NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Samhradh/Summer 2004

thomas b. o'grady The Ó Bruadair Inheritance: Some Left a Name Behind Them maryanne felter and daniel schultz James Mark Sullivan and the Film Company of Ireland kevin bowen New Poetry: Filíocht Nua ronald l. dotterer Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, and The Dalkey Archive csilla bertha The House Image in Three Contemporary Irish Plays daniel gahan “Journey After My Own Heart”: Lord Edward FitzGerald in America, 1788–90 abbie l. cory Wheeler and Thompson's Appeal: The Rhetorical Re-visioning of Gender andrew j. auge Fracture and Wound: Eavan Boland's Poetry of Nationality Taispeántais: Exhibitions patrick lonergan Half-Hearted: Irish Theater, 2003 Reviews: Léirmheasanna Cover: Clúdach

Clúdach: Cover Our quartet of cover images depicting the world of Ulysses—Dublin in 1904—opened with an image of young men and their bicycles outside the National Library. With this issue, we travel only a short way up Kildare Street, but into a different era of civic life entirely: the era of the automobile. Carriages and trams appear throughout the narrative of Ulysses, making the Ireland of 1904 seem little different from the country of Parnell's time. In fact, Joyce, ever the sensitive observer of popular culture, makes no mention of automobiles in his famous novel, though “After the Race”—the fifth story in the earlier Dubliners—concerns an international racing event that was probably modeled on the 1903 Gordon Bennett Race in which the Royal Irish Automobile Club played a large role. Motorized vehicles began to appear on Dublin streets by the turn of the last century. Nonetheless, judging by the attention that the onlookers are giving to this vehicle photographed just as its driver is making the turn off St. Stephen's Green onto Kildare Street near the Shelbourne Hotel, the sight of a motor car remained a spectacle. Judging by the attire of the passengers, particularly the floral hats of the women, the opportunity to ride in a motor car was also an occasion to display one's status—and, perhaps, something of a special event. This year's covers are drawn from the Clarke Collection, a small (fewer than 200 images) but important component in the holdings of Ireland's National Photographic Archive. The photographs were taken in and around Westmoreland Street, Grafton Street, Merrion Square, and St. Stephen's Green; the photographer J. J. Clarke, a medical student at the time, was more interested in people than buildings, but the record of street scenes and buildings in the background of his photographs is often rich in historical information. A small portion of the original image has been cropped in presenting this cover. The Clarke Collection has been cataloged and digitized, and is available online at http://www.nli.ie/new_archive.htm We thank the National Photographic Archive/An tAircív Náisiúnta Grianghrafadóireachta, and especially its curator, Sara Smyth, for its kind permission to present this photograph to the readers of New Hibernia Review.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
In 1979, the Irish-Canadian-American novelist Brian Moore published The Mangan Inheritance, a send-up of Irish literary stereotypes involving a writer who believes he has found an ancestor in the poet Mangan. In this issue, we enjoy the reflections of the Irish-Canadian-American poet Thomas O'Grady, who explores the several inheritances that have shaped his life and writing. Not the least of these is his presumed descent from the seventeenth century's Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, some of whose verses he has translated from the Irish. Life can indeed imitate art; but, where Moore's novel rarely moves past irony and farce, O'Grady's engagement with his remote forebear is of a different order. Scholarly, empathetic, and grateful, the story here (woven together with excerpts from his published and unpublished verse) becomes, in the end, a meditation on the roots of creativity. Thomas O'Grady is a prolific reviewer and critic whose articles on modern Irish literature have appeared in such journals as New Hibernia Review, Éire-Ireland, and the James Joyce Quarterly.

The American understanding of Ireland has long been shaped by classic films. As Maryanne Felter and Daniel Schultz show here, well before John Ford's The Quiet Man or Robert Fitzgerald's Man of Aran—even before the “talkies”—the Film Company of Ireland (FCI) was alert to this transatlantic trade in images. Under the leadership of the lawyer James Mark Sullivan, the FCI undertook to produce and distribute films with a nationalist purpose, the most successful of which was Knocknagow (1918). Drawing on business records held at Cornell University, Professors Felter and Schultz track the rise and fall of this short-lived company, and find that FCI's goals were both propagandistic and business-oriented, often at the same time: in one memo, the FCI advised theater owners that “The way to handle the pictures is to Sinn Fein them.” Maryanne Felter has published articles in Éire-Ireland and the Journal of Irish Literature; her colleague Daniel Schultz is currently engaged in historical research on upstate New York.

A Vietnam veteran who has returned often to Southeast Asia, and now director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and its Social Consequences at the University of Massachussetts Boston, poet Kevin Bowen has borne clear witness to the realities of war in such collections as Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong (1994). In recent years, he has spent increasing time in Ireland, especially Achill Island, and these travels have also found expression in his work, notably in Eight True Maps of the West, published in 2003 by the Dedalus Press. Here, in “The Yellow Drum on its Side,” Bowen charts an unsettling Christmas holiday in Ireland during the weeks before the American invasion of Iraq. The steady piling-up of fragmentary phrases in this eight-part poem suggests the fragmentation of the outside world, even as it records continuities with the past. Almost cinematically, the poem thus depicts a collision of memory and the present.

The comic genius Brian O'Nolan—whether writing as Flann O'Brien or as columnist Myles na Gopaleen—was dogged throughout his career by the phantom of Ireland's most eminent author in prose, James Joyce, against whom he continually measured himself. In this issue, Ronald Dotterer reprises the younger author's sometimes peevish, sometimes reverent comments on the master. As Professor Dotterer shows, “This link with James Joyce was one O'Nolan embraced, at times begrudgingly or unwillingly, but always out of some inner artistic and psychic necessity.” In his 1964 novel The Dalkey Archive, O'Nolan undertook his most audacious reworking of the Joycean specter when he imagined the author of Ulysses not as a rebel genius, but as a pious, ultraconventional character whose only literary credits are tracts for the Catholic Truth Society. Among Dr. Dotterer's seven books on varied topics is Gender, Culture, and the Arts: Women, the Arts, and Society (1993).

Irish writing is frequently distinguished by what Dr. Csilla Bertha calls “a deep embeddedness in place.” That topographic sensitivity moves outward to the physical landscape, as well as inward, to the myths, legends, and associations that accrue on houses and interior spaces— as her examination of three recent plays shows well. In Stewart Parker's Pentecost, the plot centers around the characters' relationship to a house that almost assumes the status of a character itself. Tom Murphy's The House presents a hero who comes to face his own inner demons in the course of trying to find “home,” in both its physical and spiritual senses. These plays employ the house image to form and to frame the meaning of the play. In contrast, Marina Carr's On Raftery's Hill gives us a static house, which mirrors what Bertha contends is a fundamental lack of imagination in the play. An active member of IASIL, Csilla Bertha has written numerous articles on Irish drama and on the fantastic in Irish literature.

A decade before he became one of the United Irishmen's martyred heroes of the '98 rebellion, Lord Edward FitzGerald was a dutiful British officer stationed in North America. In June of 1788, the young officer embarked on a two-year journey from Atlantic Canada, through the Great Lakes region, and finally to New Orleans. Original copies of FitzGerald's letters home during this sojourn have lately been opened to scholars, which Dr. Daniel Gahan scrutinizes in this issue. He finds little to suggest that FitzGerald imbibed revolution from its American exemplar; rather, the significance of these letters in charting FitzGerald's thought lies in the interstices. FitzGerald grew up believing in Rousseau's ideal of the “noble savage”; these letters imply that while some aspects of life in North America confirmed his worldview, others severely tested his beliefs. Daniel Gahan's books include The People's Rising: Wexford in 1798 (1995) and Rebellion: Ireland in 1798 (1997).

Irish Studies has perhaps been slow to warm to the history of ideas, an omission now being addressed by philosophers Thomas Duddy, Richard Kearney, and others. One work that has proven central in the rediscovery of an Irish philosophical tradition is William Thompson and Anna Doyle Wheeler's 1825 Appeal to One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, which articulated the case for womens' rights in the language of Utilitarianism. Although only Thompson is credited with authorship of this important work, Prof. Abbie Cory demonstrates here that Wheeler was in every way a coauthor. What is more, the book's collaborative authorship was itself an assault on traditional gender roles, one animated by Wheeler's vivid rhetoric and by her claiming of “male” rhetorical stances. Abbie L. Cory is the author of “Women, Rebellion, and Republicanism: The United Irish Risings of 1798 and 1803.”

History, and especially the gaps in history arising from the erasure of womens' experience, counts among Eavan Boland's most enduring preoccupations. Here, Dr. Andrew Auge examines Boland's poetry to demonstrate the many ways in which the poet distinguishes between the past—“the brutal reality of what happened”—and history, those “official” accounts which manipulate that reality to maintain the power of the already dominant. Auge finds that in her interrogation of nationalist imagery, in her reflections on maternity itself, and in her attentiveness to the absences in every received historical account, Boland rejects the objectification of the past. Rather, she imagines the relation of the past to the present as, in his words, “one of unsettling intimacy.” A frequent presenter on modern poetry at Irish Studies conferences and elsewhere, Andrew Auge has recently written on Seamus Heaney's poetics in LIT: Literature-Interpretation-Theory.

Theater-minded readers of New Hibernia Review always welcome the surveys of the preceding year in Irish drama that come to us from young scholars in the M.A. in Drama and Theatre Arts at the National University of Ireland, Galway. In this issue, we present the fourth such round-up to appear in these pages, an astute review by Patrick Lonergan. International work, including an adaptation of The Wild Duck at the Peacock and a production of Robert Lepage's The Far Side of the Moon at the Dublin Theatre Festival, provided some of the past year's most successful productions. Other hopeful signs include new plays that treat Ireland's growing multiculturalism, and the increased sophistication of scholarly resources and contemporary publishing in Irish drama. Nonetheless, Lonergan concludes that 2003 was in many ways a quiet, hesitant year in the Irish dramatic world—a year in which it was often Arts Council funding cuts that took center stage.

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