NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Samhradh/Summer 2002

william h. a. williams Green Again: Irish-American Lace-Curtain Satire joseph mcgowan Heaney, Cædmon, Beowulf dennis o'driscoll Filíocht Nua: New Poetry stephen watt Beckett, Late Modernism, and Bernard MacLaverty's Grace Notes anne maccarthy Writing Twentieth-Century Irish History: Mutabilitie (1997) thomas herron The Spanish Armada, Ireland, and Spenser's The Faerie Queene joseph f. connelly The Narrative Art of Jack B. Yeats's Sligo and Sailing, Sailing Swiftly fionnuala gallagher, june favre, laura mulcahy, lucia nicoletti International Auteurs and Local Amateurs: Irish Theater, 2001 Radharc ar gCúl: A Backward Glance síghle bhreathnach-lynch Twelve Irish Artists: A School of Irish Painting? brendan rooney The Color of Ireland: Twelve Irish Artists anne kelly Thomas Bodkin, Arts Policy, and Exile thomas dillon redshaw Twelve Irish Artists Described Reviews: Léirmheasanna Nuacht Faoi Údair: New of Authors

Clúdach: Cover The second issue of our 2002 volume continues New Hibernia Review's tour of the museums of Limerick City by visiting the Hunt Museum within the Georgian walls of the old Customs House, completed in 1769. The elegantly restored rooms of that museum feature the collections assembled by John (1900–1976) and Gertrude (1903–1995) Hunt. The museum's collections feature displays of such pre-Christian archaeological artifacts as the Cape Castle bucket from the first millenium b.c., found in County Antrim, which reflects the Hunts' interest in such sites as Lough Gur, County Limerick. The Hunts' focus on Ireland's prehistory is expressed in their restorations and reconstructions at Cragaunowen, County Clare. The selection of antiquities gathered by the Hunts in the 1930s and 1940s includes an especially rich array of such Irish ecclesiastical goods as pectorals, copes, patens, and chalices fashioned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John and Gertrude Hunt were serious-minded people, yet they had fine taste for the fanciful, as may be seen in the artifact from their collection pictured on our cover. This is a candelabrum fashioned to decorate a long dining table in an Ascendancy Big House. How this managed to survive intact from its making at the Belleek works in County Fermanaugh two centuries ago is a wonder. The stag's china head boasts tined antlers supporting three candle sockets shaped like sea urchins. The stag's head rests on three acanthus leaves joining a three-cornered flat base. It is likely that this piece is one of a pair designed to be posed on either side of a larger, but similarly designed, epergne. Our readers will recall, by way of contrast, the engraving of Cervus Megaceros (1825) featured on our cover a year ago. This image is reproduced © The Hunt Museum by kind permission of the trustees of the museum. We thank Fiona Davern, the museum's registrar, for her timely and expert help.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
The faintly derisive term “lace-curtain Irish”—usually used in counterpoint to an older, more raffish “shanty Irish ” underclass—compresses an historical battle over social and economic identity that preoccupied the Irish-American community in the decades following 1890. William H. A. Williams opens this issue by surveying the many ways in which this division found expression in American popular culture. As Irish Americans began to distance themselves from their recent poverty and exclusion, their attempts to negotiate with an unfamiliar social terrain can be construed as a “second immigration”—and the occasional malapropisms and left-footed social blunders of these former greenhorns were gleefully lampooned in vaudeville, popular song, and the comic pages of the day. The author of 'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream (1996), a seminal study of the Irish in American popular song, Dr. Williams is now concluding a book-length study of the British travel writer in prefamine Ireland.

Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf for Norton in 2000 has occasioned ceaseless commentary from the critical community. For better or worse, the Irish poet has created the version of the Old English epic that will be standard for a generation or longer, and woven into it richly local vocabulary from his own Northern Irish upbringing. Here, Joseph McGowan explores Heaney's joyful indebtedness to the literature of Northern antiquity—including the shepherd-turned-poet Cædmon, of whom Heaney chattily notes in The Spirit Level, “Oh, Caedmon was the real thing, all right.” He places Heaney's Beowulf in the context of the Cædmon story as, among other things, a reckoning with epic forebears, and as “the culmination of a long association with a northern hoard of images, ancestors, kennings. . . .” Dr. McGowan's many scholarly publications include an edition of the sermons of Augustine of Ancona and, with Vincent McCarren, of the Medulla Grammatice.

The year 2001 saw the publication of Dennis O'Driscoll's Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams, a substantial collection of essays and reviews from the Gallery Press, and 2002 will welcome the appearance of O'Driscoll's sixth book of poetry, Exemplary Damages, from Anvil Press. Seven of O'Driscoll's new and recent poems are gathered in this issue's “Fíliocht Nua” section. In them, he balances themes of loss and frailty against a joyous appreciation of physical detail, and the quite ordinary phrases he selects for several titles—“Heart To Heart,” “Years After,” and “While Stocks Last”—testify to a gift for opening out the full depth of meaning and association percolating below daily speech. Most of all, these poems present O'Driscoll's alert perception in every line—and especially in “Missing God,” a nineteen-stanza poem that catalogs the unadmitted aching for transcendence in the new, secular Ireland.

Best known in the United States for his 1983 novel Cal, Belfast's Bernard MacLaverty stands as one of the most accomplished fiction writers to have emerged out of the Northern Irish turmoil. In this issue, Stephen Watt probes the intertextual complexity of MacLaverty's recent fiction—in particular, the short story collection Walking the Dog (1994) and the novel Grace Notes (1997). These works, Watt notes, depart from the tragic sensibilities that shape the novels and stories that came before; instead, MacLaverty displays “a wicked sense of humor and a comic capacity not only to parry the darker implications of the ‘Troubles,' but also to undercut the pathos of his earlier work.” The presence of such ironic, mocking, and depressive elements inevitably suggests an affinity with the late work of Samuel Beckett—a linkage that MacLaverty himself points out in understated, but significant, allusions. An inventive and far-ranging critic of contemporary Irish literature, Dr. Watt has lately co-edited the collection A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage (2000).

In the contested realm of recollecting Irish national history, historians often weave together facts and myth in an attempt to inculcate a particular vision of the past. After noting that Frank McGuiness's 1997 play Mutabilitie interrogates Irish-English historical assumptions through its invention of an imagined meeting between Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser, Anne MacCarthy begins her own interrogation of Irish history textbooks and discovers that objectivity has often been displaced by nationalist and revisionist images, or stories, of Irish historic events. The 1960 edition of one school history book fails to even mention the Irish Civil War, and Moody and Martin's widely taught text from 1967 plays down the brutality of the sixteenth-century Smerwick massacre of Spanish and Italian troops by the English. In the end, McCarthy suggests, imaginative reconstructions of the past are beneficial because they allow identity to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. Dr. Anne MacCarthy has published books on Edward Walsh and James Clarence Mangan and is currently examining the nineteenth-century narrative tradition in Irish writing.

Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, much of it written during the author's tenancy as a colonial “planter” near Doneraile, County Cork, presents the contemporary reader with a daunting corpus of allegory and allusion, played out against a backdrop of sixteenth-century society and politics. Here, Thomas Herron reminds us of Spenser's inseparability from the context of the English Protestant appropriation of Irish lands underway in Munster and Connaught. Further, in scrutinizing Book V of The Faerie Queene in which the tyrant Souldan's chariots are destroyed, Herron finds that the 1588 wreck of the Spanish Armada (when nineteen of Phillip's ships were lost off Irish shores) provided a vivid contemporary analogue. A frequent presenter on Spenser and Ireland at medieval and renaissance conferences, Dr. Herron has spent the past year conducting research at the Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change of the National University of Ireland, Galway.

The literary reputation of Jack B.Yeats (1871–1957) will probably always be overshadowed by his status as Ireland's most celebrated painter of the twentieth century, though recent books by Bruce Arnold and Nora McGuinness have gone far to show that he warrants attention as a serious and innovative literary artist. Here, Joseph Connelly considers two of Jack Yeats's novels, Sligo (1930) and Sailing, Sailing Swiftly (1933), and examines their unconventional narrative techniques against simultaneous changes in the author's style of painting. Connelly finds that by using linked memories, myth, shifting story lines, and the introduction of what may superficially seem to be indiscriminate vignettes, Yeats's fiction (like Yeats's painting) “depicts the individual in a moment of feeling or transition that has gradually surfaced due to a complexity of forces, both narrative and pictorial.” Professor Connelly's previous studies of Jack Yeats's literary works have appeared in Éire-Ireland and, more recently, in Notes on Modern Irish Literature.

Readers who follow developments in Irish theater will recall the provocative commentary in these pages of a year ago, in which three students from the National University of Ireland, Galway, pointedly challenged the trend toward nostalgia in Irish dramatic offerings. In this issue, we again welcome the perspicacious observations of a team of students from NUIG's M.A. in Drama and Theatre and Studies program. Fionnuala Gallagher, June Favre, Laura Mulchahy, and Lucia Nicoletti review the extraordinarily vibrant Irish dramatic scene in the year just past, which, among other highlights, saw a Dublin Theatre Festival given over entirely to Tom Murphy; innovative Continental productions (notably the Danish Woyzeck); new plays by such rising talents as Morna Regan and Micheál Lovett; and ambitious arts festivals in Galway, Belfast, Cork, and elsewhere. The Galway team finds much to praise in these developments—but they close by asking if the most fertile source of what is best in Irish theater might not lie well below the critical radar, in Ireland's many joyous, competitive, and well-supported amateur theater companies.

A little-known book from the “Great Emergency” era—1940's Twelve Irish Artists, conceived by the Dublin gallery keeper Victor Waddington and introduced by the critic Thomas Bodkin—takes center stage in this issue's “Radharc ar gCúl / A Backward Glance” feature. In the first of a quartet of short essays that examine this document of the Free State's nascent high culture, Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, curator of Irish paintings at the National Gallery, situates the volume in the context of a longstanding debate as to whether there truly was such a thing as a distinctly Irish school of art. She finds that Waddington's book asserts that there was, indeed, such a school—but warns that no simple definition will suffice to describe it. Next, Brendan Rooney, the co-author (with Nicola Figgis) of Irish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland, considers how these twelve artists employed or declined to employ color, and how, for the painters represented, the handling of this element addressed a specifically Irish note. Anne Kelly, director of Arts Administration Studies at UCD and the biographer of Thomas Bodkin, surveys the lively and outspoken introduction to the 1940 volume—a characteristically fervid argument for the role of the arts in nation-building. Finally, Thomas Dillon Redshaw, editor of this journal, presents an expansive bibliographic note on Twelve Irish Artists, which locates it in a line of descent that includes the more renowned 1932 Free State Handbook.

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