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The article focuses on Brian Moore's novel "The Feast of Lupercal" and its exploration of the connection between cultural stagnation and sexual paralysis in Belfast. It suggests that Belfast's cultural scene, hindered by the Catholic Church and sectarianism, is inhospitable to artistic and sexual development. The article also highlights the significance of Threshold magazine, which brought together important writers associated with the Belfast Group of poets and the Field Day Theatre Company.

In line with the special issue’s commitment to elucidating some of Brian Moore’s less well-known works, this article focuses on a significant set of his nonfiction essays that are explicitly framed as “travel writing,” particularly those that appeared in the U.S. magazines Holiday and Travel & Leisure. It takes seriously Michael Cronin’s assertion that the literature of migration and diaspora has overshadowed Irish travel writing in scholarly commentaries, with the potential danger that “only certain forms of movement are privileged in analysis”: “The permanent move to Canada but not the sojourn in Sicily, the emigrants’ letters home from Australia but not the visit to Berlin, become objects of critical inquiry.”1 Considering Moore’s travel writing about Ireland in particular, the article argues that Moore adopts a highly self-conscious “Returned Yank” persona to negotiate some of the tensions of travel writing itself. Focusing on three prominent spaces in Moore’s Irish travel writing—Belfast, the West of Ireland, and the Anglo-Irish “Big House”—the article explores the ways in which Moore fashions a “travel writing” self that is just as fictitious as any of the characters in his novels, enabling him to simultaneously meet the expectations of his U.S. editors and readers and satisfy his own urge to inform, educate, and subtly critique some of the clichés of travel writing about Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the re-examination of writer Brian Moore's work and career in light of scholarly trends since his death. Topics include Moore's transnational identity, the challenges of sourcing his works and accessing archival materials, his position in literary canons in Ireland and Canada, his engagement with postmodernism and the outdated aspects of some of his works.

The article presents a roundtable discussion on teaching U.S. history, society and culture, presented at the 2017 Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States conference at University College Dublin in Ireland. Topics discussed include race, the state of precarity and U.S. studies in Great Britain, gender and U.S. history, and the value of a teaching fellowship.

Building on recent scholarship on discourses of race in twentieth-century and contemporary Ireland, this article examines the racialised nature of the “roots journey”, in which subjects of Irish descent – typically white Irish Americans – travel back to Ireland to trace their roots. Outlining arguments that have emphasised both the reactionary and radical potential of the practices of genealogy and the search for roots, the article focuses on recent developments in the Rose of Tralee contest, an annual beauty pageant in which women of Irish descent compete for the title “Rose of Tralee”. Noting that three winners since 1998 (and several other competitors since 1994) have been of mixed race ancestry, and emphasising the subsequent roots journeys undertaken by two of these winners to the Philippines and India, respectively, the article questions whether these roots journey, taking non-white subjects of Irish descentoutof Ireland rather than into it, may offer the potential of decoupling “Irishness” and “whiteness” in radical new ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ever since Jimmy Rabbitte proffered his oft-quoted “niggers of Europe” line in Roddy Doyle’sThe Commitments(1987), contemporary Irish culture, especially during the boom years, was characterised by an insistent revisiting of popular music as a metaphor for interracial and/or intercultural connection or understanding. Cross-cultural identification through music may be seen, in Werner Sollors’s memorable terms, as an eschewing of “descent” relations in favour of “consensual” relations. This essay revisits the music metaphor as it has manifested itself in Irish fiction since it was announced officially that Ireland had entered recession in 2008. Specifically, it explores Kevin Curran’sBeatsploitation(2012) and Joseph O’Connor’sThe Thrill of It All(2014) arguing that, through their deployment of the music metaphor, the novels stage the murky politics of contemporary Irish iterations of consent and descent. By exposing the extent to which the rhetoric of Irish economic recovery is yoked to paradoxical invocations of volitional and ancestral Irishness, the novels urge their readers to consider the ways in which discourses of economic recovery work to reinforce and perpetuate patterns of exclusion and marginalisation established during the Celtic Tiger years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This roundtable brings together perspectives from Canada, the U.S. and Ireland to consider the opportunities and limitations of the wider world of publishing (including censorship) in which Brian Moore participated, the diverse publishing venues in which his work appeared and the markers of prestige his contributions to the literary marketplace conferred. In Moynihan’s discussion of the Belfast “little magazine” Threshold (1957-87), she notes that the fact that Moore himself published in its pages suggests that his representations of Belfast as culturally stagnant in works such as The Feast of Lupercal (1957) were rhetorical rather than earnest. Aoife Bhreatnach analyses Moore’s autobiographical statements on reading and writing to situate his experiences within wider “mechanisms of social control,” including official forms of censorship and informal censure in his Catholic schools and at home. Janet Friskney focuses on Moore’s Canadian publishers, noting that his multiple national affiliations “created challenges around unequivocally identifying Moore as a Canadian writer, particularly given that only certain of his works contained a Canadian setting or character.” Tim Groenland uncovers the pre-history of Catholics and how it eventually came to be published in the New American Review in 1972. For Groenland, Catholics “might be viewed paradoxically as a product of [Moore’s] ‘Americanization’ even as its narrative focus centres on the confined space of a remote Irish monastery.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author focuses on Alice McDermott's novel "At Weddings and Wakes," examining the theme of the Irish-American characters' whiteness in a multicultural environment through McDermott's repetition of the color white, white skin color, and the link between whiteness and Catholicism. The author dicusses the Irish-American characters and social class, the characters' whiteness, and Catholicism in the novel.