Farset, Gomorrah and Kilburn: Reading Diasporic Queer Identities and Irish Painting in 1950s London

Between January 1977 and June 1978, Gerard Keenan published a serial novel Farset and Gomorrah in the journal The Honest Ulsterman under the pseudonym Jude the Obscure. An important character in this is the homosexual painter Francie Gent, originally from Dublin but subsequently living in London. Gent is based on the Belfast-born painter Gerard Dillon, who settled in London in 1945, remaining there until 1968, when he returned to Ireland. Dillon was the key figure in a group of mostly male expatriate Northern artists in London during the 1950s, including also Dan O’Neill, George Campbell, James MacIntyre and Noreen Rice, although his work was more successfully shown in Dublin at the time.

Using Keenan’s account as a starting point, this paper examines the textual construction of the Irish artist in terms of both queer and diasporic identities. In an attempt to produce a more nuanced reading, however, I also consider other critical accounts of Dillon’s practice, such as exhibition reviews and James White’s monograph on the artist. These textual accounts are also, crucially, shaped and determined by responses to Dillon’s paintings.

“Discussion of Self–Contained Flat” (1955), a significant work by the artist painted while living in the basement of his sister’s house in Kilburn, will be central to my reading of Gerard Dillon as both queer and diasporic subject.

 

Fionna Barber
Senior Lecturer in History of Art
School of Art and Design History
Manchester Metropolitan University
Manchester, UK

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Re-presenting the Irish Dramatic Tradition: Two Plays by Vincent Woods.

Among the many features critics struggle to identify in Irish contemporary theatre is the rewriting of tradition—Greek, European or Irish. Vincent Woods is one of the prominent names in the diverse gallery of dramatists somehow working within this sphere. His successful and intriguing 1992 play, At The Black Pig’s Dyke, reveals a study of political divisions in the border territory, in a non-linear plot, rich in advances and retreats, anchored in folkloric Mummers Play—perhaps the most significant aspect of his text.

Woods draws his inspiration from a tradition almost abandoned and forgotten by the predominant trends in the history of Irish theatre. In his most recent play, however, first performed in 2005, A Cry from Heaven, he rescues again the sources which guided much of the work of the Revival playwrights, such as Yeats and Synge, to rewrite his own poetic version of the Deirdre myth.

The aim of this paper is to analyse in what ways both plays relate to the different traditions they spring from and what significance they acquire in contemporary Ireland—from the 1990s to the twenty-first century. 

Professor Beatriz Kopschitz X. Bastos
Universidade de São Paulo
BRAZIL

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Whose accent is that anyway?

Cultural production is necessarily intertextual in nature. If art imitates life, as the Greek aestheticians believed, then our everyday interactions whether social, political or personal, are the underpinning of all that is presented back to us as art. So, how do we consider this in light of a more globally aware and mobile population with access to a myriad of cultures and their texts? For the most part when one considers intertextuality in the light of a nation’s “cultural capital”, as Pierre Bourdieu termed it, the assumption is that the exchanges happen within a specified national consciousness. In a globalised society, or indeed within a nation-state as diasporic in nature as Ireland, it is now necessary to consider intertextuality as a border-crossing exchange. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realms of mass-media; cultural products which are by their very nature more “transferable” than more traditional art-forms.

This paper will look at issues of cross-cultural intertextualities and the implications this has not only on the reading of “Irish” cinema but also on the ways that filmmakers choose to portray their subjects to the wider audience. What are the markers that are used to denote ‘Irish’ and what can they tell us about the way in which Irish culture is positioned in the outside world? Whose accents are telling us what stories, and why? 

Jennifer Beckett, University of Sydney,New South Wales, AUSTRALIA

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Positive Influences and the Anxiety of Influence in Comic Irish Fiction:  Somerville and Ross, and Flann O’Brien versus Beckett

This presentation will build, most recently, on my Irish chapter for Comedy: A Geographic and Historic Guide (ed. Maurice Charney, Praeger, 2005), and my article “Mercier’s Irish Comic Tradition as a Touchstone for Irish Studies” in the “Backward Glance” set of essays on Mercier that I compiled for the New Hibernia Review (Winter 2004), where I concluded: ‘Our habit is to move from literary, “primary” sources to critical, “secondary” sources, but The Irish Comic Tradition is a critical book that marked not only the scholarly, but also the creative Irish writing that came after it. It is thus a “secondary” book that became primary’ (145). I have focused on influences in Irish fiction throughout my career in my five Irish books from 1983 to 1999, especially The Irish Novel: A Critical History.

In this paper I will focus on two chief case studies—the first from the nineteenth (spilling into the early twentieth) century, and the second from the twentieth century: Somerville and Ross as influenced by Maria Edgeworth, at the same time that they anxiously steered away from Yeats’s literary revival; and the responses to James Joyce by Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett. In the first instance, the cousins Somerville and Ross—in their hilarious “Irish R.M.” stories, beginning in 1898—emulated the author of the tremendously influential Castle Rackrent. Edgeworth once wrote to Somerville and Ross's great-grandmother, Mrs. Bushe, in 1832, ‘It is good to laugh as long as we can … and whenever we can.’ Somerville and Ross refused to write for the Abbey or to join the literary revival, even though “Ross” (Violet Martin) was visited by her cousin Lady Gregory, who asked her to contribute a play to the Abbey. In this part of my presentation, I will draw not only on my own previous work on Somerville and Ross, but also on Gifford Lewis’s definitive new biography of Somerville. O’Brien and Beckett also offer a wonderful case study of the anxiety of influence. O’Brien started out writing like Joyce, but then felt too “scooped” by Joyce and went on to write anti-Joycean works. Whereas At Swim-Two-Birds, published in the same year (1939) as Finnegans Wake, was a wonderfully phantasmagoric, Joycean novel, O’Brien later exacted revenge on Joyce for painting him into a literary corner by inserting him in The Dalkey Archive (1964) as a character who denied authorship of Ulysses and the Wake and was instead writing pamphlets for the Catholic Truth Society. O’Brien’s later novels were not as good as his early novels; he could not escape Joyce’s large shadow. David Powell has detailed O’Brien’s love-hate attitudes to Joyce as reflected in his “Myles na Gopaleen” articles for the Irish Times. Beckett also began by writing like Joyce, even authoring an early essay in appreciation of Finnegans Wake ten years before that novel was published in its entire, final form. But then he overcame and transcended Joyce’s influence by successfully developing in exactly the opposite direction of Joyce: instead of writing more and more complex works, Beckett shifted to French and wrote increasingly stripped-down, bare, and shorter and shorter works in a voice as original and great as Joyce’s, but very different and entirely his own

Professor James M. Cahalan
Professor of English
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
USA

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Anne Enright and Emma Donoghue: The Desire to Belong in Contemporary Irish Fiction 

This paper argues that Irish Studies lacks an effective framework for discussing the island's contemporary culture. In particular, the nation's centrality overshadows diverse ways of belonging, insisting on certain identities and excluding others. By showing how much the nation cannot encompass, however, contemporary Irish literature questions the nation's status as the field's defining rhetorical element.

To support this claim, I examine fiction by Anne Enright and Emma Donoghue, both of whom narrate alternative communities in ways that insistently stretch beyond the nation's constraints. Donoghue's fairy tale cycle, Kissing the Witch (1997), for example, navigates belonging through female characters who lose their relationships to their communities, and who find revised communities in love with each other. These communities reflect the book's overlapping narratives, which link one protagonist to the next. Each character's exclusion thus initiates a new community of the excluded, a community built on difference.

As this paper concludes, such plural visions of the desire to belong echo across contemporary Irish literature but are overlooked by a critical vocabulary centered on the nation. Tracing these echoes will renew critical thinking about Irish culture, for they expand this vocabulary by addressing increasingly difficult contemporary questions about belonging and being together.

Professor Brian Cliff
Department of English
Montclair State University
USA

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Fáilte Abhaile Synge: The Homecoming of Synge and His Plays to Inis Meáin, Sept. 2005

This paper will concentrate on the critical reception of the six plays of John Millington Synge in Inis Meáin (Aran Island) in September 2005. It will evaluate the diverse responses given to the productions firstly by islanders, and secondly by visitors.

It will also look at the “homecoming” aspect of the production, and the interconnectedness of place (the island) and memory. Synge is regarded as having belonged more to Inis Meáin than anywhere else. Did he achieve this insider/native status through his artistic appreciation of the island captured in his plays, or, through his personal understanding of how the island and her people worked?

This paper will look at the triumphant return of Inis Meáin’s most famous son, while also examining how the traditional and the modern elements of the various productions helped to illuminate the lasting quality of Synge’s work and that of his beloved Inis Meáin. 

Dr Mairéad Conneely, Department of Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Limerick

IRELAND

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George Fitzmaurice’s Artist Obsessives 

In 1914 Maunsel published Five Plays by George Fitzmaurice, a volume that included three plays that focus on the artist-obsessive: The Pie-Dish, The Magic Glasses, and The Dandy Dolls. Fitzmaurice’s artists respond to seminal Abbey plays, especially Yeats’s The King’s Threshold and Synge’s works, that examined the privileges, place, and responsibilities of the Irish artist. Fitzmaurice’s artist-obsessives physically remain in the familiar peasant cottage, but they inhabit a detached, perhaps psychotic, realm. While Yeats’s Seanchan was not fully of this world, Fitzmaurice’s Kerry madmen even more tenuously linked to reality. Seen in this context, Fitzmaurice’s artists pose a deeply subversive alternative to Yeats’s court poet or Synge’s storytellers.

Like Seumas O’Kelly, Padraic Colum, and Rutherford Mayne, Fitzmaurice challenged the prevailing (or Abbey) conception and portrait of the artist. The consequences were disastrous to Fitzmaurice’s career as a playwright. At the time of the publication of Five Plays the Abbey had already staged brief runs of The Pie-Dish and The Magic Glasses as well as the popular and more realistic The Country Dressmaker, but it would be decades before The Dandy Dolls was seen Dublin.

Professor Joan FitzPatrick Dean, Department of English, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Missouri, USA

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Across the Ages and Into the West: The White Horse Myth Still Travels

Dating as far back as the engraving on Salisbury Plains and the myth of Oisín and Niamh, the white horse has maintained a central position of importance among Irish images passed down in the arts. Significantly, the horse is and always must be white, a colour connected with both the feminine and other-worldliness.

Using a socio-psychological approach to reading this image across time and art, I explore the adaptation of the white horse myth to the cultural needs and hopes of the Irish in different generations. After tracing the appearance of the horse in the myth, and its adaptation in WB Yeats’ Wanderings of Oisin and Jack B. Yeats’ painting “There is no night,” primary attention will focus on the more recent appropriation of the image for the film Into the West and the way in which that image becomes both ‘self-affrighting’ and ‘self-delighting’.

Close analysis of the links between the original Oisín/Niamh myth, the Yeats’ adaptations, and the contemporary film illuminates the way in which this image particularly speaks to cultures in conflict and transition, to dealing with fear and claiming hope.

Dr. Dawn Duncan, Department of English, Concordia College, USA

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Echoes of the Colleen Bawn

The murder of Ellen Hanley in the Summer of 1819 had all of the ingredients of a crime to catch the public imagination: a beautiful young peasant girl, a rakish cad with a faithful side-kick, class differences, an elopement, a brutal killing and Ireland's most famous advocate, Daniel O'Connell, for the defence. A young court reporter, Gerald Griffin used the details of the case as the basis for his most famous novel, The Collegians.

Forty years later the story continued to capture the imagination with the production of Dion Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn, a play so successful that it begot a further incarnation, Julius Benedict's opera, The Lily of Killarney. The inevitable movie had to wait until 1911 (with another in 1934).

This paper will attempt some observations on this distinctively Irish morality tale, and consider the implications of its differing versions. It will also explore the extent to which aspects of the story, which had international success in mediums where rural Ireland was rarely represented, have found form in other works and icons such as Myles na gCopaleen and Ulysses.

Tony Earls, Macquarie University, New South Wales, AUSTRALIA

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My Two Dads: Roddy Doyle Under the Influence of Joyce and O’Casey

Roddy Doyle acknowledges many influences at play in his fictional writing: African-American blues and jazz obviously inform both The Commitments and Oh, Play That Thing.

In the back pages of A Star Called Henry, Doyle lists a number of texts and authors to whom he turned while writing. Clearly Doyle does not hesitate to grant status to textual forebears. What is far more interesting than the influences he does mention are the ones left out and the ones he resists; namely, James Joyce and Sean O’Casey. In the case of Joyce, Doyle lists Dubliners and Ulysses as contributing to A Star Called Henry, but then rails against both the author and the industry surrounding him, particularly with regards to last summer’s Bloomsday extravaganza. 

In the case of O’Casey, Doyle does not mention his Dublin plays in his acknowledgements and yet Doyle has done work on O’Casey and he mentions O’Casey constantly at readings and in interviews. As Jimmy Rabbitte is aware, asking someone ‘who’re your influences?’ (The Commitments, 21) is a tricky political and cultural game of acceptance and acknowledgement that involves author, text and reader.

In this paper, I propose to look at the intertextual tensions at work in A Star Called Henry and how Doyle responds to and works with questions of influence both literally and satirically.

Dr. Danine Farquharson, Assistant Professor of Irish Literature, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Newfoundland, CANADA

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‘A genuinely funny German farce’ turns into a very Irish play: The Broken Jug (1994), John Banville’s adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Der zerbrochene Krug (1807)

Although John Banville’s concern with German speaking literature has been analysed in a variety of contributions, his play The Broken Jug, an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Lustspiel Der zerbrochene Krug, has rarely received critical attention. This may be due to the fact that Banville is mainly the author of novels so his dramatic pieces are supposed to be minor works. The Broken Jug deserves special attention for its specifically Irish themes, and for its peculiar changes in setting and psychological characterisation of the figures of the pre-text. Whereas in Kleist’s Lustspiel the facts take place in Holland, Banville shifts the setting to the West of Ireland, namely to the village of Ballybog (which recalls Brian Friel’s Ballybeg), and he chooses a tragic moment in Irish history—August 1846—the time of the Great Famine. Furthermore, he introduces a new and interesting character, Mr Ball, the servant of the visiting inspector, and he turns Kleist’s 12 scenes comedy into a two-act play. The paper will explore intertextual elements in Banville’s The Broken Jug drawing special attention to the resulting “Irishness” of the play.

Professor Anna Fattori, University of Rome, ITALY

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From Stage to Page: Images of Ireland in the Reflections of the London Theatre Critics

This paper will be divided into two parts. In the first a brief synthesis will be presented of a detailed survey of the presence of the Irish play on the London stage in the period from Independence in 1922 to the end of the 1990s. The aim of this survey was to register every play of Irish authorship staged in London in the period, totalling almost 1500 productions. Upon completion of the survey a representative play was selected for each of the eight decades involved and the criticism published in the London press following the first night of each of those productions was collected and analysed. The second part of the paper will attempt to chart the evolution of the critical perception of theatrical images of Ireland, from O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, first seen in London in November 1925, to Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan, staged at the Royal Court in May 1996. The findings presented in this paper are based on post-doctoral research carried out at Royal Holloway University of London funded by FAPESP, São Paulo, Brazil.

Prof. Dr. Peter James Harris, Universidade de São Paulo, BRAZIL

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The Sinuous and the Straight: Diction and Gaze in Ciaran Carson's Ekphrastic Writing

Northern Irish writer Ciaran Carson has long been noted for the extent to which his texts, both in poetry and in prose, challenge traditional genre distinctions and refashion conventional form. This practice is also matched by his representational preferences, which rather often privilege halfway or indefinite conformations.

 This paper focuses on the intermedial dimension of this poetics of transit. Carson’s 2001 narrative Shamrock Tea revolves around one of the best-known paintings in the history of western art, combining elements from a variety of discourses at the crossroads between free association, hallucination and serendipity. This in fact offers a prose parallel to the altered perceptions, with a strong visual emphasis, that characterise Carson’s verse collection The Twelfth of Never (1998).

 On the contrary, his collection Breaking News (2003) includes several ‘conventional’ ekphrastic poems unified by the book’s overriding concern with war, memory and memorialisation. In stark contrast to the ludic, intoxicated and rather garrulous emphasis of The Twelfth of Never and Shamrock Tea, suggestive of a suspension of linear time and space, the dialogue between verbal and visual in Breaking News is as definite in its temporal and spatial referents as it is brooding, clear-eyed and tight-lipped. 

This contrast largely informs the interrogation of Carson’s recent poetics of ekphrasis in the present paper, led by the aim of clarifying the importance of the verbal / visual nexus for his continued relationship to a reality marked by a sharp (and pained) awareness of history. 

Dr Rui Carvalho Homem, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade do Porto, PORTUGAL

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‘Who does he think he is?’: An intertextual reading of Roy Keane's biography

A controversial figure, Roy Keane, the Manchester United footballer and former captain of Ireland, recently published his autobiography. The book was written in conjunction with a professional writer. Though the language is riddled with ‘football-speak’ and swearing, Keane is self-revealing and brutally honest. He has an interesting story to tell about his family, his friends and acquaintances, modern Ireland, the Irish media, professional football, and celebrity—as both a hero and a post-hero. The language and its tempo reveal a lot about the ways Keane sees himself, how he thinks others see him, and his expectations of those who will read his book. In addition to his self-analysis there is some honest commentary on and analysis of 'globalised' Ireland.

Dr Anthony Hughes, History Department / Irish Studies, University of New South Wales, AUSTRALIA

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‘The wind blows hard from our past’: Anxiety and Influence in Berryman’s Irish Dream Songs

Between September 1966 and June 1967 the American poet John Berryman (1914-72) was living in Ireland. It was a highly productive period, resulting in many of the lyrics that comprise the final book of his major work, The Dream Songs. Throughout these poems, Berryman is engaging with figures from the Irish canon—primarily Yeats and Hopkins, but also with Swift, Joyce, Synge and others. The influence of the first two on Berryman’s work is widely acknowledged; he himself affirmed his debt to Yeats for the characteristic form of the individual Dream Songs. But what is particularly interesting is the way in which Berryman’s agon with his literary forebears relates to the never-resolved trauma (depicted with graphic ferocity in the work’s penultimate poem) resulting from his father’s suicide, when the poet was a boy. 

If every strong writer is involved in a struggle with some literary ‘father’, as Harold Bloom famously argued—what complexities emerge when themes of writing, love and fame combine with intimations of madness, suicide and annihilation; when one is haunted equally by the ‘majestic Shade’ of Yeats, and the impulse to ‘spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave / who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn’?

Nigel Hunter, Departamento de Letras e Artes, Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, Bahia, BRASIL

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Ned Kelly in Dialogue with Irish Literature and Culture

The Kelly gang created their own songs and ballads celebrating their deeds and modelled on Irish songs, using Irish tunes such as 'The Wearing of the Green.' I believe it can be argued that Ned Kelly himself was influenced by Robert Emmet both in his strategy for the Glenrowan siege and his courtroom demeanour and speeches. The Jerilderie Letter makes frequent reference to Irish culture, and early Irish-Australian ballads.

My paper would discuss these allusions and references, and then go on to discuss the 'Irish' take on Kelly by Douglas Stewart (influenced by Yeats), Sidney Nolan, A. Bertram Chandler, Bernardette Devlin, James Galway, John Molony, and Peter Carey, among others. 

Emeritus Professor C.L. Innes, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

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An intertextual reading of Brian Moore

Criticism of Brian Moore sometimes brings up connections with Joyce. He admitted to his having been influenced by Joyce and there are obvious similarities between them: the emphasis on the ordinary, the setting of cityscape, and Catholicism and faith. They both lived under colonialism and a strict Catholic system. Both eventually became estranged from their families for whom Catholicism was something absolute. Disbelief and the sense of guilt would stay with them throughout their lives. 

However, despite these similarities, there are many differences too, which critical writing has usually overlooked, especially with regard to religion. To understand the differences, among other things, the thirty-nine year gap between them should be taken into consideration. 

Another point is that Joyce's protagonists naturally accepted formalized Catholicism and do not make a point at issue of it, while faith is something to be seriously grappled with by the protagonists in Moore's stories. The loss of faith is one of the main themes Moore pursued all through his writing career. The emotional effusion with which Moore portrays his protagonists is also in sharp contrast to the restraint with which Joyce wrote Dubliners. 

I will try to clarify the connections between the two writers. 

Professor Noriko Ito, Tezukayama University, JAPAN

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The ‘accident of being a writer’: locating the archival/authorial subject in Kate O’Brien’s unpublished life-writing.

Making use of the recently acquired Kate O’Brien papers at the University of Limerick, Ireland, this paper will interrogate the concept of the archive as a site of complex influences and representations which disrupt our understanding of the archive as a supposedly neutral site of memory-making and primary research material. In so doing, the paper will argue that the O’Brien archive exists as material fact—a physical and textual collection of personal papers—as well as an active site of argument and debate with the self, the multiple ‘I’ that represents O’Brien within the archive, over the act and process of memory-making, autobiography, and authorship.

Within the archive, O’Brien expresses a hitherto contained self-reflexivity on the dynamic intertextual processes that catalyzed her ‘accident’ into authorship. O’Brien’s identity as author is here represented in a state of constant flux, a fragmentation of other authorial identities which are only bound together by whatever narratives we, as her readers, have internalized previous to entering the archive. The paper will conclude that such archives have the ability to comment upon in unique ways multiple levels of intertextual collaboration, between critic and archive, and between author and influence.

Dr. Anne Jamison, School of Languages and Literature, University of Ulster, NORTHERN IRELAND

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Flann O’Brien’s Faustian Accomplishments, From Faustus Kelly to The Third Policeman

 Flann O’Brien’s little known play, Faustus Kelly (1943), concerns a character who sells his soul for political gain. However, in this version of the Faust myth, Mephistopheles is left so abused by and bewildered with the political environment of Ireland in the 1940s that he proclaims, ‘Not for any favour ... in heaven or earth or hell … would I take that Kelly and the others with me to where I live.’ The implication is clear. The political arena of 1940s Ireland is worse even than hell.

This paper will examine O’Brien’s use of the Faust myth to explicate the political environment of 1940s Ireland. The central question of this paper, however, concerns why it is that the much more intertextually-self-conscious characters of At Swim Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1940)—especially given the latter’s similar focus on Faustian Noman character—lead to the much more traditionally referential temperament of the characters in Faustus Kelly. This paper argues that this is partly a consequence of O’Brien wearing several distinct literary hats at the same time; indeed, Faustus Kelly was actually written and produced under O’Brien’s journalistic pseudonym, Myles na Gopaleen. My argument is that as a journalist, O’Brien was much more engaged with political issues than aesthetic ones, and that Faustus Kelly is more a product of the former than the latter. 

Assistant Professor Daniel Jernigan, Department of English, Nanyang Technological University, SINGAPORE 

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Revisiting the Western Australian Poems of John Boyle O'Reilly

After spending eighteen months as a prisoner in the Western Australian penal colony, Fenian John Boyle O'Reilly escaped to the United States. He settled in Boston, where he led a short but dramatic life as newspaper editor, civil libertarian, spokesman for Irish independence, and poet of considerable success.

O'Reilly's poetry lost much of its appeal after the first quarter of the twentieth century. His frequently declamatory style, which he had adopted in America from the Young Ireland poets, no longer read comfortably. Unfortunately, all of his poetry, much of which is still worthy of our attention, fell victim to O'Reilly's loss of popularity. Among his worthwhile poems were several of those he wrote about Western Australia. These poems are free of Young Ireland influence.

In Fanatic Heart: A Life of John Boyle O'Reilly (University of Western Australian Press, 1997) A.G. Evans writes that O'Reilly's Western Australian poetry shows ‘a rare understanding, sensitivity, and warm regard for the strange environment which he inhabited for a short time’. What Evans is referring to here are poems like "Western Australia" in which, in a series of sensuous images, O'Reilly responds to the ‘mystery’ of W.A.'s beautiful but songless birds and ‘myriad’ but scentless flowers, and concludes with the delightful conceit that God has not yet completed his work in W.A., which is ‘waiting with soft pain/The spouse who comes to wake [her] sleeping heart.’

O'Reilly's W.A. poems were not limited to responses to its flora and fauna. He was fascinated by what might become of this strange land, at the time a dumping ground for England's unwanted and Ireland's patriots. This fascination led, in an untitled poem which begins with the apostrophe, ‘Nation of sun and sin’, to a series of powerful images, which reveal an acute insight into the future of W.A. and, indeed, Australia as a whole:

 

Land of the songless birds,

What was thy ancient crime

Burning through lapse of time

Like a prophet's cursing words?

 

Aloes and myrrh and tears

Mix in thy bitter wine,

Drink while the cup is thine

Drink, for the draft is sign

Of thy reign in the coming years.

 

Through an analysis of the poems referred to above and several other O'Reilly W.A. poems, my paper will suggest that it is time for a fresh edition of the Western Australian poems of John Boyle O'Reilly. 

Dr. Conor Johnston,Massasoit Community College, Massachusetts. USA

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Voices from the Irish Margin: Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman and Christine Reid’s Joyriders

It could be maintained that Christina Reid’s Joyriders, set in the context of Belfast’s sectarian violence in 1986, is a play that addresses the concerns of northern Irish teenagers from social minorities. This play not only critically interrogates the intimidating political and economic mechanisms that undervalue teenagers, mostly Catholic, but also questions the canonicity of Sean O’Casey’s 1923 play, The Shadow of a Gunman, through the different views of young Irish audiences. This intertextuality lies in the fact that Joyriders, beginning with a theatrical production of the tragic ending of Gunman, reproduces many of Gunman’s dramatic elements and cross-examines them in a Belfast context. The protagonists of the two plays, not all surviving the sectarian hatred, illustrate the ways in which Irish nationalism is perceived as an entertaining, resentful, patriotic, or ignored subject, for the jobless, the homeless, drug addicts, and others on the margins of society. Through their eyes, political and religious conflicts are not necessarily the breeding ground for heroism, but reveal its absurdity and irrationality. This paper will therefore emphasise how O’Casey and Reid dramatize their critiques of relevant ideologies across several decades in Ireland. One important area of elaboration is how Reid’s adaptation of O’Casey’s masterpiece raises and foregrounds wom