At the close of last year Greenwood Press of Connecticut produced A Modern Irish Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, edited by Alexander G. Gonzalez (SUNY), covering the 70 authors of the Irish Literary Revival and the decades after to our own time. Each entry offers a bio-critical assessment and a bibliographical essay and an extensive bibliography of general criticism is appended to the whole. This useful work now joins Robert Hogan's Dictionary of Irish Literature (2 vols. 1997) on the growing shelf of reference books for Irish literary scholarship from Greenwood Publishing. Like it, the format suggests a process of continuous updating since several entries are author-headwords only at this stage. Every publishing house has an endearing trait and this is surely Greenwood's. Mercifully the text is free from the sort of typographical error that leads to the assertion in the advertising bumf that the Irish Literary Revival began in '1982' and came to fruition with the plays of one 'Brian Frigl'. This is a dead giveaway for hasty optical character recognition (OCR) in 1he publi3her's ollice. [l 3cc wnat gou mear! -Ecl.]
Jibes at fellow-captives in the electronic saltmines to one side - Greenwood Press have courageously opened up a new area of Irish literary studies in publishing James M. Murphy's Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (1997) - a work which explores the forgotten shelves of Irish fiction compendiously documented by Fr. Stephen Brown in his Ireland in Fiction (1919). The result is an account of the literary climate of Ireland in the forgotten era of the Irish Parliamentary Party when 'polemical novelists' such as the Sweetmans, the McCarthy's and the Mulhollands formed the literary circle of Fr. Russell's Irish Monthly - the cultural organ of the emerging Irish Catholic bourgeoisie seeking to secure its place i' the sun of polite British society and culture at the last moment before the Fenian element in Irish cultural nationalism came so strongly to the fore under the aegis of the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin.
We have not seen the published book but have heard Fr. Murphy speaking on his subject at the IASIL Conferences in Cork and can vouch that it represents a departure as interesting and significant as Eileen Reilly's doctoral work on Irish historical fiction - which appears to have found a berth with Oxford University Press.
An edition of essays on Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres (Dublin: Irish Academic Press 1997), brought out with jointly by James Murphy with with Margaret Kelleher, incorporates a wide and various range of interdisciplinary contributions including those of literary bent by Clíona ÓGallchoir (on Maria Edgeworth's Literary Ladies), Anne Fogarty (on the novels of Maria and Lady Morgan), Colin Graham (on 'history, gender and the colonial moment in Castle Rackrent'), and Tina Hunt Mahoney (on Edward Dowden and the University Curriculum in English vis-a-vis women's education). Sex, sanity, health, love, and marriage, along with gender in public and domestic spheres, as well as a somewhat fascinating if somewhat anomalous essay by Toby Joyce on the Fenians of the mid-1860s ('Ireland's Trained and Marshalled Manhood') answer generally to the clear definitions of gender and gender history laid out in a Foreword by Mary Cullen - in the course of which she makes significant use of Gerda Lerner's account of Placing Women in History (OUP 1979).
Along with Eimar Walshe's edited collection, Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing (Cork UP 1997) - which unfortunately attracted some dismissive comments in the press relating to the high proportion of jargon in its most intellectually sophisticated contributions - this represents a considerable increment to feminist resources in Irish literary criticism.
Still at Greenwood Inc., a similarly-titled volume to Alex Gonzalez's Bio-Critical Sourcebook dealing with pre-Revival Irish writers in both languages is currently being compiled for by Bernard McKenna of the University of Miami. Never one to rest upon his laurels, Professor Gonzalez has signed up with Greenwood for an edited collection of essays on Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Some Male Perspectives - a production that clearly deserves notice for a brave attempt to square the ideological circle. Just why men's "take" on the subject should be singled out (once again, some might say) has yet to be seen from the prefatory material, if not by way of literary pathology. [Give my essay to literary science? No way? - Ed.] We think that Laurence Flanagan, ed., Irish Women's Letters published in 1997 by Far Thrupp in Sutton is an anthology - but there was no Far Thrupp in the Sutton of our childhood. [Who d'ya think yer coddin'? We all know you come from the South Side! - Ed.].