor at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She has written a critical study of John Banville’s work (Rodopi 2004) and has published several articles on modern and contemporary Irish fiction. She is currently working on a book about the modern short story by Irish women writers.

Ann Dooley is a professor with the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Program for Celtic Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Playing the Hero: Reading the Táin Bó Cúailnge (2006).

Susan B. Egenolf, Associate Professor at Texas A & M University, teaches courses in British and Irish literature and culture. She authored The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson (2009) and has published essays focused upon women writers and the intersection of literature and visual culture. Her current project investigates the works of Josiah Wedgwood and the cultivation of eighteenth century aesthetics.

Silvia Diez Fabre is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Burgos, Spain. She is a founder member of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies and was its Secretary until 2008. She has published essays about the literary interpretation of the Big House in nineteenth-and twentieth-Century Irish fiction. Her interest in Jennifer Johnston’s fiction grew from this area of studies.

Danine Farquharson is Associate Professor of Irish Literature at Memorial University in St John’ s, Newfoundland, Canada. She is co-editor of Shadows of the Gunmen: Violence and Culture in Modern Ireland (2008) and has published and presented papers on Roddy Doyle, Robert McLiam Wilson, Edna O’Brien, John McGahern, and Liam O’Flaherty.

Melissa Fegan is a Reader in the Department of English at the University of Chester. She is the author of Literature and the Irish Famine 1845–1919 (2002); she is currently working on the poetry and prose of James Clarence Mangan, and twentieth-and twenty-first-Century representations of the Great Famine.

Luke Gibbons is Professor of Irish Literary and Cultural Studies at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and the author of such books as Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (2003), Gaelic Gothic (2006), and Transformations in Irish Culture (1996).

Michael Patrick Gillespie is a Professor of English at Florida International University. He has written books on James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, William Kennedy, chaos theory, and Irish film.

Alan Gillis lectures at the University of Edinburgh. His award-winning first collection of poetry, Somebody, Somewhere, was followed by Hawks and Doves, which was shortlisted for the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize. As a critic, he is author of Irish Poetry of the 1930s (2005), and he is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry.

Clement Hawes is Professor of English and History at the University of Michigan. His recent books include The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (2005) and, as editor, G ulliver’s Travels and Other Writings by Jonathan Swift (2003).

Barbara Lisa Hillers is an associate of the Celtic Department at Harvard University. She has taught Irish and Scottish Gaelic language, literature, and folklore at the University of Edinburgh and at Harvard, and has published on medieval and modern Gaelic literature and folklore. She is currently completing The Medieval Irish Odyssey, and editing, jointly with Joseph Harris, Child’s Children: Ballad Study and its Legacies.

Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University. Her previous publications include Bram Stoker: A Literary Life (2007), Screening the Gothic (2005), and Giants of the Past: Popular Fictions and the Idea of Evolution (2004). She has also worked extensively on Renaissance literature.

Christopher Innes holds the Canada Research Chair in Performance and Culture at York University, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Author of fourteen books – which have been translated into eight different languages – and over a hundred articles, he is also General Editor of the Cambridge Directors in Perspective series and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Bernard Shaw (1998).

Jennifer M. Jeffers is Professor of English at Cleveland State University. Professor Jeffers’ books include The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power (2002), Britain Colonized: Hollywood’s Appropriation of British Literature (2006), and Beckett’s Masculinity (2009). She is the General Editor for Palgrave Macmillan on the work and legacy of Samuel Beckett.

Robert W. Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty (1998), as well as articles on Barbauld, Chatterton, and Reynolds. He is currently writing a book on “The Theatre of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.”

Vera Kreilkamp is Visiting Professor at the Irish Studies Program at Boston College, Professor of English at Pine Manor College, and co-editor of Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies. Her publications include The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (1998) and chapters in the Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (2006) and Ireland and Empire (2004).

Harriet Kramer Linkin is a Professor of English at New Mexico State University. She is the editor of the first scholarly edition of The Collected Poems and Journals of Mary Tighe (2005) and co-editor (with Stephen C. Behrendt) of Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception (1999) and Approaches to Teaching Women Poets of the British Romantic Period (1997).

Patrick Lonergan teaches drama at National University of Ireland, Galway. His book Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era won the 2008 Theatre Book Prize, and he is the editor of critical editions of two of Martin McDonagh’s plays. He also writes about theater for The Irish Times and Irish Theatre Magazine.

Eamon Maher is Director of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies at the Institute of Technology, Tallaght (Dublin). He edits the Reimagining Ireland and Studies in Franco-Irish Relations series for the Peter Lang Publishing Group. He is currently working on a monograph entitled “‘The Church and its Spire’: John McGahern and the Catholic Question.”

Susan Manly is a Reader at the University of St Andrews. She is the editor of several volumes in the Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth (1999–2003), and the author of Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s: Locke, Tooke, Wordsworth, Edgeworth (2007). She is currently working on Schools for Treason, a book about Jacobin writing for children.

Michael Mays is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of Nation States: The Cultures of Irish Nationalism (2007).

F.C. McGrath is Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. He has published and presented widely on Irish literature and culture. His books include Brian Friel’s (Post)Colonial Drama: Language, Illusion, and Politics (1999) and The Sensible Spirit: Walter Pater and the Modernist Paradigm (1986).

Brian McIlroy is Professor of Film Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Irish Cinema: An Illustrated History (1988), Shooting to Kill: Filmmaking and the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland (1998; revised edition 2001), and editor of Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism (2007).

Sarah E. McKibben is Assistant Professor of Irish Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She has published articles in such journals as Éire-Ireland and The Irish Review, and essays in Geographies and Genders in Irish Studies and The Midnight Court: A Critical Edition (forthcoming). She is currently completing a booklength manuscript entitled “Endangered Masculinities: Gender, Colonialism, and Sexuality in Early Modern Literature in Irish, 1540–1780.”

Alison Milbank is Associate Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (1992), with chapters on Le Fanu, Dante and the Victorians (1998), and Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (2007).

Robert Miles is Chair of the Department of English at the University of Victoria. He has written widely on Romantic and gothic subjects. His books include Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (1995), Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy (2002), and Romantic Misfits (2008).

Joseph Falaky Nagy is Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has taught since 1978. He is the author of books and articles on medieval Celtic literature, and the founding editor of the Celtic Studies Association of North America Yearbook.

Eugene O’Brien is Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. His publications include Seamus Heaney: Creating Irelands of the Mind (2002); Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing (2003); Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers (2006); and “Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse”: Negotiating Texts and Contexts in Contemporary Irish Studies (2009).

Stiofán Ó Cadhla is Head of Folklore in University College Cork. He has published Cá bhFuil Éire: Guth an Ghaisce i bPrós Sheáin Uí Ríordáin (1998), The Holy Well Tradition: The Pattern of St Declan, Ardmore, Co Waterford 1800–2002 (2002), Civilizing Ireland: Ordnance Survey 1824–1842: Ethnography, Cartography, Translation (2007), and An Creidmheach Déanach, poems from Coisc éim (2009).

Helen O’Connell is a Lecturer in English Studies at Durham University and is the author of Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement (2006).

Maureen O’Connor lectures in the Department of English at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. She is co-editor, with Lisa Colletta, of Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’Brien (2006), and, with Kathryn Laing and Sin é ad Mooney, of Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives (2006). She is the author of The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing, forthcoming from Peter Lang.

Liam P. Ó Murchú, a Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish in National University of Ireland, Cork, studied Irish language, literature, and history in NUIC and Irish literature and linguistics in the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. He has published textual and literary studies and has lectured on Merriman in the USA, France, Germany, and Japan.

Kathleen M. Oliver is Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Florida. Previous and forthcoming publications include Samuel Richardson, Dress, and Discourse (2008), as well as essays on Daniel Defoe, Sarah Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Frances Sheridan.

Patricia Palmer teaches in the Department of English at King’s College London. She is the author of Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland (2001), “Missing Bodies, Absent Bards: Spenser, Shakespeare and a Crisis in Criticism” (English Literary

Renaissance, 2006), and “‘An headless Ladie’ and a ‘horses loade of heades’: Writing Atrocity in a Time of Conquest” (Renaissance Quarterly, 2007). She is currently writing on violence in sixteenth-Century Ireland.

Deana Rankin is Lecturer in English and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London and former Fellow of Girton College, University of Cambridge. She is author of B etween Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenth-C entury Ireland (2005), and of a number of articles on drama, history-writing, republicanism, and Irish writing in the early modern period. Formerly a theatre manager, she maintains close links with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s education program.

Richard Rankin Russell is Associate Professor of English at Baylor University in Texas. His essays on Irish writers have appeared in Éire-Ireland, Irish University Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Modern Drama, and he has edited a collection of essays on Martin McDonagh (2007), and published a monograph on Bernard MacLaverty (2009).

Ann Saddlemyer, Professor Emeritus of English and Drama, University of Toronto, has published extensively on Irish theater and is the editor of Synge’s plays and letters and Lady Gregory’s plays, one of the general editors of the Cornell Yeats series, and co-editor of the Selected Irish Drama series. Her most recent publication is a biography of Mrs W.B. Yeats.

Christine St Peter is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. She has published widely in the areas of Irish and Canadian women’s writing. Two recent publications include Changing Ireland: Strategies in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (2000) and Opening the Field: Irish Women: Tests and Contexts (2007).

Gregory A. Schirmer is Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of The Poetry of Austin Clarke (1983), William Trevor: A Study of his Fiction (1990), and Out of What Began: A History of Irish Poetry (1998). He has also edited Austin Clarke’s essays, the poems of J. J. Callanan, and an anthology of verse translation from the Irish.

Frank Sewell is Course Director of English at the University of Ulster, and also a writer and translator. His publications include Modern Irish Poetry (2000). His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland (2008), edited by Chris Agee, and in many journals.

Eluned Summers-Bremner is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has published Insomnia: A Cultural History (2008) and Ian McEwan: Sex, Death and History (2009), and is currently working on A History of Wandering (Reaktion) along with other projects on trauma, affect, and reading, and the literature of World War II.

Mary Helen Thuente is Professor of English at North Carolina State University. Her publications include W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore (1981), The Harp Re-strung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Irish Literary Nationalism (1994), and numerous essays and journal articles. Her current research focuses on the visual iconography of women and harps in the construction of Irish identity.

Jeffery Vail is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Boston University. He is the author of The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore (2001), and of numerous articles and reviews on Byron, Moore, and the British Romantics. He is currently preparing an edition of the collected letters of Thomas Moore.

James Watt teaches in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict 1764–1832 (1999), and is currently completing a book provisionally titled “British Orientalisms, 1759–1835.”

David Wheatley lectures at the University of Hull and is the author of three collections of poetry with Gallery Press: Thirst (1997), ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• VOLUME I
• VOLUME TWO
• Index