NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Samhradh/Summer 1997




Emmet Larkin
Archival Odyssey, 1958–1995
Shane Murphy
Friel and Heaney: Setting the Island Story Straight?  
Jennifer C. Cornell
"The Other Community": Northern Ireland
in British Television, 1995  
Eamon Grennan
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry  
Marianne Mcdonald
When Despair and History Rhyme:
Colonialism and Greek Tragedy
Elizabeth Grubgeld
John Montague’s The Dead Kingdom
and the Postwar American Elegy  
Leroy V. Eid
Irish-American Backwoods Culture:
D. H. Fischer’s Albion’s Seed
John Cussen
Yeats Studies: A Korean Memoir  
David Gardiner
"To Go There as a Poet Merely":
Spenser, Dowden, and Yeats  
José Lanters
"To Keep Body and Soul Together":
Austin Clarke’s The Singing-Men at Cashel, 1936  
James J. Blake
An Teanga Inniu: The Irish Language Today
The Enhanced Public Presence of Irish  
William H. Mulligan, Jr.
Exhibitions: Taispeántais  Into Memory:
Gaelic Gotham, 1996  
Léirmheasanna: Reviews

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
One of the patriarchs of Irish Studies in the United States, and a founder of the American Committee for Irish Studies (ACIS), Prof. Emmet Larkin has earned through his still-growing history of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland a high reputation for his elegance of judgment and of sentence. Aside from his numerous articles in such journals as Victorian Studies and the American Historical Review, readers will recall especially Prof. Larkin’s The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and the Fall of Parnell, 1888–1891 (1979). Here Dr. Larkin recalls the peripatetic start of his history of the church and its inner mind in the archives of Rome, London, and Dublin.

Of the several home-grown cultural projects that have contested the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, perhaps none is more highly thought of than Derry’s Field Day Company and its productions. Sponsored by Brian Friel and seconded by Seamus Heaney, Field Day’s playwrights and pamphleteers have forever altered the topography of Irish cultures North and South. And that mapmaking is Shane Murphy’s initial concern here as, starting with a postmodern critique of cartography, he reassesses Friel’s famous play Translations in the light of Heaney’s The Haw Lantern and, in particular, the moral and metaphysical ideal of the "fifth province." Shane Murphy’s articles on Irish poetry and culture have appeared in Cascando and, from Cork University Press, Graph.

Remapping often means taking into account new landmarks, as Jennifer Cornell does here by examining television drama portraying Loyalist families. The new landmarks noted here are, of course, epehemeral artifacts of popular culture. In this instance, an examination of such teleplays as John Forte’s Skin Tight and Pat Griffin’s The Cake, both part of the 1995 Northern Lights series on BBC Northern Ireland, reveals that Unionist households remain stereotypically and negatively, thus devaluing one cultural tradition in implicit favor of the other—the Celtic-Irish sense of self. Prof. Cornell’s articles on the North appear in such journals as the Conflict Quarterly, while her short stories have appeared in the Chicago Review and TriQuarterly and were collected in Departures (1995).

Eamon Grennan’s new poems after So It Goes (1995) present a different topography: unreeling strophes become long-limbed couplets in the "approximations" and sonnets become densely packed "thirteeners." Formal fancy is just one of Grennan’s achievements; intensive meditations upon the visible details of dailiness is another. Both have origins in What Light There Is (1987) and As If It Matters (1991). An accomplished scholar of Renaissance literature and a translator of the poems of Leopardi, Prof. Grennan lectures at Vassar College and takes his summers either at the MacDowell Colony or in Renvyle. His poetry appears often in The New Yorker, as well as in such journals as the Carolina Quarterly or The Yale Review.

With the Field Day production of Tom Paulin’s Riot Act (1984) Marianne McDonald begins her charting of the ways in which Irish poets and playwrights have articulated the leading conflicts in Irish life North and South by adapting classic tragedies by Sophocles, Aeschylus, or Euripides. Just as human nature endures so do the ancient classical myths of conflict and justice endure, and with unfortunate pertinence in Ireland. Prof. McDonald touches here on Paulin’s, Kennelly’s, and Heaney’s well-known adaptations onto the Irish stage, as well as on those by Aidan Carl Mathews, Derek Mahon, and Colin Teevan. A frequent contributor to such journals as Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, Pallas, and Drama, Prof. McDonald lectures frequently at Trinity College, Dublin.

Tragedy occasions great grief, and greater joy, and perhaps that is why the elegy holds so honored a place. Any map of Irish writing in verse or prose features elegists and the elegaic, and among both we can count John Montague and his poetry in The Dead Kingdom. Here Prof. Elizabeth Grubgeld tellingly explores the dramatic regrets and yearnings of the 1984 sequence in respect to the postwar, "confessional" element in American poetry—in Lowell, Berryman, and especially Ginsberg. All three figured in Montague’s American apprenticeship in the 1950s and 1960s. Prof. Grubgeld is the author of George Moore and the Autogenous Self (1994) and of many articles in such journals as Genre, Biography, and Études Irlandaises.

One now dominant feature of the topography of the idea of America is ethnicity, which the demands of identity politics have yet again thrown into high relief. Consequently, both the history and the conception of Irish America has come in for some alteration, which Prof. L. V. Eid here provides in a critique of the assumptions behind the popular argument of Albion’s Seed (1989). Looking again at digests of statistics available for emigration from Ireland into the backwoods of the mid-Atlantic colonies, Dr. Eid suggests a redefinition of Irish America by finding detailed reasons to doubt the usual construction of backwoods prerevolutionary culture—of "hillbilly" culture—as Scotch-Irish, a product of the Border.

Many readers will recall Yeats’s romance with the Orient, notably India and Japan, and be reminded also of the fascination of the Japanese with Yeats and his works. As John Cussen reveals in this memoir—based on his teaching experiences in Korea, and especially his friendship with the Rev. Kevin O’Rourke, a translator of contemporary Korean writing—the Korean academy shares the same fascination. One suspects a certain rivalry there, especially considering Koreans’ yearning for a Nobelist of their own. Here Prof. Cussen details the humorous incidents of Korean academic life—conference-going, status-earning, job-getting. A writer of short stories, Prof. Cussen has also published scholarly articles in Studies in Short Fiction and The Irish Literary Supplement.

Fittingly, the church in which Edmund Spenser married Elizabeth Boyle in Cork city now houses the archives of the Cork Corporation: Munster’s history resides there. Spenser’s infamous View mapped out Elizabeth’s Irish policy at the inception of modern Ireland, and his epic designed the ideals of early modern Britain. As David Gardiner suggests, the inception of the Literary Revival in 1890s Dublin came on the heels of W. B. Yeats’s early and complex reaction to the imperial reconstruction of Spenser and the English Renaissance with which Edward Dowden capped his tenure at Trinity College, Dublin. David Gardiner’s most recent articles on Irish writing appear in Apostrophe and The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies.

Now best rememebered for a few anthologized verse satires, Austin Clarke was an industrious critic, an intimate playwright, and somethng of a romancer. Clarke’s The Bright Temptation (1932) was reprinted by Liam Miller, but its companion romance and his last romance, The Sun Dances at Easter (1952), remains in limbo. Like the other two tales, The Singing-Men at Cashel (1936) are set in the Celtic Romanesque period and, as José Lanters shows here, they embody themes and issues contemporary with their composition, as if the period stood for the cultural and ethical climate of Free State Ireland. A frequent contributor to such leading journals as Études Irlandaises and Irish University Review, Prof. Lanters most recently edited Troubled Histories, Troubled Fictions: Twentieth-Century Anglo-Irish Prose (1995).

Two new features appear in this issue of New Hibernia Review. The first is "An Teanga Inniu: The Irish Language Today," a series of twice-yearly reports on the vitality of the Irish language in Ireland by Prof. James J. Blake. New Hibernia Review’s regular commentary on the Irish language—focusing this time mainly on the debut of Teilefís na Gaeilge and the launch of Foinse—will alternate with commentary on the practice and conservation of Irish traditional music. The second feature has the intent of extending the range of reviews in the journal to cover significant museum exhibitions in North America and Ireland: "Taispeántais; Exhibitions." Here, Prof. William H. Mulligan, Jr., opens with "Into Memory: Gaelic Gotham, 1996," an extended review of the controversial exhibition mounted by the Museum of the City of New York in 1996. Prof. Mulligan is director of public history projects at the Forrest C. Pogue Public History Institute and the author of Northborough: The Town and Its People, 1638–1975.
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