NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Samhradh/Summer 2001

Greg Koos The Irish Hedge Schoolmaster  in the American Backcountry Patrick Walsh Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland and Revisionism Maurice Harmon Filíocht Nua: New Poetry Douglas Kanter Robert Peel and the Waning of the “Influence of the Crown” in Ireland, 1812–1818 Mícheál Mac Craith and Michelle Macleod Home and Exile: A Comparison of the Poetry of Máirtín Ó Direáin and Ruaraidh MacThòmais Robert Brazeau Thomas Kinsella and Seamus Heaney:  Translation and Representation Bryan McGovern John Mitchel:  Ecumenical Nationalist in the Old South Traditional Music: Ceol Traidisiúnta Sally K. Sommers Smith Irish Traditional Music in a Modern World Taispeántais: Exhibitions Paul Haughey, Cormac O’Brien, and Josh Tobiessen Struggling Toward a Future: Irish Theater Today A Backward Glance: Radharc ar gCúl Michael Patrick Gillespie Hugh Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce: A Reassessment David Gardiner Dublin’s Joyce: Mapping Joyce Studies Lauren Onkey Unabashed Confidence:  Hugh Kenner and Dublin’s Joyce Joseph Kelly Hugh Kenner, Gentleman Scholar Léirmheasanna: Reviews News of Authors: Nuacht faoi Údair

Clúdach: Cover The covers of volume 5 of New Hibernia Review feature natural history illustrations found among the more than 9,000 volumes of the Celtic Collection in the Department of Special Collections in O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center at the University of St. Thomas. The plate presented here is taken from A Description of the Skeleton of the Fossil Deer of Ireland, Cervus Megaceros, Drawn up at the Instance of the Committee of Natural Philosophy of the Royal Dublin Society, by John Hart, a student of the great French zoologist Cuvier, and later professor of anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons. Hart’s short book, published in Dublin by R. Graisberry in 1825, provides a detailed examination of the extraordinary skeleton in the museum of the Royal Dublin Society. His scientific discussion of the fossil is, at points, colored by the romantic nationalism implicit in the Irish antiquarianism and natural history of his day. “[W]e may well be excused . . .” Hart wrote, “for feeling a degree of national pride that our Native Institution for the encouragement of the Arts and Sciences, should have been the first public body in Europe to obtain a perfect specimen of the skeleton of this, one of the most remarkable animals which ever existed; and which, although not exclusively indigenous to, yet seems to have had its favourite haunts in our fertile plains and vallies.” For nearly a century, Irish materials have constituted a primary collecting focus for the rare and scarce book division of the St. Thomas library. Hart’s book came to the library in 1936, when Srs. Mary Agnes and Mary Fidelis O’Connor, nuns of the Visitation Convent of St. Paul, donated their late father’s splendid book collection to the college. O’Connor’s collection of more than 2,000 titles focuses on the history (particularly the local history), church history, religion, antiquities, folklore, art, and music of the Celtic nations. We thank the University of St. Thomas Department of Special Collections, and especially its acting director Ann M. Kenne, for its generous cooperation.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
If, in the early nineteenth century, a few Americans like Frederick Douglass, traveled through Ireland and altered its social discourse, many more Irish and Scots-Irish came to Antebellum America and altered not only its cities but also the small-town life of its backcountry. Here, Greg Koos, executive director of the McLean County Museum of History in Bloomington, Illinois, traces vernacular education in the frontier states back to the Irish hedge schoolmaster. Drawing on the fiction of William Carleton as well as immigration records, nineteenth-century memoirs, and the historiography of Irish and American education, Koos reveals that schoolmasters of Irish Catholic and Presbyterian origin were often “runaways” from indentured servitude into the backcountry. These itinerant teachers brought with them eighteenth-century educational practices and modeled both Irish folk culture and the sesquipedalianism of the polymath. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln’s first schoolmaster was an Irishman by the name of Zachariah Riney. Greg Koos has published articles in Historic Illinois and Material Culture and has edited Irish Immigrants in McLean County Illinois (2000).

Asserting the survival of the Gaelic culture of Ireland from the inception of the Penal Laws through the Famine is what Daniel Corkery attempted in The Hidden Ireland (1924). A literary study whose Irish-Ireland historiography has been dismissed, Corkery’s portrait of the mentalité of Munster, nevertheless fixed in Irish cultural discourse such now unavoidable terms as “Big House,” aisling, and, indeed, “Hidden Ireland.” Writing from Belfast, here Dr. Patrick Walsh recovers both Corkery’s central idea—the “concept” of a “Hidden Ireland”—and his practice of reading Gaelic literature and English history from current progressivist notions of modernization. Corkery was many things: a littérateur, a nationalist, and a talented watercolorist among them, but he was not a professional historian. Yet, he did take care to consult the best Gaelic texts available to him, as well as the leading historians of eighteenth-century Ireland—Lecky and Froude. A contributor to The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (1996) and the author of several articles on the work of the Northern Irish poet John Hewitt, Professor Walsh has just published Strangers: Reflections on a Correspondence Between Daniel Corkery and John Hewitt.

Readers of New Hibernia Review will immediately recognize the name of this issue’s Irish poet. A scholar, editor, and teacher, Maurice Harmon just published a collection of poems titled The Last Regatta with Salmon. These poems follow from that selection by practicing two modes of recollection. Their lines wind through personal anecdote, remembrance, and introspection full of confidential phrasing and intimate imagery. Professor Harmon finds another, balancing mode of recollection in the arts of translation—from the poetry of Ireland’s Fenian past gathered in the twelfth-century Accalam na Senórach or Colloquy of the Ancients. Versions of “Créde’s Lament” and “Arran” have appeared in anthologies of Irish poetry. New to English-language readers will be “Conbec” and “Eight Hours.” Currently editing a selection of essays commemorating the achievements of Liam Miller’s Dolmen Press, Maurice Harmon is the author of many critical studies, among them Sean O’Faolain: A Critical Introduction (1967) and The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella (1974).

Closely involved with the evolution of Ireland’s society after the Act of Union, Robert Peel (1788-1850) is today best known for establishing the eponymous “Peelers” or Royal Irish Constabulary in 1814, moving Catholic Emancipation through Parliament in 1829, opposing Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal campaign in 1843, and for passing the Queen’s Colleges Act in 1845. Here, Douglas Kanter focuses on one facet of Peel’s service as chief secretary for Ireland in Dublin Castle during the second decade of the Union. Peel employed patronage in order to influence the Irish members at Westminster to support Tory measures, but to little effect. Often scions of the Ascendancy, Irish parliamentarians tended to regard patronage in the old eighteenth-century style as a social or economic perquisite, not as a political contract. As Kanter reveals here, Dublin Castle ceded ineffective patronage schemes for, after Catholic Emancipation, measures favoring the political aspirations of a growing Catholic middle class. Douglas Kanter is finishing his studies under the direction of Emmet Larkin at the University of Chicago.

Scottish and Irish Gaelic are sister tongues. From the Plantation and then the Highland clearances until today, the literature in those tongues shares a heritage of dispossession and social dislocation. Here, Mícheál Mac Craith and Michelle Macleod pose together two Gaelic poets—Máirtín Ó Direáin (1910–1975) and Ruaraidh Mac Thòmais (b. 1921). Lately translated into English, the collections of both poets record the evolving responses of both poets to their island origins—Ó Direáin’s in Inis Mór, Mac Thòmais’s in the Isle of Lewis. The key word in Ó Direáin’s lexicon is stoite (“uprooted”), and that is the sense his lines give whether they romanticize life on Inis Mór or rail against office routine in Dublin. Mac Thòmais also judges the present by a romanticized past, but he rarely registers a severing from his Isle of Lewis. Rather, everything Gaelic connects him, willingly or not, back to a Lewis whose genius loci is his Muse. Prof. Mac Criath is the author of Lorg na hIasachta ar na Dánta Grádha (1989) and of numerous articles in such journals as Éigse and Léachtai Cholm Cille. Prof. Michelle Macleod serves the Ionad Chaluim Chille Ile in Port Ellen, Islay.

Aside from An Duanaire (1986), Thomas Kinsella’s The Tain (1969) is the best known of all his works. It was an Irish bestseller, and still does a brisk trade in its Oxford edition. Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf (2000) is today an American bestseller. Here, the Canadian scholar Robert Brazeau follows the lead of theorists Michael Cronin and Lawrence Venuti and contrasts the translations of Heaney and Kinsella. Kinsella’s translations from Old and Middle Irish go against fluency in order to attain a characteristic, alien primitiveness. Heaney not only has attempted Buile Suibhne—relying on O’Keeffe and rendering it as Sweeney Astray (1983)—but Dante and the Classics as well. Not so charmed by the primitive, Heaney tends to seek fluency to the degree that Philoctetes becomes, in his hands, The Cure at Troy (1990). Doing so, Heaney provides his Field Day audience with a staged metaphor for the ethical themes of the “Troubles.” This essay forms part of Dr. Brazeau’s longer study of Kinsella’s and Heaney’s political engagements with Irish writing.

The life of the Young Irelander and Fenian journalist John Mitchel continues to fascinate scholars. Mitchel’s Jail Journal, or Five Years in a British Prison (1854) was published just under a decade after Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845). Present critical attention to the captivity narrative and its nuances of postcoloniality gives Mitchel’s Jail Journal a renewed pertinence. More puzzling to contemporary readers is Mitchel’s romance with America’s Old South and his defense of the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Surveying Mitchel’s career as a journalist and controversialist in the United States, Bryan McGovern argues here that Mitchel favored the South because it seemed free of the sectarianism of the North—of, essentially, British sectarianism. Consequently, in the South both Protestant and Catholic could work together in the cause of Ireland’s freedom. That peculiar view led Mitchel to a paradoxically Romantic idealization of the Old South as a society that justly spurned “progress,” the exploitation of labor, and the divisions of mechanizing capitalism. Now finishing a critical biography of Mitchel, Bryan McGovern presented a paper titled “Irish-American Nationalism in St. Louis during the First World War” at the 1998 Missouri Graduate Conference on History.

The modes of transmission of ceol traidisiúnta and its practices have altered almost completely during the past three decades. Here, working from interviews with Séamus Connelly, Seán King, Paddy Glackin, and Mícheál Ó Suilleabháin, Dr. Sally K. Sommers Smith suggests that the passing on of air and ornament, lore and lyric, now has ceased to seem “traditional” in terms of school, region, and even nation. If advertising and market trends determine what is learned and heard by fiddlers, pipers, and singers, thus clearly altering the operation of traditio. Even the beloved séisiún runs the risk of turning into just another recorded performance staged for a crowd in some music pubs in the Liberties or off in far Lisdoonvarna. Balancing those risks is the creation of a traditional music community on the Internet through the site IRTRAD. Prof. Sommers Smith’s articles on Irish traditional music have appeared in The Recorder, Éire-Ireland, and New Hibernia Review (Spring, 1998).

A truism about Ireland is that the country’s social history has been mirrored by its twentieth-century drama—by the inventions of its playwrights from the Revival to the present, and by the efforts of its theater companies from Dublin’s Abbey and Galway’s An Taibhdhearc to Belfast’s Lyric Theatre. Here, a team of students—Paul Haughey, Cormac O’Brien, Josh Tobiessen—from Prof. Adrian Frazier’s program in Theatre Studies survey a number of recent productions mounted in Galway and Dublin in the fall of 2000. They suggest that the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger shows signs of seeking comfort in willfully nostalgic revivals of Friel and Murphy and in new productions from Conor McPherson and Michael Collins—an exception being the plays of Enda Walsh. They find sources of innovation and energy in the spectacles created by French and Italian companies during the Dublin Fringe Festival, and echoed in performances by the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company.

Gathered up and introduced by Michael Patrick Gillespie, New Hibernia Review’s second set of “Backward Glance” essays focus on a foundational work of Joyce studies—Hugh Kenner’s 1956 exegesis of James Joyce’s native city in Dublin’s Joyce. In Kenner’s pages, Prof. David Gardiner finds not only examples of “how to read Joyce” or such surprises as Kenner’s view of Joyce’s Ibsenist drama Exiles, but also instance after instance of perceptions have become commonplaces in Joyce scholarship. Noting  Kenner’s freedom from current ideological contextualizations, Prof. Lauren Onkey finds Dublin’s Joyce to be a forerunner of a hermeneutic that reads Joyce in terms of the many minutiae of the popular, material culture of Edwardian Dublin. Yet, paradoxically, Kenner also poses Dublin as chiefly a creation of conversation, talk, and language. Starting with a vivid image of Kenner as a “celebrity academic,” and remembering his first excursion into writing Joyce criticism, Prof. Joseph Kelly recalls with surprise his own, unconsciously indebtedness to Kenner’s explication of Dubliners. Just as tellingly, Kelly touches upon Kenner’s adaptations to critical trends since the writing of Joyce’s Dublin, all the while amused by Kenner’s enthusiasms, as well as his willingness to risk the grand flourish.


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