The Journals Rack

The 'cross-over' magazine History Ireland which became a wide-selling popular success under the energetic editorship of Tommy Graham (TCD) and Hiram Morgan (NUI/UCC) has now reached its sixth anniversary and seems likely to go the distance-unlike the others that occasionally reach the bookshops. Issue Vol. 6, No. 4 (Winter 1998) contains essays on 'Ireland and the European Reformation' (Karl S. Bottigheimer and Ute Lotz-Heumann), as well as Fintan Cullen on the construction of Lord Edward Fitzgerald as an Irish political icon, Micheal Ó Riain on controversy surrounding the destruction of Nelson's Pillar, Brendan Grimes on the Carnegie Libraries in Ireland, Bernard Share on 'the branding of industrial Ireland', Jane Ohlmeyer on the loans and debts in early modern Ireland from surviving records (now available on CD-ROM), and Elizabeth Crooke comparing last year's "1798" exhibitions in Belfast, Dublin and Enniscorthy. The preceeding issue-billed the "1798 Special" - included Thomas Bartlett on United Irish informers, Dáire Keogh on the fascinating Fr. James Coigly, and Tom Dunne on the Wexford United Irishmen as seen in the perspective of recent 'subaltern studies', along with an interview with Marianne Elliott, the new Director of the Irish Studies Institute at Liverpool. Subscriptions can be placed with news agents; on editorial matters contact Tommy Graham, Dept. of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Republic of Ireland. History Ireland has a web page at http://www.ucc.ie/histire/hihome.html (regrettably not updated since Autumn 1996), and an email at <history.ireland@infonet.ie>.

"A country smaller than the state of Maine with a population less than the island of Hong Kong-perhaps the richest literary soil in the world." That how the editors of the venerable Sewanee Review described our terrestial handkerchief. Only twice has the journal devoted an issue to Irish writing, Winter 1976 and again in Spring 1998. The latter is still available at 735 University Ave., Sewanee TN, 37383-1000 USA, tel. (931) 598-1246. The deal is, subscribe for Summer 1998 and get the Spring 1998 issue free at the annual rate of $18 plus $5 for mailing outside USA.

Besides its usual freight of darkly medieval lore, best left to historians in their disciplinary chains, the latest issue of Irish Historical Studies (Vol. 31, No. 122; Nov. 1998) contains an essay by G. K. Peatling addressing the hypothetical character of John Kells Ingram's nationalism-he of "Who Fears to Speak of '98" fame-as well as an account of Arthur Clery's pro-partitionist Irish nationalism by the frightenly prolific Patrick Maume, while Joep Leerssen's Mere Irish and Fíor Ghael (1986), reprinted by Cork UP in 1996 after a decade of undue neglect, together with his follow-up treatment of the 19th. century in Remembrance and Imagination (1996) are reviewed by Niall Ó Ciosáin. Patrick Kelly reviews W. J. McCormack's account of The Pamphlet Debate on the Union between Great Britain and Ireland, 1797-1800 (IAP 1995)-a historian's book, mayhap, but one whose true inwardness will impact on all of us with the upcoming bicentenary of the Act of Union.

New Hibernia Review - valuable copies of which the editor Thomas Dillon Redshaw generously doled out free-gratis at IASIL Limerick in 1998 - is now aged three. Holding to its interdisciplinary recipé with a strongly arts-literature bias, the new issue (March 1999) starts out with Terence Winch's a memoir of the Irish traditional music scene around Washington D.C., continuing with an esay on traditional music and the Famine by Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, a suite of poems by Eamonn Wall, and an interview with Thomas McCarthy, as well as analytic offerings by Lauren Onkey ('NY hip-hop band Black '47'), Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch ('Robert Ballagh and the Irish commemoration of Easter 1916'), Joan Fitzpatrick Dean (on Frank McGuinness), Paul Townsend (Father Mathew's Temperance movement and Archbishop Cullen's devotional revolution), Vivian Valvano Lynch (Quinn's Book and authorship), and Celia de Fréine (the Irish soap Ros na Rún). The cover of this issue- always a striking feature-shows "Man at the Keyboard" by Gerard Dillon, recently acquired by the Crawford Gallery, Cork, as part of the Murphy Bequest. To order, contact James Rogers, Center for Irish Studies 5008, St. Thomas's University, St. Paul, Minnesota 55105-1096, USA.; email <jrogers@stthomas.edu>. On editorial matters write to Tom Redshaw at the same address or e-mail <tdredshaw@stthomas.edu>. The next issue will focus on Irish and Irish-American history.

Willa Murphy has edited a special issue of tri-annual journal Religion and Literature (Summer 1998) under the title of 'The Endless Knot: Literature and Religion in Ireland'. The journal contains essays by Tom Duddy ('Derrida and the Druids'), Terry Eagleton ('The Irish Sublime'), Tadhg Ó Dushlaine ('The Irish Spiritual Reformation 1600-1800'), Joseph Spence ('Irish Tory Historical Fiction 1820-50'), W. J. McCormack ('The Plymouth Brethern [and] J. M. Synge's Biography'), Robert Welch ('Religion and the Irish'-a 'sacramental' reading of the identitarian question, this one), Norman Vance ('Catholic & Protestant Literary Visions of 'Ulster"), Eamonn Hughes ('Representations of Belfast in Recent Fiction'), and Anne McCartney ('Francis Stuart's Narrative Theology'). Those epithets on one side or the other of the colon are getting better all the time. First prize goes to Ó Dushlaine with 'Going for Baroque ...', and second place to Norman Vance with '... Now You See It, Now You Don't'. All share in a special award [free as air-Ed.] for this invaluable review of a subject that stands close to essential concerns in Irish criticism. The issue includes creative writing by David Wheatley, Theo Dorgan, Sinead Morrissey, Eva Bourke, Aine Miller, Alan Titley, and Bernard O'Donoghue. Order from R&L, English Dept., University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556-5639, USA; tel. (001) 219-631-5725; email <english.randl.l@nd.edu> and website http://www. nd.edu/~randl. Enclose $12 for US post-paid delivery.

Guest editor Maria Pramaggiore is compiling "Ireland 2000", a special issue of Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and welcomes papers concerned with the 'status of Ireland and the 'Irish Diaspora and the century's end' in regard to politics, economics, culture, religion and history-especially if working in anti-colonial or post-colonial theories and practices. Essays, reviews, and interviews taking advantage of the Journal's multimedia capabilities are especially welcome. 15th January is the submission date for abstracts and 1st May for completed essays (20-25pp.). Dr. Pramaggiore can be reached at Dept. of English, Box 8105, N. Carolina State U., Raleigh, NC, 27695-8105; email <maria_p@unity.nscu. edu>.

A fledgling on the Irish studies scene is Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing, a twice-yearly journal from Jefferson City dedicated to schol./crit. on contemporary Irish writing and writers-meaning back to 1969-with latitude for poetry, drama, film, autobiography and biography also. The February 1999 launch issue contains offerings by Thomas Dillon Redshaw ('The Hidden Ireland of Thomas McCarthy'), Thomas F. Shea ('Lethal Literary Allusions in Patrick McGinley's Foggage'), James S. Brown ('National Allegory in Doyle, McCabe, and McCann'); John Hobbs ('An Interview with Paula Meehan'); poems in translation by Seamus Deane, with more poems by Sara Berkeley and Thomas McCarthy, as well as a review essay on Irish film by Gerald C. Wood and sundry book reviews. A two-issue volume-Spring and Autumn-costs $15.00 in the US and $20 overseas with a further hike of $5 and $10 for institutions at home and abroad respectively. Cheques made payable to Nua should be sent to Shawn O'Hare (Editor), Nua, Box 71978, Carson-Newman College Jefferson City, TN 37760 USA; tel. 423-471-3451; fax 423-471-3502; email <ohare@cncacc.cn.edu>

Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter 1997/Spring 1998), whose absence we lamented in the last issue, arrived on the doormat immediately after our positively last deadline. Now transferred to Notre Dame University, this new issue contains an authoritative account of the 'Anglo-Irish Theatrical Imagination' by Thomas Kilroy, along with essays on 'Irish Tommies' in the 1914-18 War by Joanna Bourke, Daniel Albright on Music and Modernism in Beckett, Oliver Rafferty on the Catholic Church and Fenianism, Marilynn Richtarik on James Joyce and Stewart Parker; John McCafferty on Archbishop Ussher's proto-nationalist discourse and Cormac Ó Grada with new perspectives on the Irish Famine based oral records. Terry Eagleton reviews Joep Leerssen's Remembrance and Seamus Deane's Strange Country while Shaun Richards examines Luke Gibbons' Transformations and Deirdre MacMahon looks into Jim Ring's biography of Erskine Childers. Willey Maley weighs Thomas Hofheinz and Emer Nolan's dissertations on the 'Joyce & History' chestnut, while James Pethica peruses Allison's selected essays on Yeats's Political Identities. The result confirms this journal's standing as a leading venue for the nationalist intelligentsia at its most intelligent.

In the current issue (Autumn 1998) Thomas Bartlett poses the Question about Ulster and the Union, while Robert Sullivan expounds John Toland's treatise on Irish Druids, and Catriona Clutterbuck makes brilliant sense of self-representation in Irish poetry. In addition Patrick Maume traces various strains of Fenian fever in the works of William O'Brien and Canon Sheehan, while Christopher Wheatley amending the Anglo-American incomprehension of Charles Macklin. Elsewhere, Steven Connor reviews Knowlson's and Cronin's biographies of Beckett, giving the literary bays to Cronin [as we read him - Ed.]. Marjorie Howes reads James Pethica's edition of Lady Gregory's Diaries, and Toby Barnard tackles Ann Kavanaugh's John FitzGibbon, Earl of Clare-the ascendancy legal-eagle whom Irish critics love to hate-along with Stella Tillyard's life of Lord Edward. Sean Ryder doesn't think that John Molony's life of Thomas Davis quite makes the cut and finds Ellen Shannon-Mangan's life of James Clarence of that ilk unwarrantably conservative in intellectual method. For the rest, Catherine Nash reviews Jim Mac Laughlin's edition of essays on Emigration and Irish Identities and Cheryl Temple Herr's study of Regionalism from Ireland to Midwest (of America, that is) before Patrick Maume returns to read James Murphy's Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland 1873-1922 and Ruth Fleischmann's study of Canon Sheehan, while Peter Gray appraises Robert Scally's The End of Hidden Ireland and Christine Kinealy's acclaimed treatise on The Irish Famine. Studies of the military strategies of the old IRA and the like concern of historians pure and impure also receive attention.

One of the vagaries of the present generation of scholarly journals is the incidence of a new breed of typographical error generated by wordprocessors and spellcheck, but most of all from electronic scanners. Arising from this last-named cause, the Irish Studies Review recently cited a title edited by 'Osilla Bertha'-our own dear Csilla-while an early issue of Bullán enjoined us to consider Edmund Burke's 'ichnographies of sex and death'-a fishy tale, if ever. Dr. Wheatley's contribution to the current issue similarly accredits a gentleman called 'Leo Strauss' with manufacturing fashionable 'poststructuralist' theories. In the footnotes to the same, Richard Twiss's travel book of 1796 is given as Twif's [sic] Tour of Ireland. E-browsers know well that, common as these errors may be in print, the substitution of 'cl' for 'd' or 'rn' for 'm' on the web pages of the world is a perennial mouse-trap. [We know about these things. - Ed.]

Irish Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring 1999), the bulletin of the Irish Studies program at Boston College, reports on recent visits by President Mary McAleese, John Hume and Seamus Heaney, all in honour of its the twentieth anniversary and its permanent incumbency of Connolly House. Autumn's season at Connolly House included lectures from Terry Eagleton, Catherine Candy, Marion Casey, and readings by Greg Delanty, Heaney, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (currently Burns Scholar), and Gabriel Rosenstock. This spring's cultural programme there includes a more or less back-to-back series of seminar-lectures given by visiting scholars such as Noel Barber (Studies editor), Donncha O'Connell (NUI Galway), Ailbhe Smyth (Women's Education Research & Resource Centre, UCD), Kevin Whelan (Keough Inst./Notre Dame), Gearóid Denvir (UCG), Larry Taylor (Maynooth), Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith (UCD), Peter Jupp (QUB), Luke Gibbons (DCU), Daniel Sweeney (Cambridge), and Kevin Rockett (UCD), as well as journalist and author Tim Pat Coogan and musician Phil Coulter. A series of talks by Kevin Barry were unfortunately cancelled. Boston is at the forefront of attempts to develop databases of the diaspora experience such as Ruth-Ann Harris's "Missing Friends" database based on arrival lists in the Boston Pilot, and a database of Irish serials compiled by Beth Sweeney and Kathy Williams (accessible at http://www.bc.edu/irishserials). The Irish Studies Program has a webpage at http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/irish/. The handsome Newsletter is designed by Robert Lowry of ILS fame.

Ethnos-Nation, an all-Europe journal, is planning a special "Northern Ireland" issue for 2000 with a view to 'analysing social, political, economic and ideological reasons of the conflict.' According to the pessimistic overview provided, 'The Real IRA [...] have been profiting too much from terror and crime to be interested in a negotiated settlement' and 'it will take Protestants and Catholics years to learn how to deal with each other and with their common problems in a democratic and constructive way.' We hardly dare challenge such knowledgeable assumptions. [Cathestants and Protholics Rule Okay-ed.] If interested, contact Christopher P. Storck at Universitaet zu Koeln, Seminar fuer Osteuropaeische Geschichte, Kringsweg 6, D-50931 Koeln, Germany; tel. (+49 221) 470 24 45; fax (+49 221) 470 51 27, or email <christopher. storck@uni-koeln.de>. There is a web site at http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/soeg/ethnos/.

The current issue of Irish Studies Review (Vol. 6 No. 3; December 1998) sets out from an essay on William Baldwin's Beware the Cat (1588) in which Andrew Hadfield provides a subtly nuanced reading that challenges simplistic notions of Ireland-as-colonial-Other in Tudor days-a notion for which he himself has learnedly stood sponsor on past occasions. Mary Shine Thompson contributes a searching examination of the possibility of 'objective' biography by means of 'Literary Life-chronology' in lieu of the usual writerly fabrications, while Louise Ryan looks into the construction of 'Modern Girls and Comely Maidens' in Ireland and Jayne Steel peers at the vampiric iconography of the 'Irish Female Terrorist' in film. Aoife Bhreatnach examines the media record in representing the Travellers while Timothy Taylor reads The Commitments in a postcolonial light and finds both author and film-maker Parker ultimately wanting. Reviews by Jonathan Bardon, Christine Kinealy, Patrick Maume (twice), Virginia Crossman, Bob Purdie, William Hughes, Alvin Jackson, Joseph Ruane, Willy Maley, Colin Graham, Joseph McMinn, Barbara A. Suess, Liam Harte, Clare Wallace, Michael Thomas and some twenty others embrace almost 40 titles to fulfil this journal's brief as a premier source of informed commentary on on the increasingly unwieldy roster of interdisciplinary Irish studies. The cover picture shows Sir Thomas Lee decked out as an Irish kerne in the grounds of his home, Castlemartin, Co. Kildare-now owned by Tony O'Reilly in PoCo irony of some note. The DNB narrates that Sir Thomas (who lost his head in 1601) professed upon the scaffold, 'A free tongue has ever been my worse fault'. [I'll have that - Ed.]

Irish University Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Autumn/Winter 1998)-the second to appear under Anthony Roche's editorship in succession to Christopher Murray-follows the recent practice in devoting space to Irish theatrical records-this time the script of Stewart Parker's Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain (BBC 1981), with an introduction by Marilynn Richtarik. Gerald Dawe assesses Irish literary studies after the collapse of the 'Eng. Lit.' canon and draws deeply on the lore of colleagues Declan Kiberd, Terence Brown, and Terry Eagleton to sound a warning against the presumption of disengaging from the 'the Britishness of Ireland'. To do so, he writes, is to run the risk 'a cybernetic recycling plant for historical navel-gazing'. Philip Edwards-a welcome voice not heard as much as formerly in Irish studies-has a winning sentence in "Shakespeare, Ireland, Dreamland": 'I think Shakespeare accepted empire as a fact of life.' Elizabeth Belanger illustrates the strategies involved in Maria Edgeworth's 'imaginative attempt at a cultural union' between Britain and Ireland. Henry Merritt offers a classic exegesis of symbolism and its biographical context in his reading of Yeats's "Black Centaur" - in which poem he discovers a prototypical design for The Tower. Each in different ways, Peter Higginson and Hedwig Schwall keep the psychoanalytical ball rolling that Luke Gibbons set in motion with his recent essay on 'hysteria' in Irish literature and society (Irish University Review, Spring/Summer 1997): here "Yeats's Mood Structures" and "Forms of Hysteria in A Portrait and Stephen Hero" provide the points d'appui. In one of those 'corridors-of-Earlsfort Terrace' memoirs that have been cropping up recently, Tom Garvin anatomising the 'Strange Death of Clerical Politics' in the UCD Politics Department during the epoch of that 'political ethnarch Dr. John Charles McQuaid'. Richard Pine's review-article on 'Mac Liammóir in Wonderland' explores the maestro's fictitious Irish persona once more. Andrew Carpenter recommends Eagleton's Crazy John and the Bishop (1998) as a 'prickly but sparkling gauntlet', while Douglas Archibald wonders why a writer as good as Seamus Deane should write so turgidly in Strange Country (1997). Derek Hand reviews Margaret Kelleher's Feminization of Famine (1997) with straightforward approbation, while Kelleher reviews Maureen Murphy's edition of Asenath Nicholson's Annals of the Famine [1851] (1998) with lavish praise for the editor and additional strictures about the need for fuller comparative study of such narratives. Gender and Sexuality, the collection edited by Anthony Bradley and Maryann Valiulis (1997), is reviewed by Robert Mohr with Kelleher and James Murphy's Gender Perspectives in 19th-century Ireland (1997). Aisling Maguire reads Beckett's Dream of Middling to fair Women (1996), while recent poetry collections by Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, Brendan Kennelly, Padraic Fiacc, and others David Wheatley, Katie Donovan, Mary O'Malley, Mary O'Donnell, Knute Skinner, and Adrienne Rich are reviewed by Barbóla Farago, Jeff Holdridge, Peter Denman and others. The IASIL Bibliography for 1997, compiled by Turlough Johnston (Bibl. Sub-Committtee Chair), deploys the established methods with admirably firmness to produce an orderly and comprehensive listing that seems fuller and tighter than we have seen it for some time.

William Lazenbatt (Univ. of Ulster) is editing a new issue of Writing Ulster, the journal that recently gave us a timely 'Francis Stuart Special Issue' in the novelist's ninety-fourth year containing contributions from Maurice Harmon, Dermot Bolger, Simon Caterson, Brendan Kennelly, Anne McCartney, Hugo Hamilton, Fintan O'Toole, Rüdiger Imhof, Medbh McGuckian, and Kathleen McCracken as well as his own interview with the writer and a selection from the diaries held at the University of Ulster not far from Stuart's childhood home. Stuart's Aosdana troubles were touched in the last Newsletter and will not be revarnished here except to mention that Paul Durcan's recently-published Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (London: Harvill 1999) includes a burlesque on the "Stoning of Francis Stuart" which may set critics blushing, together with another poem reflecting that 'humility ... snatched victory from the jaws of spite' the day that Mary Robinson conferred the Saoi-ship on our oldest writer. [Now you Saoi it ... - Ed.]

The forthcoming issue, sub-titled "Northern Narratives", will include essays on writers such as Bernard MacLaverty, Eoin McNamee, Deirdre Madden, Jennifer Johnston, Carlo Gebler, Ciaran Carson, and Glen Patterson as well as other essays on northern Irish literature and culture. Prospective contributors should contact Bill Lazenbatt, Editor, Writing Ulster, School of Languages & Literature, University of Ulster at Jordanstown, Shore Road, Newtownabbey, Co Antrim, BT37 0QB, Northern Ireland, tel. (0)1232-366461; fax (0)1232-366824; email <w.lazenbatt@ulst.ac.uk>.