Last year saw the publication of the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (ed. Robert Welch), and this year brings us a revised and enlarged edition of Robert Hogan's Dictionary of Irish Literature, which first appeared in 1979. It comes now in 2 volumes issued solely by Greenwood Press, Connecticut-though a London imprint is apparently to follow shortly. Macmillan, daunted by the success of the Companion, evidently shied from the proffered opportunity. Yet reviewers have insisted that the books are equally admirable, albeit the Dictionary comes with a steep price tag at £99.50 (pre-publication £79.50), reserving it for a needs-must audience and library reference shelves.
The new Dictionary has, as might be expected, lists numerous recently-fledged talents-Frances Molloy (sadly deceased), Paul Mercier, Marie Jones, &c.-though unavoidably it is already facing what might be called the 'Martin McDonagh factor'. Naturally, as coming from Hogan, it gives due notice to theatre companies (Project, Druid, Red Kettle, &c.); less expectedly, it also includes articles on Irish publishing houses-Dolmen, Maunsel, Poolbeg, &c. As in the last edition, the editor reserves the right to asperse the abilities of virtual nonentities who might just as easily be censured by omission-but omission is not Bob Hogan's way, and there is a kind of good grace in that too. Oddly, a few of the entries contain nothing but a headword, perhaps in token of a third edition, while others such as that on Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill are clearly provisional with a modest four lines. All entries, as before, are signed and are not-as in the Companion-anything like uniform in style.
A notable feature of the Dictionary is the index, which lists all author's names and book-titles as well as some proper nouns such as Coldstream Guards, Tammany Hall, Unionism, &c. The result is extraordinary concordance of the literature. Generous (and in many instances in exhaustive) bibliographies attached to each article makes this an indispensable research tool which no Irish literary scholar can get far without. The longer bibliographical listings associated with major authors have been rationalised, and though it is not clear what is gained by making the Joyce listing author-alphabetical, the Yeats list is treated as a bibliographical essay with separate sections devoted to different sorts of commentary and critical approaches, in addition to the original works and reprint editions. A 20-page general bibliography is fairly selective and still outgunned by the equivalent portion of Field Day's Irish Writing (1992). It is good to see that IASIL Proceedings are generously quoted, but Joep Leerssen-whose book is front of stage again-is surprisingly passed over. These are quibbles. Professor Hogan's Dictionary in the revised edition remains itself, and more.
To Greenwood Press we were also indebted for Ann Brady's Women in Ireland: An Annotated Bibliography (1988), the sixth volume in their bibliographies and indexes in Women's Studies. Its 478 pages dish up an extraordinary breadth of references, such as-for instance-Charlotte O'Connor Eccles, 'A Plea for the Modern Woman', in Irish Monthly for May 1904, in immediate contiguity with a pamphlet of the Employment Equality Agency: Its Role in Eliminating Sex Discrimination ... [1978].
Greenwood now promise to bring out Alexander Gonzalez's Modern Irish Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook in Autumn 1997, having published Assessing the Achievement of J. M. Synge in November 1996, a collection of essays by numerous hands, among them Coilin D. Owens, Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt, John Harrington, et al. A further, and unquestionably interesting compilation, Pre-Revival Irish Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook is being undertaken for Greenwood by Bernard McKenna, who may or may not be a relative of Brian McKenna, author of the invaluable handbook, Irish Literature 1800-1875: Unfamiliar Sources (1978).
Not to be overlooked is Bernice Schrank and William W. Dernastes's Irish Playwrights 1880-1995: A Research and Production Sourcebook, and James H. Murphy's Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922. The latter is an enlargement of a fascinating study that has been glimpsed in paper-form at a recent IASIL conference, and the fruit of very extensive reading in the shadow of the Irish Parliamentary Party among forgotten novels including Justin Huntley McCarthy, Rosa Mulholland, and the aforementioned Charlotte Eccles, et mult. al. What is revealed is a forgotten literary constituency concerned with mediating the contemporary idea of Irishness in an empire context while insisting on the ethnic and religious particularity of the national bourgeoisie of Ireland. In Nos Autem, which appeared last year, Murphy has written a history of Castleknock, the Irish Catholic 'public school' that is not Clongowes Wood. He is a member of the All Hallows community in Dublin, occupying the former home of the Coghill family, built by Edward Lovett Pearce in 1727.
A ring of American university presses with strong publishing records in Irish studies are now successfully targetting EU-side scholars aboard the good ship Eurospan (frigate-class, if I am not mistaken). Syracuse, Catholic Univ. of America (Wash.), Notre Dame, Florida, Georgia, Winsconsin, Ohio, Penn State, Fordham, Massechussetts, Iowa, Virginia, Alabama-in no particular order. Increasing interdisciplinarity is a notable feature but the balance is still Joyce, Joyce, Joyce and then the others. One can't of course review a continent, but as an indication of the scope it may be pointed out that the back list reaches from Robert Munter's important A Dictionary of the Print Trade in Ireland, 1550-1775 (NY: Fordham UP 1988) to Keith Booker's Flann O'Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire (Syracuse 1995), a text in the new taxonomic tradition which might just as well be called 'De Selby Redivivus'.
Current titles include Cheryl Temple Herr's Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From Ireland to the American Midwest (Florida UP 1996), a study based on Kenneth Frampton's concept of 'critical regionalism', which exhibits the sure-footed sense of dynamic social contexts behind literary texts that is her hall-mark. There is also a collection of essays on The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers edited by Theresa O'Connor. I do not think that I would use the preposition 'in' quite like that if I were editor, but then I would not call for 'a new, gendered, reading of Ireland's comic intellectual heritage in prose and poetry since the 18th century' either-or at least not all of those things in the same mouthful. Elizabeth Cullingford Butler's much-admired Gender and History in Yeats's Love Poetry from Syracuse UP is a reissue of the Cambridge University Press title of 1993, while the collection of essays edited by R. B. Kershner treads the road pioneered by Cheryl Herr before she repossessed her notably Swiftian family name.
Dillon Johnston's Irish Poetry After Joyce (Notre Dame 1995) has had a refresh updating it to 1995 without modifying the anti-Yeatsocentrian bias or the pairing system according to which Irish poets are made to proceed through literary history two by two. The Eurospan note on William York Tindall's Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake, first printed in 1959, hints that the author has been meditating Joyce's masterpiece with some intensity during the last forty years and is now ready to report on it, which is of course misleading. The allusion to 'Joyce's unexpected depths' suggests that blurb-writing, like other forms of advertising, has a limited shelf-life. Nevertheless, Eurospan's catalogue is a serviceable bibliographical guide to an impressive achievement in Irish studies state-side.
Academic Web Users everywhere will excited by the news that the BL Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC), formerly available by password only at some expense to the enrolled institutions, will reach the World Wide Web on May 22, 1997.
Our own explorations in the BL catalogue suggest room for caveats about the British Library, however: it cannot be assumed that every Irish imprint of the 19th century is to be found there, nor even all of Duffy, Curry, and other Irish publishers. Unquestionably, however, the copyright status and unselected nature of this great library (as compared with TCD, where they scorned to collect popular fiction until very recently) makes it a key resource for Irish bibliography.
For 18th-century imprints, and especially the produce of the Irish book-pirating trade selling into America through the channels so ably described by Cargill (Irish Booksellers and English Writers, 1740-1800, Mansell 1986), the New York Public Library and some other American collections are still the place to look for special items.
BL OPAC joins the wide resources of the COPAC Web page, giving access to British and Irish university libraries in their legions, to make up a battery of catalogues which make the bibliographical mind boggle at the sheer potentiality for rapid accessing of what James Joyce, in pompous youth, would call 'widely related' publication details. The problem (if problem it is) is, what to do with it all? Surely it immediately suggests the possibility of co-ordinating bibliographical searches within the Irish studies area on an unprecedented scale? Fortunately .... .
Last issue we promised to celebrate the achievements of Rodopi, the academic publishing house in Amsterdam with a circulation office in Atlanta, Georgia, that printed the papers of the IASIL Conference set in Leiden in 1992-full listings of which were included in the last volume of the Newsletter. Here is an academic press that serves the needs of conferences in Irish studies and other literary subject-areas in economical but wellbound paperbacks, though strengthening conspicuously in design year by year. Rodopi publishes an astounding range of series in Literaturwissenschaft and Teoría Literaria, as well as French Letters, American Literature, Clinical Teaching, Poznán Studies, Bahktinitis, Cultural Psychoanalysis, Slavonics, Imagologica, Postcoloniality, Religious Beliefs (Christian v. others), Psychology of Religion, Comparative Lit., European Joyicity (ed. Fritz Senn), Avant Garde, Fichte studies, Aussie playwrights, Interkultur, Hispanics, Popperism (Karl-wise), and further intriguing titles such as Faux Titres and Daphnis. But our debt of gratitude chiefly regards the matter of Ireland.
No doubt there are more Irish collections than we have examined, but several of these clearly deserve wider recognition as in-gatherings of critical labour in the area. One such is Joris Duytschaever and Geert Lernout, eds., History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature (1988), which includes a brilliant expatiation on 'Poetry and Violence' by Brendan Kennelly, along with truly illuminating depositions on Irish writers and their contexts such as Lernout's piece on 'Banville and Being', Theo d'Haen's on 'Desmond Hogan and Ireland's Post-Modern Past', Duytschaever's on 'History in the Poetry of Derek Mahon', and W. J. McCormack's on 'Finnegans Wake and Irish Literary History'. The thrust of this last-for those who are curious-is that the Wake has had no real influence upon us, but nevertheless reveals in x-ray the discontinuities that define our cultural condition. The collection also contains Joep Leerssen's essay on the Táin and more particularly on Lady Gregory's better-dressed version of it, as well as Louis Dieltjens' account of the Abbey Theatre as a cultural formation. It is all, in Joyce's coinage, intensely 'throughsighty' stuff and argues strongly for the internationalism of Irish studies.
In The Crows Behind the Plough: History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama (1991), a further issue of the Costerus Series edited by Lernout alone, the same sort of topical and contextual investigations are prefaced by Nina Witoszeck and Patrick Sheeran's striking paper entitled 'The Tradition of Vernacular Hatred'. Witoszeck and Sheeran-or ought we say Nina Fitzpatrick?-describe the culture of modern Ireland in terms of the 'zero-gain' mentality of primitive societies, the very definition of begrudgery. It is a mordant essay which curiously shares in the maledictory nature of the syndrome it describes, while remaining pokerfaced in the best manner of its genre, viz, a bad story about the hard life. Other papers in the gathering (of symposiastic origin, naturally) clearly anticipate longer essays from the same authors such as Werner Huber's recent book on Beckett's reception in Germany. Christopher Murray on the historical inaccuracy of Friel Translations scenario is not easily shrugged off by apologists for the Foyleside school of Irish history. Riana O'Dwyer writes authoritatively on Frank McGuinness; Rüdiger revisits The Gigli Concert; Edna Longley discourses on traditionalism and modernism in Irish Poetry, while Tjebbe Westendorp's reflections on 'The Great War in Irish Memory' refine upon a subject which she formerly expounded in a wider context of English poetry.
Further Irishly-useful editions of literary criticism from Rodopi include C. C. Barfoot and Theo D'Haen's collection, The Clash of Ireland: Literary Contrasts and Connections (1989).This includes work by Joep Th. Leerssen, Peter van de Kamp, Wim Tigges, José Lanters, Tjebbe Westendorp, and Lernout, as well as the transactions of the Second International Beckett symposium held in the Hague in 1992,here selected and edited by Marius Buning and Lois Oppenheim under the title Beckett in the 1990s (1994). The most recent Irish titles are Roselinde Supheert's monograph, The Reception W. B. Yeats in the Netherlands Before Word War 2 (1995), and Terence Brown's edition of an ESF conference as Celticism (1996)-the latter noticed in a previous Newsletter.
The jewel in the Rodopi crown is surely their Postmodern Studies series, conducted under the general editorship of Theo d'Haen and Hans Bertans since 1988, and now counting fifteen volumes with the appearance of Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism, edited by David Pierce and Peter de Voogd. Offerings for the year of 1994, include British Postmodern Fiction and Liminal Postmodernisms, both edited by D'haen and Bertrans, as well as Postmodern Surroundings edited by Steven Earnshaw and Deconstructing Foucault edited by Ricard Miguel-Alfonso and Silvia Caporale-Bizzini. In 1995 appeared the 622-page Bibliography of Postmodernism compiled by Deborah Madsen. In the eighteenth-century the Dutch were the main purveyors of affordable editions of English works to the world outside the British metropolis-a trade shared with the piratical printers of Dublin before the Act of Union queered their pitch. It is tempting to hope that Rodopi might do the same for Irish literature, most especially Irish academic literature ... . What chance a Rodopi edition of the stranded 1995 IASIL papers?
The American Society for Theatre Research has presented the 1996 Barnard Hewitt Award of the University of Michigan for Outstanding Research in Theatre History to Joseph Donohue and Ruth Berggren for their Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest: The First Production (1995), published in the Princess Grace Irish Library ( Monaco) Series by Colin Smythe, Ltd. In bestowing the award, the committee cited the massive research and scholarly erudition evidenced in both the painstaking recreation of the script for the play's first production, and the abundant annotations and illustrations that provide new insights into virtually every line of the text.
Una Chaudhuri's Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Michigan UP) and Scott Cutler Shershow's Puppets and "Popular" Culture (Cornell UP) received honourable mention. The awarding committee included Joseph Roach (Tulane), Virginia Scott, Chair (Amherst), and Margaret Knapp, (Arizona State).
November 1996 saw the appearance of the fourth issue of UCG Women's Studies Centre Review, whose high standards of writing and production we have noticed before. The editoris are Alan Hayes, Ann Lyons, Áine Ní Léime, and Lorna Shaughnessy. The current 184-page volume includes essays under the section titles, 'Defining the Political', 'Perspectives on Citizenship', and 'Beijing and After', as well as critical and creative writing in 'Different Voices', along with book reviews. Contact Publications, Women's Studies Centre, University College, Galway, Ireland; tel: 353 91 750455; faf: 750549; email: <wsc@ucgt.ie>.
On 4 December 1966 a reception to mark the publication of the first three volumes of the seven-volume series, of James Clarence Mangan's works was given at the George Frederick Handel Hotel, Fishamble St., Dublin, the volumes already printed being Collected Poems, 1838-44; Collected Poems, 1818-37, and the authoritative, 500-page biography by Ellen Shannon-Mangan (actually published in February 1996). This last-named is dedicated to Augustine Martin, the greatly-lamented Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at UCD and a long-standing friend of IASIL who served as General Editor to the project. The whole is a monument of Irish literary scholarship and an indispensible component any Irish library of serious pretensions. The publisher, Irish Academic Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin. Jacques Chuto, a principal in the Mangan project, has just issued a French translation of the poems of Derek Mahon with Denis Rigal.
The ingeniously folded broadsheet Riposte has been dropping through Irish letterboxes for several months past, with a poem of a dozen-or-so lines neatly set in each of sixteen available panels. Rosemary Rowley says 'congratulations on reviving the Broadsheet Tradition' and Desmond Egan says 'I like Riposte -it's lively', but Theo Dorgan says (apparently) '... we don't like the idea ...' on behalf of Poetry Ireland. The occasional familiar name (Mary Rose Callan, Karina Tynan) turns out not to be the person you were thinking of. Well, at least we have survived the winter blues-crocuses and butterflies are in the ascendent. This is vox humana with a vengeance. The pitch is, £8 keeps your name on the mailing list and purchases eligibility for The Competition. At present, the IASIL Newsletter editor (who has not coughed up) is listed along with Tony Gregory, Gay Byrne, Dermot Healy, Brendan Kennelly ... [What does Brendan say, that's what we want all to know!]
The White Row Press, established at Dundonald, Belfast, has reissued The Autobiography of William Carleton, last seen with a foreward by Patrick Kavanagh (MacGibbon & Kee 1968), and now decked out with another by Benedict Kiely. The hardbound book, with 238 gloss pages and some endpaper advertisements devoted to books of Ulster interest, has a cover painting by Basil Shawcross based on the 'best' portrait of Carleton by John Slattery. The text and notes are those of D. J. Donoghue's 1896 edition, using manuscript remains which he 'completed'. Kiely's preface (which does not recount what was involved in this process) shows how little a man may change his mind in a lifetime.
The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the mentality of the writer whom Yeats called Ireland's 'true historian'. It is nothing like a scholarly edition but makes fascinating reading. Whether Kiely is up to speed when he asserts that the 'makings of modern Ireland' were in the world that Carleton saw without and 'found within his own soul' is another question. This was the theory of the revival, but it may be that the arrival of modernity has simply been the slow obliteration of all that. [Now hold on, which side are you on?-Ed.]
James Pethica's edition of Lady Gregory's Diaries 1892-1902, published by Colin Smythe (1996), has been justly praised as an authentic history of the literary revival in the making, as well as a brilliantly annotated piece of literary scholarship, comparing for interest of the on-page footnotes with Professor John Kelly's annotations to Yeats's Letters in the currently advancing Clarendon Press edition. It would be a mistake to let our warranted excitement about Roy Foster's biography of Yeats overshadow this pleasurable and intellectually significant resource for Irish literary history. An exhaustive 20-page index, constructed to exacting standards of this publisher-and the combined indexes of Colin Smythe's Irish Literary Studies series are a resource of some importance-underlines its utility, and makes it a perfect shelf-companion with Lady Gregory: Fifty Years After, the collection of essays edited by Smythe with Ann Saddlemyer in 1987.
Following the appearance of Lucy McDiarmid and Maureen Waters edition of the Selected Writings of Lady Gregory in Penguin paperback during Autumn of 1995, Pethica's work confirms the tendency to hand the literary revival as a movement as well as some plays conventionally ascribed to Yeats back into the charge of their real mother, if not indeed their 'onlie begetter'.
A volume of essays by Derry Jeffares, collected as Images of Invention (Colin Smythe 1996), confirms the IASIL Life President's immensely sure grasp of Irish literature in English. It also demonstrates his absolute independence from the magnetism of large, irrelevant ideas about the primacy of this or that form of cultural life in Ireland and might even be accused of favouring the increasingly unfashionable Anglo-Irish strand of our literature. It does: and it is the real thing, based on a profound familiarity with the authors and an instinctive knowledge of their several Irish contexts.
Well-judged discourses on the Irishness of Swift, Farquhar, and Goldsmith are followed by accounts of Lady Morgan, Maturin and Charles Lever, a writer whom he rescues from oblivion in a persuasive re-evaluation styled 'Yeats and the Wrong Lever'. In 'Lever's Lord Kilgobbin' he works upon the matter of the novel wherein Lever 'reveals himself as truly Anglo-Irish' to such effect that the final appraisal seems perfectly self-evident: '[Lever] had moved from comedy through elements of tragi-comedy to a tragic view of life in the Ireland he loved.' (p.187).
This is not a version of Lever much favoured by writers in the Field Day school of Irish criticism. Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that Lever, whom nationalists of the 1910s still felt it necessary to cite as one of the (albeit regrettable) geniuses of Irish writing, is wholly omitted (along with Samuel Lover) from that synposis of Irish writing in 'all traditions'. This ostracism is a stroke of such intellectual vulgarity that, though Lever will never be again be really popular, some act of generosity should be considered in his favour. The dedication of a Lever Room in UCD's Belfield campus might do the trick, perhaps.
Other pieces on Sterne, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt-probable father of Robert Gregory in Foster's book-and Sir Robert Torrens, Mme McBride ('In my teens I used to talk to Maud Gonne') complete an itinerary of Anglo-Irish letters and their context which can be relished all the more deeply now that we have officially placed 'Anglo-Irish' is a sub-set of the wider realm of Irish literature in English. However, an essay in the Irish realist novel from Gus Martin's Genius of Irish Prose collection demonstrates that this box will not hold the author either.
In the Studia Anglistica Upsalienia series (which now extends to ninety-five titles, comes a Hedda Friberg's dissertation on An Old Order and a New: The Split World of Liam O'Flaherty's Novels (Uppsala 1996), a richly annotated commentary that prominently features Peter Sheeran, James Cahalan, Liam O'Dowd, Michael D. Higgins, John Zneimer, and A. A. Kelly, among the citations, but also contains material letters from Kitty Tailer and plates including a photo belonging to Peggy O'Sullivan showing O'Flaherty tinkling on an accordion by the halfdoor of the cottage in Glencrea [sic], with Margaret Barrington in the background. The stern of a pram protrudes into the picture right, a component of the relationship unknown to me. This is a robust treatment of the writer's life and works, though I suspect that the Old-Order and New-Order typology might become a little tiresome. Still, if Leerssen can go mega with 'imagotypical', why not 'Old-orderism' too?
In November 1796 the Linen Hall Library of Belfast (under its official title of the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge) published Edward Bunting's Ancient Music of Ireland. Exactly 200 years later the Library has published a facsimile of this seminal work containing the 66 traditional tunes that Edward Bunting took down at the Harpers' Festival in Belfast in 1792, in a limited edition of 1,000 copies. This facsimile publication was made possible by the financial support of Flying Fox Films and matching funds from ABSA. It is also hoped that this extremely handsome production will raise money for the Linenhall Library, where the name of each subscriber will be listed and attached to the archive copy. The book, bound in soft covers and measuring 9x13", costs £25.00. Contact the Library at 17 Donegal Square, N., Belfast BT1 5GD; tel: (0)1232 321707; fax: 438586.
The Linenhall Library, founded by Belfast philanthropists in 1788, and survivor of a recent fire-bomb attack reputedly by Republican activists under some misapprehension about its cultural character and historical profile, is now extending into the upper floors of an adjacent building with £300,000 support from the National Lottery-though Phase B, intended to provide additional reading space, calls for a further £400,000. Along with its valuable Irish book collection and its incomparable archive of the political literature of Ulster in all periods, the Library holds a unique collection of 'Troubles' memorabilia including pamphlets, badges, banners and suchlike printed matter. Friends of the Linenhall Library contribute £35 annually to subvent this living museum of Northern Irish culture and society which frequently hosts exhibitions and lecture series, including the Irish Language Lectures and the Linenhall Lectures. Mr John Killen produced a history of the library in 1991. A more recent publication is An Uncommon Bookman: Essays in Memory of J. R. R. Adams (1996).
Proceedings of IASIL conferences in Cairo and Tokyo came out in time (narrowly) to appear at the Hofstra Conference in August 1996. These are published by Colin Smythe, Ltd., as Mary Massoud, ed., Literary Inter-Relations: Ireland, Egypt, and the Far-East, and Toshi Furomoto, et al., eds., International Aspects of Irish Literature. We will give a full account of them in the next Newsletter. In the meantime, Colin Smythe is offering copies at 25% discount post free for direct sales to IASIL members. Contact his address at P.O Box 6, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, England, SL9, 8XA; tel: (0)1753 886000; fax: 886469.
From Colin Smythe also comes a collection of pieces delivered at symposium by Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy, John McGahern, and John Banville, with commentaries upon those writers by Maurice Harmon, Gus Martin, Chris Murray, Lynda Henderson, John Cronin, and Rûdiger Imhof, all published as Irish Writers and their Creative Process, and edited by Jacqueline Genet with Wynne Hellegouarc'h. Professor Genet-whose idea of retirement is comparable with Derry Jeffares'-has also edited Rural Ireland, Real Ireland? (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1996).
In March, 1997, the Center for Irish Studies/Lárionad an Léinn Éireannaigh at the University of St. Thomas launches a referreed quarterly journal in the shape of the New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua. The first issue contains recollections of Belfast in the 1970s by Gerald Dawe, Adrian Frazier on entwinements between Dublin and Paris, George Moore and Manet; Mary Trotter on the Field Day production of Tom Kilroy's Double Cross; Gearóid Denvir on the Irish language in postcolonial period; poetry by John F. Deane; James Doan on similarities between the seventeenth-century English conception of the Irish and Native Americans;, as well as others on archaeology of the famine at Strokestown, Irish tourism and Joyce, the new popularity of Irish traditional music, and-intriguingly-Ford Maddox Brown's "Work" and the Irish famine. Contact with Thomas Dillon Redshaw via e-mail at <tdresdhaw@sttthomas.edu> with enquiries, orders, or contributions.
Wilde about Wilde, the pamphlet-form journal of Wilde studies edited by Carmel McCaffrey, has reached its 10th year of publication. John Wilson Foster has done the honours with a thoughtful essay on 'Science and Oscar Wilde', in which he contemplates Wilde's scientific reading in Oxford 1874-79, as revealed in the Notebooks (edited by Philip E. Smith and Michael S. Helfand), and finds that we can no long view him as the supreme exponent of one side of the Two Cultures dichotomy. In reading Huxley, Tyndall, Spender, and especialy William Kingdon Clifford, Wilde discovered 'the evolutionary foundation of his belief in individuality'. He also, more ominously, learned a lesson in pathology from H. T. Buckle's comments on William Cullen and William Hunter, two gentlemen who sought to found a science of the abnormal. From Buckle, Wilde transcribed: 'Even animal monstrosities are now known not to be capricious but essentially natural; a new science is thus produced, that of Tetralogy.' That must have simplified relations with his mother. Eric Bentley poses a query about the true authorship of a pornographic novel called Teleny (1890), sometimes touted as a work by Wilde. This enthusiastic journal keeps offering excellent small wares but nevertheless keeps missing the Irish studies gravy train. Carmel McCaffrey can be reached at <carmelm@ccpl.carr.lib.md.us>.
We have already mentioned under Conferences [above] Joseph Th. Leerssen's extraordinary book Mere Irish & Fíor Ghael: Studies In the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century, first published as Vol. 22 in the General and Comparative Literature series of Utrecht, and issued in Amsterdam and Philadelphia by John Benjamins Pub. Co. This year Cork University Press has reissued it, and with it a newer work, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, being No. 4 of the 'Critical Conditions' series edited by Seamus Deane of Field Day. The two other titles in the series, Luke Gibbon's Transformations in Irish Culture and Kevin Whelan's The Liberty Tree, will receive further notice in the next Newsletter. With this sudden spate of publication, Leerssen is set to assume his rightful place at the pinnance of contemporary intellectual discourse in Ireland. It may also be, with his superlatively lucent narrative of the round towers of monastic Ireland (alias 'Phoenician fire-towers') and their stereotypical misadventures at the hands of 18th- and 19th- century colonial antiquarians and assorted wishful thinkers, that he will reach a wider audience.
At any rate, it is certain that the standard of critical and historical discourse vis-a-vis Irish antiquarianism in every period has undergone a sudden revolution-though heavy use of works by Robert and Catherine Ward, and a UCD MA thesis by Ann de Valera (Antiquarian and historical investigations in Ireland in the eighteenth century, 1978), itself building on seminal work by Walter D. Love in the early 1960s, tend to suggests that a more local pedigree may be established for this remarkable scholarly synthesis. The detailed characterisation of mentalities and stereotypes is certainly more engaging that the relatively skimpy theoretical adumbration of the 'imago-typical' approach, which seems to mean something very like the intellectual commonplace that ideas of race and nation are socially constructed.
Not withstanding some carping criticism in DIAS circles back in 1986, and wholesale neglect by those who should have hailed it as a referee for polemical clinches in Irish cultural debating, this book was nevertheless the first to characterise the bardic mentality as we currently understand it, and remains unsurpassed for the analytic power it brings to bear on a series of colonial moments between the Norman invasion and Celtic revival. It offers, too, an astonishingly lucent perspective on such figures as Eoghan Ruadh Mac an Bhaird and Sean Ó Neachtain, Sir John Davies and Bishop Jones, Geoffrey Keating and Roderick O'Flaherty, Charles O'Conor and John Leland, Francis Dobbs and Gorges Edmund Howard, Henry and Charlotte Brooke, Petrie, Hardiman, Ferguson, O'Donovan, and all the others who make up the chronicle of Irish antiquarianism-as well as odder couplings such as Hugh MacCurtin and Sir Richard Cox, or Edward Ledwich and John Lanigan who might collectively furnish characters for a new play by Tom Stoppard-especially when the latter pair retire in mental disarray to Dr. Harty's Asylum in Clontarf.
A first issue of Book History, the organ of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publication (SHARP), will appear under the editorship of Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose in early 1998. As an interdisciplinary Association on an international footing, SHARP takes its services seriously, rising to a Membership and Periodical Directory as well as the punctual and informative quarterly SHARP Newsletter. There is also a hectic SHARP email subscriber list and a SHARP Web page coming out of Penn State. This is the organisation that will act as mentor to the History of the Book project espoused by the Coleraine Centre, and included as a panel at IASIL Goteborg, 1997, with a keynote lecture from Professor Robin Alston, of the Institute of Advanced Studies in London University, where an MA programme in the History of the Book is well-established.
SHARP is shortly holding a Conference in Cambridge, England, during 4-7 April 1997, and has invited 20-minute papers without limitation of topic (submission date, 20 Nov. 1996) News of the conference, as bearing on IASIL concerns, will be posted in our next Newsletter. For information, contact <lconnors@drew.edu>.