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Item Racializing the Irish: the discursive production of race and nation by the young Ireland movement(Taylor & Francis, 45390) Molloy, Edward; Irish Research CouncilThis essay will analyse the ways in which definitions of race in nineteenth-century Ireland were not only, nor simply set by British colonizers, but rather were produced and determined by Irish people themselves. This long history of Irish engagement with concepts of race shaped how the Young Ireland movement understood how the Irish nation was (racially) constituted. Additionally, the multi-racial history of the Irish nation inflected Young Ireland's understanding of how history structured the construction of an Irish nationality. This paper then will show how the Young Irelanders understood race and, more particularly, how they recognized themselves as racialized subjects. Their own adoption of a racialized Irishness was important to their vision for Ireland's revolutionary future. Placing race centrally within the writings of Young Ireland, highlighting its essential role in a historical account of Irish nationality, this essay will thereby cast new light on the difficulties inherent in Young Ireland's nationalist project. In particular, it will underscore the anxieties experienced by Young Ireland about the potential impossibility of the nationalist project with reference to its production and experience of racialized but ambiguous subject positions.Item Shakespeare and early modern Europe: A critical survey(Routledge, 2018-02-12) Semple, Edel; Vyroubalová, Ema; Wood, NigelThis survey examines the history of criticism on Shakespeare and early modern Europe. With major sociopolitical European events in mind, the article reviews scholarship on this topic from the early twentieth century to the present day. Particular emphasis is placed on studies of Shakespeare’s own treatment of European characters and settings. The related topics of the changing meaning of “Europe” of Shakespeare’s European afterlives are also briefly discussed.Item ‘So am I detached / From the fabric which claims me’ Women, fabric, and poetry(EFACIS, the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies; KU Leuven, 2018-03-19) Coughlan, PatriciaWomen are immemorially associated with fabric, an association both metaphorical and metonymic, and one widespread in myth, legend and folklore. Spinning and weaving are bound up with women and femininity in fundamental ways, entwining socio-economic histories with deep and persistent trans-cultural symbolic and ideological systems. Women spinning or weaving are figures for both death and birth, and ancient equivalences represent gestation itself as a process of weaving. Drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s revisionary theorizing of maternal subjectivity as both seamless and a paradigm for human creativity, this article teases out significant strands in the representation by contemporary poets Boland, McGuckian, and Ní Chuilleanáin of the women-fabric association and its meanings. If there is a powerful cultural given that women in some sense are fabric, that which has been woven, these three poets have fabricated powerful and various accounts of the different proposition that women are agents of their own weaving, in McGuckian’s words both ‘detached’ and constituting ‘the fabric which claims’ them.Item ‘We get all sealed up’: An essay in five deaths(Edinburgh University Press, 2021-05) Coughlan, PatriciaIn January 1941 Elizabeth Bowen, struggling to complete Bowen's Court, wrote to Virginia Woolf: ‘the last chapter seems to, or ought to re-write retrospectively all the rest of the book’, and also that she felt ‘despair about my own generation … we don't really suffer much but we get all sealed up’. I approach these two remarks as structuring ideas and as connected. Drawing on recent research on the affective dimensions of history, I examine the management of emotion in Bowen's elite class and period, entailing the systematic blockage of conscious suffering and outward displays of feeling. In this frozen war midwinter, she saw that the conclusion of her family history must decisively reject the trajectory of what had gone before. Would this painfully break the ‘seal’ of this last Bowen's tacit acceptance of settler values? The essay is in five episodes, four about a death in or near Bowen's experience, one in her fiction. Each adds a layer to my analysis of these associated questions and their significanceItem Paper ghosts: Reading the uncanny in Alice McDermott(Irish-American Cultural Institute, 2012-06-15) Coughlan, Patricia