NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Geimhreadh/Winter 1997




Desmond Fennell
"The Recent Birth and Checkered Career of 'Rural Ireland'"
Ben Howard
"'Tragedy Fully Explored': From
The Rough Field (1972) to Belfast Confetti (1989)"
David Krause
"The Plough and the Stars:
Socialism (1913) and Nationalism (1916)"
Benjamin Z. Novick
"DORA, Suppression, and Nationalist
Propaganda in Ireland, 1914--1915"
Theo Dorgan
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
Joseph P. O'Grady
"From Baldonnell to Shannon:
Irish Civil Aviation Policy, 1921-- 1935"
Patricia J. Fanning
"'Maybe They'd Call the Doctor':
Illness Behavior in the Novels of James T. Farrell"
Marguerite Quintelli-Neary
"Fenian Topography in Finnegans Wake"
Christopher J. Wheatley
"Finis Galliae: Ascendancy Drama, Burnell to O'Keeffe"
John Turpin
"The Academy Movement in Dublin, 1730--1880"
James J. Blake
An Teanga Inniu: The Irish Language Today
"Béal Feirst: An Irish-Language Community"
Nicole Greene
Taispeántais: Exhibitions 
"Fabric and Form: Irish Fashion Since 1950 "
Reviews: Léirmheasanna  

Editors' Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
The transmogrification of Ireland into the "Celtic Tiger" within the European Community during the last decade has not gone on without scandal and disquiet. The way for such distresses has been paved by, and the distresses themselves obscured, a shift in ideological parlance in the Irish media, one aspect of which the social critic Desmond Fennell analyzes here. Originally delivered at the 1996 Willaim Carleton Summer School, Fennell's lecture anatomizes the increasingly negative valorizing of the term "rural Ireland" during the 1970s and 1980s in the mediated culture of Ireland. The term has become dismissive, disparaging, life-limiting in the use it gets from metropolitan Dublin, and so the vital reality of Ireland's remainder languishes in the popular marketplace of ideas. Desmond Fennell's most recent books include Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern Ireland (1993) and Dreams of Oranges: An Eyewitness Account of the Fall of Communist East Germany (1996).

Just as Patrick Kavanagh's famous free verse delineation of country life in Monaghan titled The Great Hunger (1942) stands behind the negative notion of "rural Ireland," so the tragic heart of that poem stands behind the long and innovating portrayals of Northern Ireland in John Montague's The Rough Field (1972) and Ciarán Carson's Belfast Confetti (1989). Ben Howard's elegant survey of these two masterpoems catches their texture and tone and links them to their decades--the 1970s, just after another "Bloody Sunday"; the end of the 1981, which had begun so darkly with the Hunger Strike. By capturing the signal features of each poem, Dr. Howard reminds the reader that the tragedy of the North may be comprehended in two different humors, each cognizant of necssary human hopes. Ben Howard's The Pressed Melodeon (----) surveys with considerable considerate acuity recent Irish poetry.

The continuing contest of values in Irish culture has antecedents and corollaries, of course, and the O'Casey scholar David Krause here proposes a few in respect to The Plough and the Stars (1926), and its contemporary critical status. Prof. Krause reminds us that Sean O'Casey, in Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919), presented his allegiance to socialism, represented by the Labour movement and the events of the General Strike and Lockout of 1913, as more essential than his loyalty to republican nationalism, as enacted in the Easter Rising of 1916. In The Plough and the Stars, O'Casey displays dramatically, satirically the same preferences, which modern critics have found insufficient to the status of Ireland either in the Common Market or in the post- or neo-Marxist criticism of the universities.

Certainly O'Casey and those Dubliners represented by characters in The Plough and the Stars saw on the tenement walls of north Dublin the posters of the General Recruiting Office in Ireland pasted up during the first years of World War I, as well as the antirecruiting posters sponsored by nationalists, Sinn Féin in particular. And certainly talk reached O'Casey, as well as other Dubliners, of the suppression of such nationalist, antiwar papers as The Irish Volunteer or Scissors and Paste. Drawing on public records, Benjamin Z. Novick shows here that the debate over recruitment, and its suppression, in Ireland, and its suppression, both shaped nationalist opinion and sharpened military frustration, on the British side, with local civil legalities. This ideological contest in Ireland formed habits of thought and sentiment that helped shape political debate from the Dáil of 1919 through the closing years of the Free State. Currently working as an polycy analyst for UN Watch in Geneva, Benjamin Novick is completing a dissertation on Ireland during World War I under the guidance of R. F. Foster.

Having started in Cork with David Marcus's New Irish Writing in the 1940s, Poetry Ireland, both the journal and the organization, now resides in Dublin Castle, the now organization headed by Theo Dorgan. An innovator in Ireland's culture--he helped found Triskel Arts Centre in Cork and to create The Great Book of Ireland (1991)--Dorgan is a skilled and passionate poet whose lines and levity are not as often seen or heard in North America as the work deserves. Here we present a suite of six poems taken from Rosa Mundi (1997), published by Salmon Press, which also printed Dorgan's first book The Ordinary House of Love (1990). In Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh (1996) Dorgan has collected the RTÉ Thomas Davis Lectures tracing, in memory of Gus Martin, new waves in Irish poetry since the 1930s.

Owing to the new university there, Limerick has now become a center for the arts, and owing to the Shannon airport, Limerick had become a center for light industry and technology. Yet, as Prof. Joseph P. O'Grady shows here, the path the Free State took towards founding an airport and a civil air industry was neither short nor long. The research behind this exploration of Ireland's aviation policy was accomplished with the aid of a 1995 fellowship from the Irish American Cultural Institute. Prof. O'Grady has published other studies of Irish aviation in Foreign Affairs and Air Power History. He presently serves as president of Ireland's Heritage Preservation Foundation, which awarded its first McHale Family Fellowship in Modern Archival Management (April, 1997) to Mary Fitzpatrick, archivist of the city of Waterford.

Early and mid-twentieth-century Irish American was amply and accurately chronicled by the novelist James T. Farrell, whose Studs Lonigan was, in its first printing, introduced by a sociologist. As Dr. Patricia Fanning reveals here, the period accuracy of Farrell's eye and ear extended to his characters on their the sickbeds and deathbeds, thus fictionally substantiating the sociological observations analyzed by sociologists examining the bahvior of hyphenate Americans in the hospital ward and in the doctor's office. While one might expect the Irish-American patient to have the comforting care of family and church, both sociology and Farrell's fiction reveal that the acutely ill experience little but loneliness and isolation. Patricia Fanning's most recent publications have concerned F. Holland Day and the history of photography.

Finnegans Wake is titled, at several removes, after the hero Fionn, and in the Wake's reconstitution of "nighttown," to borrow from Ulysses, Joyce manipulates placelore intensively, as Marguerite Quintelli-Neary reveals here. A namesake, Patrick Weston Joyce, provided Joyce with sources and keys to the Fenian lore that led Joyce to encode, for example, the goddess Áine in the laden lines of the Wake. It is analogy that makes allusion, and allusion of the landscape to myth and legend makes of the Wake a medieval vellum full of rich palimpsests and glosses on the dinnsenchas of Dublin sleeping by the Liffey. Currently researching the presence of Irish folklore of the frontier of the American West, Prof. Quintelli-Neary helped edit Robert Hogan's The Dictionary of Irish Literature (1996) and has lately published Folklore and the Fantastic in Twelve Modern Irish Novels (1997).

Few works of literature prove as densely Irish in content as Finnegans Wake. Other examples of Irish or Anglo-Irish writing acquire their character not so much from genre or language or even the biographies of their makers as from their audiences. Currently editing an anthology of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish drama, Christopher Wheatley here discerns what has made Ascendancy drama, largely performed in Dublin from the 1640s through 1800, distinct from English or London drama of the period, a drama itself enriched by such Irish Playwrights as Sheridan and Goldsmith. The plays of Charles Shadwell, Mary O'Brien, and especially Charles Macklin count as Irish, in the end, because they were performed for and their political sentiments comprehended by the Irish living within the Pale. Prof. Wheatley is the author of Without God or Reason: The Plays of Thomas Shadwell and Secular Ethics in the Restoration (1993).

During the century of the Protestant Nation, Ascendancy Dublin attempted to found and patronize such institutions as the Royal Dublin Society or the Royal Irish Academy for the advancement of the arts and sciences in the Enlightenment capital. Out of such efforts eventually grew the National College of Art and Design, founded in 1746, whose director, Dr. John Turpin, here analyzes the fitful evolution of the academy movement in art education and exhibition in Dublin through into the high Victorian period. The Royal Hibernian Academy, begun in 1823, figures large in this tangled history of progress and patronage. Dr. Turpin's publications include the catalogues Daniel Maclise (1972) and John Hogan: Irish Neoclassical Sculptor (1982) and a history of the Coláiste Náisiúnta Ealaine is Deartha titled A School of Art in Dublin since the Eighteenth Century (1995).

In his second "An Teanga Inniu" report, Dr. James J. Blake reviews the blooming of Belfast as a city coming to claim the Irish language as one expression of its renewed sense of its neighborhood vitality. The Belfast Oireachtas this past October, as well as the Belfast Community Festival in August, brought intio prominence Belfast's Irish-language resiources--the periodical Lá and the Gaelscoileanna, especially Meánscoile Feirste. The rise of the language, however, has occasioned such controversies as the campaign against Irish as "anti-Protestant" at The Queen's University Student Union. Likewise, Belfast's Ulster Museum was the site of another innovation: Elizabeth McCrum's Fabric and Form exhibition, which is the subject of this issue's "Taispeántais" review by Nicole Greene. Scheduled to appear soon in the new Collins galleries of the National Museum in Dublin, the same exhibition was recorded in an extensive, illustrated catalogue: Fabric and Form: Irish Fashion Since 1950, also by Elizabeth McCrum. Here Nicole Greene details not simply the novelties and news of the exhibition, but also the ways in which Irish designer fashion has reflected both the artistic and commercial history of Ireland since the late 1950s and the Whitaker Report.
                                                                         Back to New Hibernia Review