NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Geimhreadh/Winter 2000

Kathleen M. Flanagan
“Dance and Song of the Gael”: 
Pat Roche and Irish Dance in Chicago, 1933–1953
Brendan Galvin
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
Edward A. Hagan
Really an Alley Cat?
Angela’s Ashes and Critical Orthodoxy
Joel A. Hollander
Heroic Construction: 
Parnell in Irish Political Cartoons, 1880–1891
Brian M. Walker
Finnigan’s Awake: 
E. S. Finnigan and Ulster Politics, 1874–1892
Shane Murphy
“The Eye That Scanned It”:
The Picture Poems of Heaney, Muldoon, and McGuckian
Daniel Davy
“Isn’t It a Great Wonder?”: The Quantum Mechanical
Structure of The Playboy of the Western World
Dermot McCarthy
Recovering Dionysus: Dermot Healy’s A Goat’s Song
Reviews: Léirmheasanna

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
The worldwide success of Riverdance has had the benefit of popularizing the historical and critical study of Irish-American popular culture in the twentieth century. Often stigmatized for its sentimental patriotism and the excesses of its commercialization, the sustaining force of this culture marked the parishes of Irish America and their schools, and especially so in such cities as Chicago. Starting with the Century of Progress exhibition in 1933, here Kathleen M. Flanagan traces the progress of Irish step dancing, and its linked arts of music and costume, through to the feiseanna held in the early 1950s at Loyola University. Dr. Flanagan’s interviews with Pat Roche and his dancers in the early 1990s provide the foundation of this almost oral history, supplemented with articles and advertisements from such often overlooked neighborhood newspapers as the Garfieldian. A dance instructor and a former student of Roche’s, Dr. Kathleen Flanagan spoke on the history of dance in Chicago at the 1996 “Scattering” conference in Cork.

Brendan Galvin’s selected poems appeared under the title Great Blue in 1990. Between the covers of that book appear many poems—like “In Ireland I Remembered the Foxes of Truro, Massachusetts”—rooted in the sandy beachscapes around Galvin’s home on Cape Cod. Sometimes, as in that poem, Galvin’s art reaches back to Ireland and melds details of the Irish landscape with those of coastal New England, and nuances of Irish versecraft with those of the loose-limbed American tradition. The long poem “Some Fragments of Senan the Anchorite,” originally destined for Galvin’s 1992 retelling of the Brendan legend Saints in Their Ox-Hide Boats, recreates the miraculous life of the local saint Seanán (“Old Man”), who founded a monastery on Scattery Island (Inis Cathaigh) at the mouth of the Shannon. Galvin’s poems can often be found in the pages of the Kenyon Review, Poetry, and The New Yorker.

The phenomenon of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes owes much to the intrinsically oral, performative nature of its narrative and humor, but perhaps even more to the appetite of Irish America in the 1990s for an agreed-upon myth of emigration. The persistence of that appetite gives telling stature to the critical controversies sparked by McCourt’s memoir and its imitators, and to Professor Edward Hagan’s dissection of the pained responses of such well-known Irish critics as Denis Donoghue, Seamus Deane, and R. F. Foster. Using some notions from chaos theory, Hagan defends McCourt’s storytelling, the instability of its “facts,” and the overarching truth of its ironies against condescension of Irish critics who have—politically or socially—scorned the human truths of Angela’s Ashes’ fictiveness and, implicitly, its readership. Dr. Hagan has lately contributed an essay to Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (1998), and has published widely on the literature of the Vietnam War.

Popular culture helps to shape politics, and did so in Dublin in the 1880s at the height of Parnell’s career and the campaign for Home Rule, as such historians as Curtis and McBride have so well documented. Examining the vivid caricatures of John Fergus O’Hea in the Dublin Weekly Freeman, Professor Joel Hollander discerns a lexicon of allusive images borrowed from the graphics of Honoré Daumier and of Jean-Leon Gérôme that warped Classical images into satirical jabs at the excesses of the French Second Empire and Second Republic in France. In the instance of Parnell, caricature portrayed the “Uncrowned King” as the victorious gladiator and then as Caesar triumphant. When scandal began to sap the powers of Parnell’s leadership, Dr. Hollander discovers, the Dublin caricaturists began to depict Parnell as a faltering funambulist, a bumbling Blondin. Dr. Hollander has most recently written on Irish political cartoons in the collection Images, Icons and the Irish Nationalist Imagination (1999).

While Home Rule was being fiercely contested in Dublin and London, it was being locally opposed in the marginal as well as the home counties of Unionism. Professor Brian Walker, an accomplished historian of party politics in nineteenth-century Ulster, outlines here the political management of E. S. Finnigan in the 1880s that, by the election of 1885, had succeeded in establishing the populist Orange presence in Ulster Unionism and, by sharing votes with nationalist candidates in marginal ridings, outflanking Gladstone’s Liberal Party in Ulster. Finnigan had succeeded in polarizing the political landscape of Ulster. Director of the Institute of Irish Studies of The Queen’s University, Belfast, Dr. Walker is the author of many papers and books, especially Ulster Politics: The Formative Years, 1868–86 (1989) and Dancing to History’s Tune: History, Myth and Politics in Northern Ireland (1996).

Poets writing out of a culture in political crisis often suffer the accusations of those who prefer plain-spoken partisanship rather than “art.” Owing to the “Troubles,” of course, Northern poets bear that burden, and have borne it challengingly—even when they turn to write out of art, and painting in particular. Here, Dr. Shane Murphy plumbs the Northern “gaze” by examining the encounters of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Medbh McGuckian with the sustaining powers of the fine arts against the background of writings on contemporary art in Ireland and scholarship pertaining to such European artists as Goya and Matisse. Shane Murphy’s articles have appeared such journals as Études Irlandaises, Graph, and Irish University Review. A lecturer in King’s College, Dr. Murphy serves as coordinator of the Irish and Scottish Programme in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

Dramaturgs and critics have had nearly a century to ponder J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, and many have noted in it a disjuncture between its realistic and its romantic elements of motivation, character, and situation in respect to Christy and his moral status. Famously, the very text of Synge’s drama gives this disjuncture a native term—“gap”—and that provides Professor Daniel Davy with an opening to apply a theory from physics—rather than psychology or philosophy—to explain Christy’s simultaneously dual status in Synge’s drama. That simultaneity, both on stage and in the imagination, renders rhetorical Synge’s and Dr. Davy’s titular question: “Isn’t it a great wonder.” Dr. Davy’s criticism has appeared in Essays in Theatre, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Modern Drama.

Dermot Healy’s rich memoir The Bend for Home (1996) earned its author praise and attention on both sides of the Atlantic, but, as Professor Dermot McCarthy shows here, the narrative structure of A Goat’s Song (1990) can claim an equally telling complexity. Healy’s autobiographical novel displays some of the Chinese-box structure of modernist Irish fiction, but not in imitation of Flann O’Brien, nor to recreate the procession of tragedy and the characteristic duplicities of alcoholism. Rather, it is the paradigms of psychoanalysis—especially as elucidated by Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia”—that inform the ways in which Healy shapes his narrative. Dermot McCarthy has published a study of the Canadian poet Ralph Gustafson titled A Poetics of Place (1991), as well as five collections of poems, the latest being A Rumour of Music (1998).

Cover: Clúdach
The final work of contemporary Irish textile art to be presented on the covers of New Hibernia Review in the year 2000, Kitty Whelan’s 1994 quilt Kilkeasy draws on motifs found in Ireland’s most recognizable and intricate work of art, the ninth-century Book of Kells. The vivid, interlocking tracery of Whelan’s piece appears on a field that contrasts with the bright colors of the quilt’s central peacock figure and suggests not only the vellum page but also—in a stitched pattern reminiscent of an ocean wave—Ireland’s island status, which allowed the preservation of such medieval masterpieces.

Whelan, a resident of Montenotte, was raised in Middleton, County Cork. She is a member of the Irish Patchwork Society and is active in Cork’s “Four Winds” textile group, a diverse group of women who meet to hand-dye fabrics, to help one with problems of technique and design, and to share in an atmosphere of friendship and concern. Hand-quilted in cotton, Kilkeasy is machine-pieced and machine-appliquéd; the red dots surrounding the central figure are hand-embroidered. It measures 32 x 36 inches, and was one of two of Whelan’s quilts to be shown in the “Contemporary Irish Textile Art: The Women of Annaghmakerrig” exhibition at the University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Gallery in March, 1997. The work bears the name of a parish in County Kilkenny  where Whelan’s father was born. Kilkeasy is now in the collection of the Hotel Pattee in Perry, Iowa.

We thank Kitty Whelan for her kind permission to reproduce Kilkeasy, as well as Dr. Karen Holland of Providence College, whose article “Form Over Function: 150 Years of Irish Quilting, 1850–2000” in volume 4, number 1 of this journal surveyed the history and development of Irish quilting.

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