Congratulations to Paddy O'Sullivan on the successful launch of his Diaspora Electronic List based at Bradford, where he has previously compiled his superlative Irish World Wide Series (6 vols., published by Leicester Univ. Press, 1992-97). The list is energetically maintained by him and receives a good deal of high-quality information, largely relating to current issues such as the mental health of Irish emigrants/immigrants and the question of endangered access to shipping records, which are materially important for the tracing of Irish-American lineage. (Maureen Murphy's essay on 'The Fionnuala Factor' in the Bradley/Valuilis collection makes resourceful use of such records.)
Among the crumbs recently dropped from the Diaspora table is the information that Mary Doran - who herself contributed a report on the Irish-Scottish Initiative - is the newly-appointed Curator for the Modern Irish Collections at the British Library, an appointment that is producing positive effects on the way that the BL serves the Irish academic and research communities.
The Diaspora Web site at <http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora> joins that of Dr. Piaras Mac Einri, Director of the Irish Centre for Migration Studies at University College, Cork, at <http://www.ucc.ie/icms>. Patrick O'Sullivan also includes the URL of the Yorkshire Playwrights, who maintain lively Irish dramatic interests, in his messages.Find them at <http://www.poptel.org.uk/unholy/yp>
One of our aims in the present chapter of IASIL history is to build up electronic utilities of use to researchers in Irish literary studies. Like all such enterprises, this crucially depends on corpus - the right twigs to make the eagle's nest. [Meaning lots of bio-bibliographical data on Irish subjects. -Ed.]
Wherever Internet pages exist, there is a fearful propensity towards imbalance between the razzamatazzical graphics and any real freight of information. In the case of the IASIL Web Pages, this has been significantly remedied by William T. O'Malley's generous donation of a supplementary bibliography - being in fact a supplement to his Bibliography of Dissertations on Anglo-Irish Literature, 1873-1989 published by Greenwood Press in 1990.
The earlier bibliography provided title information on over 4,000 dissertations, representing more than 350 universities and 28 different countries, on 193 writers. The present supplement contains 914 titles that have been identified since 1990. Some of those listed were inadvertantly missed at the time of publication, but most have been produced since 1989, those carrying on directly from the printed volume.
In addition to the above informationi, Dr. O'Malley writes: 'The bibliography was conceived, and the supplement was begun, prior to the renaming (quite rightly) of the 'International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures'. The scope of this list should more accurately reflect the focus of IASIL, and dissertations concerning Irish language writers and Irish language literature would be welcome additions. William O'Malley is Collection Management Officer of the University Library at University of Rhode Island. He can be reached at tel. 401 874 4799; Fax: 401 874 4608; or email e-mail <RKA101@uriacc.uri.edu>
Jacqueline Genet has collaborated with Claude Fiérobe in producing a general history of Irish literature as La Littérature irlandaise (Armand Colin 1997), abetted in the Gaelic parts by Wesley Hutchinson, Aodan Mac Poilín and Seán Ó Conaill. Some obeisance is justly made in the introduction to Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, alongside an acknowledgement to The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. The 'selected bibliography' is very select indeed-53 titles only (and some distinctly dated), whereas the index packs 12 columns of names into 6 point type, registering the wide range of authors treated. This then is a survey book for French students with limited access to critical sources-making its arrival all the more welcome. A curiosity is the grim notice on title-verso which warns us that 'le photocopillage tue le livre' along with some serious words on the 'une baisse brutal des achats'.
The work possesses a schematic thoroughness of the kind that has hardly been seen since Legouis and Cazamian, those masters of the subdivisional table of contents. Fiérobe takes charge of the XVIIIe siècle in which we meet in turn with 'le roman sentimental', 'roman et satire', 'roman historique et roman gothique', and thence onwards 'vers un roman irlandais'. His province also entails eighteenth-century sections such as 'the laughing comedy', la comédie sentimentale, and 'Une comédie irlandaise?' Under 'La Première Renaissance celtique' from the hand of Professor Genet we meet subdivisions I.1 to 1.7 starting with 'Origines écossaises et galloises' (meaning Macpherson, of course), and ending with 'emergence d'un vision héroïque de l'Irlande' and 'le thêatre'. 'La Deuxième Renaissance' comfortably yields numbered sections II.1 to II.4 beginning with 'dramaturge en marge de la Renaissance' and ending with 'poètes du mouvement republicain'.
The prose is admirably clear [quoth the Hiberno-English teaboy from the IASIL Newsletter - Ed.] and numerous statements have a ring of transparent truth that home-grown criticism does not always attain to. Sometimes the truths are perhaps too transparent.
Professor Genet is by this date a magisterial exponent of Irish literature in France and a publishing house to herself, besides her dignity and desserts as an eminent host of Irish conferences in her capacity as former President of Caen Université. This is in some sense a summary work, giving one pause to reflect that there was a time in the 1970s when the serious criticism of nineteenth-century Irish romantic literature - including notably such figures such as Griffin, Banim, Carleton, and Maturin, - was sustained by young French scholars gathered around Patrick Rafroidi, of whom Claude Fiérobe was one.
It is greatly to be hoped that this book will make Irish literary history more widely known in France, where student numbers are building rapidly, judging by the success of the SOFEIR conference in Nice during the March this year.