NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Fomhar/Autumn 1998




James Liddy
How We Stood With Liam Miller:
The Dolmen Miscellany, 1962
Michael Parker
Gleanings, Leavings: Irish and American
Influences on Seamus Heaney’s Wintering Out, 1972
Shakir Mustafa
Revisionism and Revival: A Postcolonial
Approach to Irish Cultural Nationalism
Greg Delanty
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
Michael Storey
Postcolonialism and Stories of the Irish Troubles
Janet Nolan
Education and Women’s Mobility
in Ireland and Irish America,
1880–1920: A Preliminary Look
James Guilfoyle
The Religious Development of Daniel
O’Connell, I: From Deist to Roman Catholic
Helen Lojek
Charabanc Theatre Company’s Lay Up Your Ends, 1983
George E. Ryan
Thomas Landsdowne Parr Moore,
Son and Legionnaire Ceol Traidisíunta: Traditional Music
Mick Moloney
Irish Dance Bands in America
Taispeántais: Exhibitions
Joseph p. O’Grady
Irish Archives in 1997 in the Republic of Ireland
Reviews: Léirmheasanna

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
In Dublin of the late 50s and early 60s, the literary generation of Kavanagh, O’Brien, and Behan still held court in McDaid’s pub, while around them, a new wave of creativity—including Kinsella, Montague, and Iremonger—waited to break into its own. Born in Dublin in 1942 and educated at University College, Dublin, James Liddy was very much a part of that milieu, and he has lately complemented the witty, resonant verse of his Collected Poems (1994) with erudite memoirs that evoke this special moment between authorial generations. Here, Liddy recalls Liam Miller, the craftsman publisher whose Dolmen Press defined Irish poetry in his day. Miller was, Liddy tells us, “a new kind of impresario and a reinventor of prevailing tradition” —gifts that crystallized in the 1962 Dolmen Miscellany of Irish Writing. James Liddy directs the Irish Studies program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Michael Parker’s essay similarly testifies to the power that a single book may exert—in this case, P.V. Glob’s The Bog People, with its eerie photographs of leathery, mutilated bodies found in a Danish burial site. These dark images haunt Seamus Heaney’s 1972 collection Wintering Out, a book that paradoxically springs from Heaney’s time in sun-drenched California. Yet Berkeley and the bogs are not so polar as they may seem at first glance; Parker shows here that the rising interest in Native American culture and the Hispanic activism that Heaney encountered in California gave the poet ready examples of the uses of myth and historical analogy—uses he then read back into the placenames and landscapes of Ireland. Parker is the author of Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (1993), and is currently completing a book on Irish writers and “the Troubles.”

Irish nationalism has had no shortage of critics. Some blame it for the legacy of violence in the north, while others challenge nationalism’s legitimacy by minimizing the inequities of the colonial past. Here, Shakir Mustafa argues against these dismissive critics by noting the ways in which Irish cultural nationalism—particularly that of Gaelic Revival—was a benevolent project, remarking that “even if its success was limited, the attempt to form a spiritual center for national unity was a considerable achievement.” Mustafa assesses Irish nationalism through the lens of postcolonial theory, drawing on the work of such far-ranging authors as Frantz Fanon, Seamus Deane, and especially, Partha Chatterjee. Mustafa, of Indiana University, is the author of a forthcoming article on “Demythologyzing Ireland” in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. He has previously published on Zionism and American Jewish literature.

The son of a printer, Greg Delanty considers his youth in Cork, and now in America, with a sensibility shaped by occupational traditions, a craftsman’s vocabulary, and an intimacy with the printed word. These early memories pervade Delanty’s newest collection, The Hellbox, (1998) a deeply autobiographical collection from Oxford University Press, from which the first six poems presented here are drawn. The title itself is a metaphor that refers to the container into which printers would toss broken pieces of type. Now teaching at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, Greg Delanty is the author of three previous collections of poetry and has received numerous honors, including the 1996 Austin Clarke Award. The Center for Irish Studies will present a reading by Greg Delanty on October 16, 1998, at the regional meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

In the first generation after the Irish Literary Revival, many well-known Irish fiction writers set their stories in the Troubles of the 1920s, a conflict played out in the earliest years of an emerging nation. More recent Irish authors have also employed fiction to probe the bewildering urban conflict in (chiefly) Northern Ireland, “the Troubles” that date from 1969. Although the short stories that Michael Storey considers here are separated by some seven decades, and the later works display a dramatically more diverse range of authorship and a far grittier use of violence, they may all be understood as products of Ireland’s colonial, now postcolonial, experience. Professor Storey’s articles on Irish literature have appeared in such publications as Classical and Modern Literature, Éire-Ireland, and Comparative Literature Studies.

Women’s history in Ireland and in Irish America is intricately linked to the role of education. In nineteenth-century Ireland, the preparation provided to girls in the National Schools—who attended at higher rates that their male counterparts—helped to equip an unusually large number of single women for life in the New World. Once in America, these women and their daughters often selected teaching as the most attractive of the scant professional opportunities open to women. In this essay, Professor Janet Nolan surveys the outsized participation of Irish women in classrooms on both sides of the Atlantic, and recaps the activism of such pathbreaking teaching professionals as San Francisco’s Kate Kennedy. Nolan’s many publications include Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration From Ireland, 1885-1920 (1989).

Daniel O’Connell’s early biographers invented an unwavering and lifelong commitment to Catholicism in their hero; later authors have slighted or ignored his religious convictions, despite the centrality of religion in the public sphere of O’Connell’s day. In a two-part essay for New Hibernia Review, the first portion of which is presented here, James Guilfoyle charts for the first time the full complexity of O’Connell’s religious journey. His early instruction in the Catholic faith gave way to a deism shaped by the writings of Thomas Paine, but this cerebral creed gave little emotional sustenance. We leave this portion of the essay with O’Connell hesitantly returning to the Church of Rome while asserting the absolute freedom of conscience. James Guilfoyle of the University of Chicago is currently researching English mercantilism in eighteenth-century Ireland.

The Charabanc Theatre Company brought its improvisational energies to stages in Belfast and, later, the world, from 1983 to 1995, and in those years developed a free-flowing tradition which challenged conventional approaches to the theater. For example, so fluid was Charabanc’s dramaturgy that only one of the company’s twenty-one productions has ever been published as a text. Working from a photocopy of the script for Lay Up Your Ends, Charabanc’s story of a 1911 mill strike, Helen Lojek explores the many discoveries that awaited the company as they created their first play: among them, discoveries of the actors’ identification with the strikers, of archetypal links between women and the craft of weaving, and most significantly, of their own voices as women. Professor Lojek teaches Irish and American literature at Boise State University. Her writing on Irish drama appears in the 1998 ACIS Annual.

The Irish songs of Thomas Moore (1779–1852), which so often insinuated a “sweet sedition” into the drawing rooms of the English gentry, also conceal a more personal subtext: the grief of the poet over the premature deaths of all five of his children. Here, George E. Ryan recounts the brief and troubled life of Thomas Landsdowne Parr Moore, who died in 1846 while serving in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria. Young Tom Moore’s death seems almost to have been adumbrated in some of the Bard of Erin’s plangent lyrics; his life, in contrast, created that durable stock character of melodrama and lampoon, the Legionnaire who is trying to forget. Ryan writes from Scituate, Massachusetts, where he has edited the informative Bulletin of the Eire Society of Boston for thirty-four years.

Today, traditional music often serves as a sort of port of entry for Irish Americans wishing to delve into their ethnic roots, and more than a few Irish Studies scholars were first drawn to the discipline through a youthful fascination with the music. As Dr. Mick Moloney shows here, the Irish dance bands that packed American music halls from 1890 forward also served as a port of entry for the immigrant generations. Even as they affirmed ethnic continuity and community, when such groups as The Pride of Erin Orchestra or Paddy Killoran’s Serenaders began to include saxophones, pianos, and vocalists in their performances, Irish dance music in America became the site of a hotly contested hybridity. Moloney’s stellar career as a performer of Irish traditional music is complemented by his researches in folklore and ethnomusicology. He is the author of Irish Music in America: Continuity and Change (1998).

The most dramatic event in the history of Irish archives was undoubtedly the burning, in June of 1922, of the Public Record Office in Dublin, causing the loss of innumerable documentary sources for Irish history. Yet in our own time, the so-called “slow fires” of decay, the pressure of inadequate storage space, and the lack of professional archival skills also threaten collections in Ireland. Professor Joseph O’Grady, who is active in the work of the Ireland Heritage Preservation Foundation, reports on the alarming findings of an early survey of Irish depositories of the written record. “It is strange that the Irish place little value on the preservation of manuscripts” he notes with bemusement, “for they place so much emphasis on the private and public use of the past. . . .” Recently retired from La Salle University, O’Grady’s many publications on Irish history have lately focused on civil aviation.

Cover
This issue of New Hibernia Review continues the presentation, in our 1998 volume, of political lithography from late nineteenth-century Ireland. The example shown here comes from a free supplement that accompanied the Weekly Freeman and National Press of August 13, 1898. This vibrantly colored image is titled “Wolfe Tone before the Courtmartial November 10, 1798.” The accompanying text, not shown here, notes that the illustration was “Copied from ‘The Hibernian Magazine’ for November, 1798 and coloured according to a description in the same publication” also that it was printed at “Cherry & Smallridge, Ltd., Color [sic] Printers, Dublin.”

The most well-known of the United Irishmen whose French-influenced revolutionary ideals illuminated the 1790s, Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–98) led armies to Ireland in rather quixotic missions from France in 1796 and again in 1798. After the defeat of General Humbert’s forces at Lough Swilly, Tone was captured at Buncrana, County Donegal; following imprisonment at Newgate Gaol in Dublin, he was tried and convicted of high treason. In death, Tone immediately joined the pantheon of nationalist heroes, celebrated in song, melodrama, and, of course, in political iconography. This illustration from the hand of artist Phil Blake shows us Tone facing his judges. Blake renders an archetypal image of the defiant hero: clad in the spotless uniform of a French adjutant general, Tone’s unbowed posture, his classical profile, the confident thrust forward of his left foot and the resolute folding of his arms across his chest all declare his steadfastness. The windswept uniform and the crude wooden half-wall in the background similarly evoke the image of Tone in command of a naval fleet: on sea or on land, this, surely, is a man who stands with right against the winds of fortune or empire.

We thank Prof. Lawrence McBride and Nancy Romero of the library of the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, for providing these examples of political lithography from Dublin.
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