NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
IRIS ÉIREANNACH NUA

Earrach/Spring 1997

Gerald Dawe
Finding the Language: Poetry, Belfast, and the Past
Adrian Frazier
Paris, Dublin: Looking at George Moore Looking at Manet  
Mary Trotter
"Double Crossing" Irish Borders: The Field Day
Production of Tom Kilroy’s Double Cross  
Ggearóid Denvir
Decolonizing the Mind: Language and Literature in Ireland  
John F. Deane
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry  
James A. Doan
"An Island in the Virginia Sea": Native Americans
and the Irish in English Discourse, 1585–1640  
Joel A. Hollander
Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1865):
The Irish Question, Carlyle, and the Great Famine
Charles E. Orser, Jr.
Of Dishes and Drains: An Archaeological Perspective
on Irish Rural Life in the Famine Era  
Spurgeon Thompson
James Joyce and Tourism in Dublin:
Quotation and the Mass Commodification of Irish Culture  
Cathy Larson Sky
Ceol Traidisiúnta: Traditional Music A Lot of Notes but Little Music: Competition and the Changing Character of Performance  
Reviews: Léirmheasanna

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
Now working on a new collection of poems titled The Minos Hotel, here Gerry Dawe offers a casual memoir of his schooling in Belfast, his introduction to Northern literary life through Padraic Fiacc, and the learning through the Penguin Poets that led to his first book Sheltering Places. The other, Galway side of Dawe recounts the lowered mood of an Ireland reeling from the hunger strikes and referenda in the early 1980s. Selections from Dawe’s "little magazine" make up Krino, 1986–1996: An Anthology of Modern Irish Writing (1996). This memoir will be collected in The Rest Is History: Belfast Notes. 

The most famous of Irish memoirs is George Moore’s Hail and Farewell, and its contrarily witty views of the Literary Revival may perhaps be traced to Moore’s Royal Hibernian Academy address (1904) in defense of a Dublin gallery for the Lane pictures. The disgrace of the Lane controversy has become legend, and has been made up for by the elegant refurbishing of the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery. Here, with wit equal to Moore’s, Prof. Adrian Frazier takes time away from his Yale biography of Moore to dissect the paradoxical issues of identity at play in Moore’s speech and upon his listeners. Dr. Frazier is best known for his reinterpretation of the founding of the Abbey Theatre in Behind the Scenes (1990). 

Conceived in lieu of a Field Day pamphlet, Tom Kilroy’s two-part play Double Cross (1986) poses similarly ironic, severely consequential issues of identity for the playwright, the players, and their audiences. Here, Mary Trotter succinctly anatomizes Kilroy’s dramatic use of two figures (both played originally by Field Day’s Stephen Rea) from the history of World War II—Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s minister of Information in London; William Joyce, "Lord Haw-Haw," in Berlin—to pose in Brechtian contrast another set of paradoxes about Irish identity. As Dr. Trotter suggests, these remain interrogative, unresolved in Double Cross. Another of Prof. Trotter’s critical studies of Irish drama appears in Crucibles of Crisis: Performing Social Change (1996). 

Such problems of identity as Double Cross portrays may be taken as immediate symptoms of Ireland’s postcoloniality, which Prof. Gearóid Denvir addresses differently in his wide-ranging discussion of language and sensibility, liberation and mentality in the Gaeltacht and in the whole of Ireland. A popular lecturer, Denvir has published widely in both Irish and English on the popular oral poetry of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Connemara, as well as on the writing of Pádraic Ó Conaire (1978) and Máirtín Ó Cadhain. His most recent book is an intricate annotated edition, Amhráin Choilm de Bhailis (1996). 

Born on Achill, John F. Deane has published several collections of poems, including his selected poems The Stylized City (1991) and A l’ombre du photographe (1996), elegant renderings in French of his poems. This long, articulated poem titled "The Return" descends from Deane’s tours of the American South—a visit to the Olympic Poetry Festival in Georgia, for instance—and recalls stereoscopically his childhood in the South of Ireland. Founder of Poetry Ireland, John F. Deane now edits Tracks and runs Dedalus Press with much care and dedication. In 1997 White Pine Press in New York will copublish his forthcoming collection Christ, with Urban Fox. 

Since the researches of D. B. Quinn, the publication of Bury My Heart at Wound Knee, and the ructions of the 1970s, it has been a notional commonplace to trope Ulster with Virginia, Planters with plantations, woodkerne with Native Americans. The colonial discourse of Early Modern Britain gives, of course, much evidence of this rhetorical and cultural strategy, as Prof. James E. Doan recalls here. Dr. Doan’s focus falls upon the anthropological equation of the Native American with the Gaelic Irish ranging in references from the northern Algonquian to the West Indian Arawak. And in this discourse—perhaps touristic, as its chronicles advertise the lands discovered for English settlement—are implicated the "Scythian" classical myth and the Edenic Christian myth. Dr. Doan is the author of Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh: An Irish Poet in Romance and Oral Tradition (1990). 

In the year of Yeats’s birth the English painter Ford Madox Brown exhibited, after thirteen years of labor, the painting Work. Full of details of costume and color, of humors and humanity, the painting’s portrayal of a busy Hampstead street harbors distinct allusions to the social condition of 1850s London, and Joel Hollander teases them out here in respect to the repercussions of the Great Famine on metropolitan London. A canny observer, Brown construed in his painting the two views of the Irish Question through the observations of Thomas Carlyle and Frederick Denison Maurice, themselves observing the charged social scene in the picture. Joel Hollander will shortly publish "The Fairies’ Christmas: Elements of the Fantastic in Irish Political Cartoons from the Home Rule Movement" in The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (Winter, 1997). 

The Irish navvies of London dug up Hampstead streets for new water and sewer lines; historical archaeologists like Prof. Charles Orser dig into the nineteenth-century landscape of Ireland for evidence of drains. Properly observed, recent material remains reveal much about the material life of the rural Irish—in this case, at Strokestown in County Roscommon—and that gives further evidence of the technological and social changes impelled by the crisis of the Great Famine. The founder of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Dr. Orser has published numerous articles and books, among them A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World (1996). 

The historical archaeologist of the twenty-second century may, perhaps, discover odd remains in the streets of Dublin—fourteen brass plaques marking the fictional preprandial meander of Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, each presenting a "quote" from Ulysses. Here Spurgeon Thompson delineates how various forms of Joycean quotation—"quotes," or "lit-bites"—displace the prime fiction and, much of the time, demean both its author and his potential reader in the service of education some times, "good crack" other times, and profit at all times. And Thompson reminds us that a few tourist destinations in Ireland—the Famine Museum at Strokestown, for instance—do achieve moral authenticity by way of self-critical dissonance. Thompson’s essay "Surveillance and the Production of Tourist Space in Dublin" was collected in Imaginary Boundaries (1996). 

The practice of Joyce-derived tourism in Dublin may well be a dark token of Euro-contemporaneity. The contest of the market has touched even the practice of traditional music in Ireland, as the fiddler and musicologist Cathy Larson Sky suggests here. Observation and anecdote, especially in reference to the traditions of performance in County Clare, point out that competitions designed to preserve musical traditions may ultimately coarsen and homogenize them in pursuit of virtuosity. The actual folk-practice of the country house dance and cúirt begins, then, to fade. Formerly traditional music columnist for the Spectator Magazine, Cathy Larson Sky’s most recent paper delineated the political dimensions of country house set dances over the past century.
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