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13.12.18
(University College Cork, 2019) D'Arcy, Kathy; Davis, Alex; O'Donoghue, Bernard; Irish Research Council
This piece takes the form of a long experimental poem in three parts followed by a ‘guidebook’ which is referenced throughout so that it can be read alongside. The poem is a heteroglossic exploration, using fictional voices and fragmented texts, of the blurred visibility (the ‘weighted silence’ as I have called it) of women in Irish history and literature, and an attempt to creatively problematise that omission. The first section begins in the mythological beginnings of Ireland, the second takes place in the first years of the hypermasculine ‘Irish State’, and the third occurs in the present. The various voices clash and coincide, speak over and beyond each other, and rise together in a palimpsest of re-articulation.
A method to the madness? Representations of female psychological disorder in Irish women’s fiction 1878-1914
(University College Cork, 2022-10) Regan, Éadaoin; O Gallchoir, Cliona; Laird, Heather; University College Cork
This thesis investigates representations of female psychological disorders in selected Irish women’s fiction published between 1878 and 1914, focusing on how these stories challenge contemporary perceptions of the cause and cure of mental illness. The authors included in this project are as follows: George Egerton, Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, Richard Dehan, Sarah Grand, Bithia Mary (B.M.) Croker, and Charlotte Riddell. I propose that these stories point to contemporary women’s awareness of their mental illnesses or what society perceived these to be. This includes a discussion of Freudian analysis’ wide-ranging list of hysterical symptoms: general illness, fantasies, or dreams. It also explores various instances of self-harm such as anorexia, alcoholism, and suicide. With reference to contemporary psychoanalytic theories on hysteria, I offer a correction to cultural perceptions of women’s mental health issues during the fin de siécle. For some of the texts explored, these Irish women writers were anticipating psychoanalytic interpretations of wider women’s experiences or at the very least responding to the culture which formed psychoanalysis. Furthermore, I argue that in contrast to prevailing perceptions of the time, the texts suggest that neuroses are not solely caused by repressed sexuality. This thesis contributes to a re-evaluation of fin de siècle Irish women’s writing, thus building upon the research carried out in this area over the past three decades. It does so by employing critical readings of nineteenth-century Irish women’s writing but through an alternative methodology, one that engages with long-neglected Spielreinian, Horneyan, or Jungian theories. This thesis therefore explores fictional representations of fin de siècle women’s mental illness using psychoanalysis as a comparative study of the impact domestic, social, and cultural had on neurotic behaviour. This thesis also engages with the implications of the geographical proximity of Ireland to the centre of the British Empire, which necessitated the former’s adherence to the latter’s laws and social expectations. For Irish women, like their English counterparts, there was an emphasis on women’s integral roles within the Empire as daughters, wives, and mothers. While the New Woman movement stretched beyond Ireland and Britain, differences in legal and cultural ramifications means that the experiences represented in these fictional texts incorporate complex contemporary tensions which result in psychological disorder. Though thesis focuses on women’s experiences during the period, where relevant, it also examines the role of Irish culture and its impact on the selected fictional instances of madness. The British Empire’s colonisation efforts in Ireland had significant impact on the island and are inextricable from discussions of its sexuality, maternity, culture, individuality, and women’s mental illness. Similarly, psychoanalysis was not created in a vacuum. If Freud’s case studies can be deemed an archive of their time, then the selected Irish women’s writing can be seen as somewhat of a counter-archive. As argued throughout this thesis, the selected fiction deconstructs contemporary perceptions of a universal Irish women’s experience during this period. It therefore suggests Irish women had a far more intricate understanding of their mental illness, and society’s impact on it, than their contemporaries acknowledged.
Adaptable near and far: C. H. Hazlewood's double adaptations
(SAGE Publications, 2020-09-13) Hofer-Robinson, Joanna
Stage personnel faced complex and conflicting demands in the nineteenth century to curate and cater to appetites for theatre with perceived local relevance and increasingly mobile and diverse audiences. This article argues that the formulaic melodramas written for less reputable London theatres allowed for just such local identification as well as for coming and going, as playwrights produced dramas which simultaneously traded on their knowledge of managerial preferences and theatrical companies while retaining an inclusive ambiguity in their scripts by avoiding specific political affiliation and curating moments of metatheatrical humour that appealed to audiencesâ general knowledge of stage conventions, rather than specific local contexts or affiliations. Focusing on two very different dramatisations of Charles Readeâ s novel It Is Never Too Late to Mend, both written by C. H. Hazlewood, this article analyses how the playwright addressed the tastes and capabilities of a network of professionals with whom he was personally connected, while maintaining an essential ambiguity that made these dramas portable across an international dramatic circuit.
Afterwords: reparative queer death and the contemporary Irish novel, 1960-2000
(University College Cork, 2014) Goodwin, Adrian A.; Walshe, Eibhear; Irish Research Council
Given that an extant comprehensive study of homosexuality and the twentieth century Irish novel has yet to produced, this thesis is an attempt at rectifying such a gap in research by way of close textual analysis of writing from the latter half of the century—that is, from 1960-2000. Analysis of seven novels by four male authors – John Broderick, Desmond Hogan, Colm Tóibín and Keith Ridgway – lead to one overarching feature common to all four writers becoming clear: the homosexual or queer is always dying or already ‘dead’. ‘Dead’ is placed in inverted commas here as it is not only biological death that characterises the fate of gay men in the aforementioned literature. In the first instance, such men are also always already ‘dead’—that is, by light of their disenfranchisement as homosexual or queer, they are, in socialized terms, examples of the ‘living’ dead. Secondly, biological death neither fully obliterates the queer body nor its disruptive influence. Consequently, one of the overarching ways in which I read queer death in the late twentieth century Irish novel is through the prism of its reparative ‘afterw(a)ord’. On the one hand, such readings are temporally based (that is, reading from a point beyond the death of the protagonist - or their ‘afterward’); while, on the other hand, such readings are stylistically premised (that is, reading or interpreting the narrative itself as an ‘afterword’). The current project thus constitutes an original contribution to knowledge by establishing variant ways of reading the contemporary Irish novel from the point of view of the queer ‘unliving’. In assessing such heterogeneous aspects of contemporary queer death, the project a) contributes to recent, largely Anglo-American-based literary theoretical research on the queer and the eschatological, and b) provides a more contemporized literary base upon which future research can uncover a continuum of Irish queer writing in the twentieth century, one concerned with writing prior to 1960 and not limited to writing my men, in which death and same-sex desire are at parallel angles to one another.
Alice's Garden: Imagining agency in the natural world in Clare Boylan's Black Baby
(Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI), 2020-10-31) O'Connor, Maureen; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; European Regional Development Fund; Agencia Estatal de Investigación
The Irish writer Clare Boylan is something of a forgotten figure, despite enjoying significant literary success in her lifetime. Because of her untimely death, little critical work has been done on her fiction. Her blackly comic sensibility responds sensitively to characters situated in culturally specific environments, with particular attention paid to the vexed and contradictory position of women in their relationship to the natural world, and so this essay conducts a reading of her 1988 novel, Black Baby, using the insights of feminist new materialism and critical posthumanism, especially as articulated by Rosi Braidotti. In every genre, contemporary Irish women’s writing finds space in the natural world to explore alternatives to the status quo. Black Baby imagines an interracial family of women (and cats) in the enchanted environment of a miraculously blooming winter garden. By staging Alice’s most transformative moments, including her final moments of semi-consciousness, in a garden, Boylan makes recourse to the idea of an unending, generative process. Nothing really dies when life is no longer an individualised experience, but an impersonal moment of radical inclusion that exceeds the material limits of any one life span.
The Amergin Step: explorations in the imagination of Iveragh
(University College Cork, 2021-04-21) Bushe, Patrick Joseph; Walshe, Eibhear; O'Donoghue, Bernard
This work is a creative act of pietas, of homage and of gratitude towards the place where I have lived for almost half a century. It is an engagement with aspects of the literature of the southwestern end of the Iveragh peninsula. All of the places I explore lie within a twenty-kilometre radius of where I live, in Waterville, on the shores of Ballinskelligs Bay/ Bá na Scealg. I use the term literature in the broadest possible sense. Essentially, I include anything that gives verbal – and occasionally non-verbal – expression to an imaginative engagement with place. I include, for example, mythology, folklore, toponymy, archaeology, hagiography, travel writing, historical writing, topographical description and other categories. The work, however, is neither scholarly nor comprehensive. This is not only because I am not a scholar in any of these areas, but because I wanted to allow myself speculative and imaginative freedom of which scholars would rightly be wary. I do however have a respect bordering on awe for scholarly work, and I draw freely, in more than one sense, on the work of scholars, some of whom I am privileged to call friends. The work is not comprehensive because I wanted to concentrate on those aspects of the imagination of place which have engaged my own imagination, and my poetic work, for many years. At the same time, although this was not my intention when I embarked on the work, it is a contextual exploration and presentation of aspects of my own poetic output, in both Irish and English, over the last thirty-five years. A further dimension that underlies the work is my belief that our engagement with and nurture of what I think of as the imagination and memory of place is an essential element in how we protect and nurture the place where we live, in both the global and local sense. An ecologically committed philosophy cannot be concerned only with the physical environment. Our very survival, it appears, depends on an urgent recalibrating of our relationship with our environment, a move from that relationship being exploitative to being sympathetic, in the fullest sense of that word. We are unlikely to effect this move unless we have an imaginative relationship with our surroundings. Hence my title, The Amergin Step. Just before Amergin uttered his incantatory statement of identification with his surroundings, he stepped onto the shoreline. A step into a renewed imaginative identification with our environment is, I hope, part of what happens in this work. The work in its entirety consists of four main chapters, as well as a prologue and coda. For the purposes of this thesis in Creative Writing – which is limited to 80,000 words – the prologue, the first two of the main chapters and the critical commentary should be regarded as the thesis proper, with the remaining two chapters, the coda and my translation of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire then to be read as appendices.
Animals and animality in Irish fiction
(Cambridge University Press, 2022-07-14) O'Connor, Maureen; Sen, Malcolm
This chapter charts a transhistorical narrative to analyze the evolving permutations encoded within human–animal binarisms. Maureen O’Connor argues that “The native Irish were long believed to have powers of human–animal metamorphosis.” O’Connor states that the Welsh clergyman Giraldus Cambrensis, and later Edmund Spenser in his View of the Present State of Ireland, “claimed that the Irish regularly turned into wolves.” Interestingly, in the late nineteenth century “various threats to the status quo, including feminists and Fenians, were figured as werewolves. Following the Great Hunger and the subsequent rise of Fenianism, which agitated for Irish independence often through acts of violent terror, the image of the threatening Irish animal became ubiquitous in English culture.” O’Connor is especially alert to the gendered dimensions to such discourses, making visible the transformation of the dyadic relationship between animality and femininity that stretches from early Irish writing to colonial and postcolonial deployments.
Anti-capitalist critique and travelling poetry in the works of Lorna Dee Cervantes and Rage Against the Machine
(Forum for inter-american research, 2012-04) Alexander, Donna Maria
Apophrades, Adonais, and the return of the Shelleys
(Manchester University Press, 2010-04) Allen, Graham; Rawes, Alan; Shears, Jonathon
This chapter returns to Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, and in particular his notion of apophrades. It does so in the context of a reading of P. B. Shelley’s elegy to John Keats, Adonais. The chapter argues that Bloom’s version of apophrades elides the uncanniness possessed by the original Greek concept; an uncanniness exploited within Shelleys’ own poetry.
At once elitist and popular: The audiences of the Bewcastle and Ruthwell Crosses
(Cambridge University Press, 2006) Ó Carragáin, Éamonn
Banville, the Feminine, and the Scenes of Eros
(Edinburgh University Press, 2006) Coughlan, Patricia
Beneath the penumbral glow: John Banville and the cinema
(University College Cork, 2016) Kirwan, Mark; Davis, Alex; Allen, Graham; Irish Research Council
This study focuses on the cinematic aspects of John Banville’s work, aiming to answer how the overt cinematic interest in the cinema in his later work is to be understood in the context of his writing career as a whole. His writing plays on the difficulties inherent in the relationship between appearances and reality, raising questions about how words and images, accurately or otherwise, represent the world. The thesis here is that the cinema has become a significant feature and powerful symbolic image of these preoccupations in the later period of Banville’s career, resonating with his earlier work while bringing a new frame through which to look at his novels and wider career. This cinematic interest continues the Banvillian tradition of appropriating other art forms in the construction of his novels and also is a deeply resonant form considering the predominant themes of surface, appearance and inability to penetrate reality in his work. Following this thread involves the consideration of many of Banville’s novels, naturally, but also brings his scriptwriting credits for film into critical discussion of his writing, as well as the cinematically inflected work of his Benjamin Black writing persona. As such a further aim of the research is to expand the horizons of study around Banville’s writing by looking at the more esoteric and marginal in his oeuvre and how they relate to his prominent, dominant, well-known works.
The bestial feminine in Finnegans Wake
(MDPI, 2017) Lovejoy, Laura
Female characters frequently appear as animals in the unstable universe of James Joyce’s a Finnegans Wake. What Kimberly Devlin terms “the male tendency to reduce women to the level of the beast” is manifest in Finnegans Wake on a large scale. From the hen pecking at a dung heap which we suppose is a manifestation of matriarch Anna Livia Plurabelle, to the often lascivious pig imagery (reminiscent of Bloom’s experience with brothel-keeper Bella in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses) associated with juvenile seductress Issy, the lines between animal and human are frequently blurred when it comes to representing the feminine in the Wake. As scholars such as Devlin have highlighted, such constellations of images have their roots in blatantly misogynistic iconographies. Indeed, the reinscription of female characters into bestial roles in the Wake echoes a religious history of the dehumanisation of women. Yet, while this gendered representational tendency has been noted in Joycean and, more recently, wider modernist studies, its deployment and impact as a cultural and literary trope has not yet been interpreted according to the sociohistorical and cultural contexts which shaped the composition of Finnegans Wake. In particular, the culturally-specific sexual politics of Free State Ireland (1922–1937), against which Joyce arguably pushes throughout the entirety of the Wake, offer a suggestive lens through which to view the text’s interconnected representations of the feminine and the bestial. This article suggests that, in Finnegans Wake, the nonhuman is a mode through which Joyce explores the fraught sexual politics of early twentieth-century Ireland. Specifically, the bestial feminine becomes an avenue to inspect, expose, and satirise prevalent contemporary fears over female sexual licentiousness and national moral decline. Historicising the text’s grappling with themes of carnality and baseness, the article discusses the ways in which the woman-as-animal is deployed in Finnegans Wake as a grotesque symbol of an unbridled and threatening female sexuality—an extreme embodiment of 1920s and 1930s Ireland’s worst fears surrounding the perceived degeneration of Irish women’s modesty. Unearthing the Wake’s social contexts in order to interpret its sexual politics, this article ultimately asks whether the trope of the woman-as-animal stages a complete resistance against the conservatism of early twentieth-century Ireland’s sexual politics, or whether Joyce’s invocation of a historically misogynistic and patriarchal construction risks reinforcing the dehumanisation of women, moving the text’s sexual politics further away from the liberatory
Between Pantheons: Roman landscape and topography in Butor’s La Modification
(The Virgil Society, 2004) Cox, Fiona; Ó Carragáin, Éamonn
Beyond the Pale: Frederick Douglass in Cork
(Cork University Press, 1999-09) Jenkins, Lee M.
'A big book about England' ? Public and private meanings in Patronage
(Four Courts Press, 2005) Connolly, Claire; Belanger, Jacqueline
‘Black butter melting and opening underfoot’: the ‘peat harvest’ in Irish literature and culture
(Taylor & Francis, 2021-02-24) O'Connor, Maureen; Gearey, Benjamin
In this paper, we discuss ‘turf-cutting’, or the ‘harvest’ of peat, a centuries-long agricultural practice in Ireland. Although healthy peatlands are known to be carbon sinks, calls for the end of peat cutting are controversial in a country still largely defined by rural traditions. We consider the relationship between peat, peat cutting and identity: the ‘bog’ features significantly in literature and has played a central role in notions of a specifically gendered version of ‘authentic’ Irishness. The cutting of peat exposes and destroys cultural heritage in the form of the archaeological record, and we contrast this reality with the representation of peat cutting in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. We then focus on the fiction of Edna O’Brien, for whom the bog is precious, meaningful, culturally and aesthetically, when left in its undisturbed state, or when explored to connect to the past rather than fuel patriarchal desires
Blake and influence
(Lewis Glucksman Gallery, 2006-01) Allen, Graham; Zechlin, Rene; Healy, Ciara
This paper which commissioned for an exhibition entitled Blake and Sons at the Glucksman Gallery, Cork. The paper reflects on the continuing influence of Blake, and contrasts that still significant influence with a conspicuous lack of readership for his major works
Book review: Niamh Reilly and Stacey Scriver (eds.), Religion, gender and the public sphere
(ISASR in association with the Study of Religions, University College Cork, 2017) Coughlan, Patricia
A bookish history of Irish Romanticism
(Oxford University Press, 2014-11-27) Connolly, Claire; Fermanis, Porscha; Regan, John
This chapter argues that authors of Irish Romantic novels and national tales, such as Maria Edgeworth and John and Michael Banim, are not only concerned with the extent to which their novels sought to copy from Irish culture but are also worried about the slightness of the novel form in relation to the copiousness of that culture. Such concerns led to attempts by Thomas Crofton Croker and others to add texture and tactility to their depictions of the Irish past, through antiquarian methodologies but also facsimiles, lithography, and other developments in print culture. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which Irish literary texts were concerned not only to accurately and minutely detail the past, but also to adduce evidence of such historical and cultural authenticity, working against teleological accounts of the birth of the modern historical method, which see Romantic history as unconcerned with the evidentiary foundations of the past.

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