Publishing News
Colin Smythe, whose honorary degree from TCD is noticed in our Editorial Comment, has just brought out Selected Plays of T. C. Murray [ISBN 0-86140-142-5; pb. 0-86140-143-3 pbk], edited and introduced by Richard Allen Cave. along with Selected Plays M. J. Molloy, chosen and introduced by Robert O'Driscoll [ISBN 0-86140-148-4; pbk 0-86140-149-2], in matching covers. Both volumes contain some works not previously published and a checklist bibliography. Rosemary Pountney's Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett's Drama 1956-76 (1988) [ISBN 0-86140-407-6]-published to acclaim from Barry McGovern and others-is now reprinted also.
The proceedings of a Conference held at the Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco) in May-June 1998 appeared well within six months in keeping with the Library's policy. Its two handsome volumes, with cover reproductions of Harry Clarke's "Geneva Window", contain keynote lectures by Daithí Ó hÓgain, Chris Morash, Peter Kuch, and Terence Brown, with individual papers by Anthony Easthope, Bart Moore-Gilbert, Colin Graham, Nicholas Daly, Claude Fiérobe, William Hughes, Elizabeth Heine, Deirdre Twoomey, Warwick Gould, as well as others to a total of 45 including IASIL members James E. Doan, Selina Guinness, Maria Tymoczko, Eileen Fauset, Laura O'Connor, Richard Haslam, Margarita G. Bon, Neil Sammells, Claire Connolly, Bernard McKenna, Csilla Bertha, Alexander Gonzalez, Monique Gallagher, Paul Murray, Jerry Nolan, Donald Morse, and Matthew M. DeForrest. Mebdh McGuckian and Harry Cliftdon contributed original poems. The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature and Its Contexts (Bucks: Gerrards Cross 1998) [Vol 1: 0-86140-417-3; Vol.2: 0-86140-418-1]. The volumes are edited by Bruce Stewart, IASIL Secretary and Adviser to the Princess Grace Irish Library, who also contributed essays and an introduction. Orders for all of these can be placed with Colin Smythe, PO Box 6, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, England, SL9 8XA; tel 01753-86000; fax 01753-886469, or email <CPSmythe@aol.com>; website, http://www.colin-smythe.com.
Timing is all. Pierre Joannon capitalised on Neil Jordan's film Michael Collins with a republication of his highly-readable life of Michael Collins in French, which went on to best-sellerdom-while Richard Deutsch has just scooped plaudits with Le sentier de la paix (Rennes: Terre de Brume/PUR 1998) [ISBN 2-84362-032-5], his study of the Belfast Agreement of 1998. Coming out directly after Nobel awards were made to Hume and Trimble it was sure of an audience. The author can be reached at <Richard.Deutsch@Uhb.Fr>.
In After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (OUP/Opus 1997), Neil Corcoran (St. Andrew's), has written a guide to Irish literature set out in well-ordered and engaging chapters that ends in a mood of celebration with an essay on the poets of Ulster/Northern Ireland-perhaps inevitably, given his predelictions as revealed in the authoritatively edited collection The Chosen Ground (Bridgend: Seren Books 1992). In his preface Corcoran quotes Bruce Stewart's comments in an essay in The Irish Review describing modern Irish literature as occupying 'a world of often fierce antagonisms invoking the pride and anxieties of a tragically suppressed (yet partially resuscitated) native language, and the hauteur and unease of a forcibly imposed yet fully assimilated one, each wearing the uncompromising aspect of a manichean hero as they face up to each other in fatal dispute over the body of Ireland.' Aside from this lapse in taste there is nothing to fault in the way that Professor Corcoran crisply and intelligently surveys his subject in chapter-titles reflecting major departures and arrivals on the itinerary between the Literary Revival and the present moment: 'Translations', 'A Slight Inflection', 'Lyrical Fields and Featherbeds', 'Views of Dublin' and 'Ulsters of the mind'. Corcoran excels at placing Irish writers in their communal contexts without conceding too much to the influence of socio-political forces: 'The poem of a childhood in which sectarian division is apparent, but contained, features in a number of [these] poets', he writes of a group including pre-eminently Derek Mahon and Tom Paulin. The author was recently seen writing spiritedly in the Times Literary Supplement (16 May, 1998) where he defended John Banville's novel The Untouchable against Maggie Gee's charge of 'asset-striping' the personality of Anthony Blunt, in response to which Corcoran alluded convincingly to the 'postmodern touch' which makes it Banville's 'richest book to date'. Gee returned to the fray on the 30th May but did not win her point.
In The Question of Irish Identity in the Writings of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce (Edwin Mellen Press 1999) [0-7734-8237-7], Eugene O'Brien (Mary Immaculate/Limerick U.) employs theoretical models from Adorno, Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas to redefine ideas of Irish identity as these have features in cultural and socio-political discourse throughout this century, and does so by exploring the similar 'negative epistemologies of identity' of the title-authors. The earnestness of such intentions is offset by a strain of wit that finds expression in his chapter-titles: "Tara to Holyhead-the centrifugal vector", What is my language?-centripetal revival"; "Cuchulain discomforted", "Emigration as trope", and "Patrick W. Shakespeare". O'Brien, whose work on nationalism has been seen to advantage in the Irish Studies Review and elsewhere, is currently editing "Ireland in Theory", a newly-launched Irish studies series from the same press. Here the idea is much the same: 'to imbricate the theoretical developments of the last fifty years with a questioning of the epistemological status of Irish writing, Irish culture and Irish identity, and their interaction.' Younger scholars will rightly detect a publishing opportunity in all of this. Eugene is one of the team who service the Oscail Programme, an initiative of the National Centre for Distance Education based at Dublin City University.
Longmans Publishers have launched a "Rethinking Irish Studies" series with such reprint and original titles as Basil Chubbs's Government and Politics of Ireland, Sabine Wichert's Northern Ireland since 1945, Theodore Hoppen's Conflict and Conformity in Ireland Since 1800, Steven Ellis's Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, and Dáibhí Ó Cróinín's Early Medieval Ireland, as well as William Crotty and David Schmitt's edited collection, Ireland and the Politics of Change, Arthur Aughey and Duncan Morrow's Northern Ireland Politics, and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe's monograph Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland. Heading up the series is David Miller's Rethinking Northern Ireland, which reinstates imperial and colonial forces in contemporary analysis at the expense of the popular 'ethnic war' and 'two-nations' interpretations. Contents include sociological and political essays by Robbie McVeigh and Liam O'Dowd as well as cultural analysis by Bill Rolston, Desmond Bell, Ronan Bennett and Carol Coulter-writing on feminism and nationalism in Northern Ireland. The publisher has a web site at http://www/awl-he.com.
A selection of papers from the stranded "Coming of Age" Cork Conference of 1995 are soon coming out from Rodopi Press of Amsterdam -who have previously earned our praise in the Newsletter-under the editing hand of Colbert Kearney. The papers of the more recent Limerick Conference of 1998 will be published by the same firm thanks to Conference Director Patricia Lynch. We understand that Jacqueline Hurtley has already lined up Rodopi as publisher of the Barcelona Proceedings, following the appearance of her own valuable collection, Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics (1998), from the same press-which has also issued a study of Yeats and the Drama of Sacred Space (1998) by Nicholas Meihuizen.
IASIL Limerick conference participants (1998) were asked in a letter from Patricia Lynch, the Conference Director, and her associates Brian Coates and Joachim Fischer to provide copies of their appears for possible publication in a selection edition to be published by Rodopi. Papers should be sent directly to Ms. Lucy Imbush, 13 Woodlawn Drive, Dooradoyle, Limerick, Ireland; fax 353-(0)61-228234; email <imbusch@iol.ie>.
Deborah Fleming is editing a collection on W. B. Yeats on Post-colonialism, to appear early in 2000, and seeks previously unpublished essays. The date for abstracts is 1 June, 1999 and for completed papers 1 November, 1999. Deborah has previously edited Learning the Trade: W. B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry (Locust Hill Press 1995). Her contact address is English Dept., Ashland OH 44805 USA; tel. 419-289-5789 [wk], or 419-938-7305 [hm]; email <dfleming@ashland.edu>.
Routledge (London), who brought out Robert Welch's admired collection of literary essays Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (1993), now offers an extended range including James Lydon's well-reviewed Ireland from Ancient Times to the Present (1998) Thomas Hennessey's Dividing Ireland: WWI and Partition (1998), Richard Kearney's Post Nationalist Ireland (1996), George Boyce and Alan O'Day's Making of Modern Irish History (1996), Brian Graham's edition of revisionist essays with the Morton-esque title In Search of Ireland (1997), and Noel Ignatiev's challenging study, How the Irish Became White (1997), as well as other Irish titles by Boyce, Peter Somerset Fry, and M. L. R. Smith, with a reprint of Edmund Curtis's classic History of Ireland-originally 1936 but here ascribed to 1961 in the proprietary way of publishers. Routledge have a web-site at http://www.routledge.com and a trade address at 11, New Fetter Lane, London, WC4P 4EE.