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Thin Places (2021) is a piece of work which defies categorization. It is partly a memoir filled with traumatic personal events, partly a reflection on loss in all its manifest forms (physical, familial, linguistic, environmental), and partly an uplifting plea for allowing the exploration of our natural surroundings to function as a meaningful form of care. Kerri ní Dochartaigh uses the materiality of the sentient beings that surround us, and deep care for our ecosystem, as a means of recovery. Earth care as self-care. Ní Dochartaigh is concerned with both the materiality and the immateriality of objects of care and manages to incorporate both through her interest in “the liminal space between things”, to borrow the title of an article by Timothy Morton (2014). The narrator foregrounds her mental health difficulties brought on by a violent and traumatic childhood in Northern Ireland yet also places the focus on the ways in which Ireland’s natural habitat, its material reality and its immaterial Celtic portals, “hold us” (2022: 228) in unsuspected care relationships. In the process, “[a]rt happens […] in the liminal space(s) between things, in conversations between metal and sky, humans and metal, era and era, heaven and earth” (Morton 2014: 270-1). A poignant process of recovery is recounted, highlighting firstly the refusal of care before slowly moving towards co-constituted acts of care: as ní Dochartaigh gradually recovers her lost mother tongue, and pays attention to the beauty of her natural surroundings, as she begins to care for both, she also starts to feel cared for. The sensory experience of loss, gain, and care in Thin Places is predicated upon several ecologies and resonates strongly with Joan Tronto’s definition of care as ultimately “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves (sic.), and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (1993: 103; original emphasis). Kerri ní Dochartaigh celebrates, in the most understated manner, the full complexity of this “life-sustaining web” and this article proposes to unpack all of the above elements to show how her very singular aesthetics places the emphasis on the coloniality of loss and the restorative power of stories.

This paper examines the inner debate in Basque nationalism resulting from the Easter Rising between 1916 and 1918. Basque nationalists firmly believed that the Irish Revolution would affect the British war effort, the outcome of the Great War and hence Basque political vindication itself. The official nationalist leadership and its organ, Euzkadi, supported Great Britain, arguing a British military triumph in Ireland and in the Great War would bring a worldwide era of autonomy for national minorities. Pro-independence militants, however, not only expressed solidarity and outspoken support towards the rebels, but also associated their victory with a post-war scenario favourable to independence movements. This study focuses on the two competing Basque nationalist interpretations as presented in the media. Simultaneously, traditionalist parties (i.e. Carlists and Integrists) exacerbated nationalists’ differences in order to weaken a direct political rival.

This essay was prompted by a review by the Scottish poet, Robert Crawford, of Clare Bucknell’s recent book, The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture (2023). It provides a reading of Bucknell’s book in the light of other anthologies. So it is not in itself a review but, rather, a series of reflections on the construction and nature of anthologies stimulated by my reading of Bucknell’s book. Crawford insists on the omissions in Bucknell’s account from a Scottish perspective. But I want to take in a wider perspective, one that includes national identity. Initially, I focus on the index and on the entry for Palgrave’s father and his Jewish name. This leads to a discussion on the authoritative appearance of The Golden Treasury and perhaps on what it is hiding. The essay takes issue with the partial view of English poetry, where Wordsworth is afforded the most poems, and eighteenth-century poets hardly feature. The second half discusses Bucknell’s chapter on the popularity of poetry therapy and her omission of any discussion of recent women’s poetry. The anthology she dismisses out of hand is Yeats’s The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935. Such a conclusion invites a response at some length. The focus then shifts to another Irish writer, William Allingham, and his largely forgotten anthology, Nightingale Valley, which was published the year before The Golden Treasury and which Palgrave sought to better. In his thought-provoking choices, which includes possibly the first printing of Blake’s poems in an anthology, Allingham provides a counter to those who read poetry and literature simply in terms of the way they reflect history. In doing so he affords a valuable critique of The Treasuries and The Golden Treasury from over a century and a half ago.

Tim Robinson’s acclaimed two-volume account of the Aran Islands, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986) and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (1995), originated both in the author’s personal fascination with the islands and his professional, cartographic project when he was encouraged to produce a detailed map of the area. The digressive narratives in the companion volumes are structured around Robinson’s walks along the coast (Pilgrimage) and through the interior of Aran (Labyrinth). His generically hybrid books combine topography, folklore, human and natural history, culture and nature. Although sceptical about the tradition of romanticising the Aran Islands and a self-professed non-believer, Robinson nevertheless tends to transcend down-to-earth, factual reporting towards reflections on the spiritual and the universal. This approach paves the way for the use of metaphorical language. The article examines the intersection between the scholarly and the creative, the objective and the personal in Stones of Aran, and especially the tension between the writer’s simultaneous proclivity for and resistance to figurative language.

“The Tale of Slawkenbergius”, also known as the “Episode of the Nose”, is one of the most recognised and quoted passages from Tristram Shandy (Sterne 1759-1767). This short story from the fourth volume of Sterne’s novel has received a great deal of attention in the specialised bibliography. However, the studies so far published analyse the story as an isolated episode and concentrate mainly on the use of irony, double entendre and puns as a means of alluding to sexual issues (Gallagher 2018; Walsh 2009). The aim of this paper is to study “The Tale of Slawkenbergius” no longer as a humorous representation of the grotesque, but as a metaliterary manifestation of Sterne’s poetics, thus relating the tale to the structure of the novel. The way in which Sterne uses the device of the “strange loop” in this passage to express his subscription to Hogarth’s aesthetics and to Hogarth’s ideas about the “lines of beauty and grace” will be determined. It will also relate the apology for the beauty of a colossal-nosed, disproportionate hero that is established in this episode to the defence of “deformed” art forms, removed from neoclassical aesthetics, that Tristram establishes throughout his narrative.

Laughter in the midst of tragedy can be one of life’s most disturbing, cathartic and enlightening experiences, a maxim experienced in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, one of the most painful periods of Irish history. Northern Irish playwrights were acutely aware of this when dealing with violence in their plays and so, however grim the events they depicted, the comic element was very much present. After the Good Friday Agreement, along with the change in the political situation in Northern Ireland, there was a generational change in the theatre. What seems to characterise this new wave is the ironic distance taken towards the sectarian divide and the consequences of the conflict on Northern Irish society, which is revealed above all in their use of humour. Lisa McGee, one of the most important representatives of the new generation thanks to the popularity of her television series Derry Girls, had already shown her maturity in her 2006 play Girls and Dolls, performed by Tinderbox the same year. McGee mixes the tragic and the comic to present the terrible consequences of childhood trauma alongside the violence of the late Troubles, while raising questions about guilt, the meaning of friendship and the subtle ways in which violence affects us. This article aims to analyse the different uses of humour employed by McGee to deal with tragic episodes and their theatrical effect, drawing on the existing research on humour in literature and McGee’s own observations given in an interview with the author on 3 March 2023.

This article looks critically at Celia de Fréine’s Léaslíne a Lorg / In Search of a Horizon (2022), a poetry collection entirely devoted to the lockdown experienced during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic by an Irish woman – easily identified with the poet herself – from her house in Dublin. In the 18 poems that make up the collection, published in bilingual format (English and Irish), de Fréine addresses issues as relevant as the supposed objectivity of the scientific discourse around the virus, the human-nonhuman connection, environmental damage and the historical links of the COVID-19 pandemic with previous health crises lived through in Ireland, specifically the Hepatitis C Scandal. My analysis will close-read the poems, adopting both a national and a transnational perspective. The ultimate aim of this essay is to look at the virus in its socio-cultural dimension in order to complement the biomedical narratives around it.

This essay examines Luis Martín-Santos’ second novel, Time of Destruction, unfinished at the time of his accidental death in 1964, in connection with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). To date, Marisol Morales-Ladrón remains the only scholar who has dealt extensively with both texts (2005: 162-182), a sharp contrast to the numerous studies that have discussed the traces of Joyce’s Ulysses in Martín-Santos’ first novel, Time of Silence (1962). The publication, in 2022, of Mauricio Jalón’s new edition of Martín-Santos’ Time of Destruction, one with significant textual amendments to the first edition (1975), provides an ideal opportunity to expand the scholarship on this scarcely researched topic. The first section of this essay offers a brief discussion of the new edition of Martín-Santos’ novel and reconsiders it in relation to Joyce’s work. The second section proposes a reading of A Portrait and Time of Destruction in light of the tension that exists between the narrators and the two main fictional figures in these novels, Stephen Dedalus and Agustín. The final section considers both novels in relation to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of history and morality.

In the wake of the heightened attention accorded Michael Collins on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of his death in August 2022, this review essay addresses both the most recent and the most influential scholarly and popular treatments of his life and legacy. This material provides a window on both Ireland’s past and present – and also its future. When addressing Collins’s role in that contentious and much-contested past, new and more established scholarly studies by biographers and historians assist us not only to understand it better, but likewise also grasp the unique symbolic role that Collins occupies in Irish political life today. The fact is that many Irish people – and Irish Americans – simply cannot easily talk about Collins in balanced terms, or with the sort of historical detachment that they can bring to other bygone leaders of Ireland. He is a lightning rod for controversy in contemporary Ireland, with his very name sparking a debate whenever politically minded Irishmen get together. Unlike other Irish historical figures who have largely receded into the past, his life and death remain subjects of fascination on a national scale, with radio and television documentaries, fictionalised dramatisations, and even multimedia spectacles dedicated to the scrutiny of his brief life and tragic death. The review essay covers more than twenty biographies and biographical portraits, the majority of which have appeared in the twenty-first century, along with three dozen Collins-themed topical monographs as well as several research articles and selected pieces of journalism.

This essay contends that emotional oscillations between subordination and emancipation are responsible for the inconclusivity and evasiveness of Le Fanu’s plots, which critics often emphasise but rarely try to explain. The parallels between, on the one hand, the dual structures that pervade Le Fanu’s works and, on the other, the binaries of latent dream thoughts and manifest dream content, the familiar and the uncanny, which Sigmund Freud employs in his explorations of the unconscious, shed significant light on the motivational forces at work in Le Fanu’s oeuvre. Le Fanu uses displacement and condensation, the major operations Freud attributes to dream work, to create an outside world, which reveals itself as an upended world within. This essay tries to demonstrate the psychological significance of central motifs in Le Fanu’s works, such as the double and the closed room. In light of later psychoanalytical insights into the influence of childhood traumatisation on the creativity of writers, Le Fanu appears absorbed by the incorporation of his innermost mortifications and yearnings into the defamiliarisations of his fiction. On the basis of Gothic patterns, he produces psychological fiction avant la lettre. He anticipates George Orwell’s dissection of mental processes in terms of manipulative social engineering, H.P. Lovecraft’s fantastic evocations of a Jungian collective unconscious, and literary interiorisation by modernist techniques, developed not long after Le Fanu’s death by the likes of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

The decades that followed Irish independence witnessed a doubling down of efforts to reinforce established gender roles and conservative systems of power in the fledgling state. The tensions that emerged between the cosmopolitanism outside of Ireland and the increasingly isolationist policies within found suitable expression in the contradictory treatment of Kate O’Brien’s work, lauded outside of Ireland, yet subjected at home to the stringent censorship laws that saw both Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941) banned upon publication. While, across the Atlantic, Maeve Brennan, then at the very outset of her career, was undergoing a form of self–censorship writing her first extended work, later to be published as The Visitor (2000). In the mid-twentieth century, Brennan and O’Brien explored depictions of women living on the margins of normative domestic life, beyond the institutions of marriage and motherhood. And in this, they paved the way for the radical cultural and spatial re-formations that would signal a new Ireland at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this essay, I consider Kate O’Brien’s novel Mary Lavelle (1936), alongside recently uncovered drafts of Brennan’s roughly contemporaneous novella, as a challenge to the patriarchal hegemony that emerged in the newly conceived Free State. And I suggest that in drafting her first extended work of fiction, Brennan was conscious of the proscriptions that O’Brien had fallen foul of in Ireland.

This article aims at examining how systemic violence is connected with social stigma and structural vulnerability in the social novel The Spinning Heart, which was published by the Irish writer Donal Ryan in 2012. This much lauded work describes the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and its devastating effects in a small rural town in Ireland from multiple viewpoints. Although there are twenty-one first-person narrators, one per chapter, Bobby Mahon stands out among them. In fact, the story of this construction foreman connects with the trajectories presented by the other characters. Through all of them, Ryan denounces the practices and procedures that powerful and privileged institutions, groups and individuals resort to in contemporary Ireland in order to assert control or authority over other less favoured members of society, thus fostering a climate of violence. Attention is drawn in this article to the nature of the patterns of aggression and hostility developed by the main characters in the novel but also to the adverse impact these unjust, oppressive and stigmatising patterns have on vulnerable subjects by burdening them physically, psychologically, culturally and financially. Michael Staudigl’s theories on systemic violence in Phenomenologies of Violence (2014), Imogen Tyler’s notions on social stigma in Stigma. The Machinery of Inequality (2020), Judith Butler’s ideas on structural vulnerability in Vulnerability in Resistance (2016) and Pierre Bourdieu’s views on patriarchy in Masculine Domination (2001) inform this work.

In the present essay, Derek Mahon’s last four collections, from Life on Earth (2008) all the way to Washing Up (2020), are analysed in the context of ecology. I argue here that Mahon’s increased attention to man-caused environmental destruction is predicated on a withdrawal from the world of profit-obsessed capitalism in favour of a silent contemplation of nature, which Mahon evokes through the figure of Gaia. Relying on Bruno Latour’s revision of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, I show that Mahon’s late poetry represents an attempt to caringly engage the mystery and mystique of the Earth understood as a network of interrelated agents. This down-to-earth point of view, which Latour refers to as the terrestrial, characterises the Earthbound: the people who see the environment as an infinitely complex, material realm in which humanity is one subject among many. And it is the terrestrial vantage of the Earthbound perspective that Mahon evokes throughout his work, challenging the hegemony of capitalism and technology in an effort to reach the pulsating rhythms of what he calls “the still living whole”.

Starting from Myles’ playful advertisement of book-handling services, the paper explores O’Brien’s/Myles’ systematic recycling, rewriting and inscribing of modernist texts and narrative devices, imbricated with the featuring of second-hand and repurposed objects. I argue for a provocative self-positioning of Flann’s/Myles’ texts and their recasting of modernist authorship and the authority of the author in the context of the increasing relevance, and ever faster obsolescence, of commodity culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The collage/assemblage of texts belonging to different genres, ages, languages and aesthetics is situated at the interface between Handlung with its corollary, the ethos of productivity, and handling, reuse and repurposing, at an ironic angle to the modernist slogan, “make it new”.

The playwright and theatre director Phillip McMahon is also co-founder and co-director of THISISPOPBABY, a Dublin arts company founded in 2007 and said to have redefined modern Irish theatre, ripping up the space between popular culture, counterculture and high art. Their shows have played and toured around Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, and beyond. THISISPOPBABY voices queer culture on stage making space for the history and stories of the LGBTIQA+ Irish community positioning itself between performance and politics. The first play written by McMahon purely with LGBTIQA+ characters is Once Before I Go (2021), in which he explores and examines the legacy of the AIDS crisis in Irish queer lives. McMahon does not only voice the community’s historic pain, shame, and stigma, but he also foregrounds the fact that, despite marriage equality, the LGBTIQA+ rights movement has not come to an end. In fact, he claims that, after the COVID-19 pandemic, a wider society is ready to hear stories that have been long buried, forgotten, and suppressed.

Deirdre Sullivan is an award-winning Irish YA writer who has been praised by several writers and folklore academics, such as Jack Zipes, for her fairy-tale revisions and her rewriting of the Irish legend “The Children of Lir”. Following the steps of contemporary feminist writers like Angela Carter or Emma Donoghue, Sullivan gives voice to minorities and deals with silenced topics such as sexual harassment. This interview focuses on her subversions of fairy tales and Irish mythology, especially in her collection Tangleweed and Brine (2017) and her revision of “The Children of Lir” in Savage Her Reply (2020). In this interview, Deirdre Sullivan talks about her interest in fairy tales and Irish folklore and how she became a writer.

In March and September of 1711, in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Ireland’s last witch trials took place. Eighteen-year-old educated gentlewoman Mary Dunbar accused eight Presbyterian women and one man from Islandmagee and the surrounding areas of using witchcraft to attack her in spectral or spirit form and to summon demons to possess her body. The women were tried on 31 March 1711 at the Spring Session of Carrickfergus County Assize Court. Despite pleading not guilty, they were convicted under the 1586 Irish Witchcraft Act and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and four stints in the pillory. Unlike most demonically-possessed persons, the incarceration of the convicted witches did not improve Dunbar’s health. Dunbar now claimed that William Sellor, husband and father to two of the convicted women, had begun bewitching her. William was convicted of witchcraft at the Summer Assizes in September 1711. Mary Dunbar however had died a few weeks earlier, just after the first trial, turning William’s original offence into a capital crime for which he was probably executed: he was thus one of a possible two people executed in Ireland under a witchcraft Act. The story of the trial is told in Andrew Sneddon’s book Possessed by the Devil: The Real History of The Islandmagee Witches and Ireland’s Only Mass Witchcraft Trial (History Press, 2013). Along with Victoria McCollum, Sneddon now heads the Islandmagee Witches 1711 Project (w1711.org). The following discussion outlines the origins, aims and outputs of the project.

This essay looks at post 1798 tensions in Belfast, Antrim and Down, using a survey of literary and cultural texts. It notes a range of responses to the first two decades of the nineteenth century in those associated with United Irish aspiration and those associated with maintaining establishment control. On one hand there was a maintenance of the publication of United Irish political, cultural thought and language in the first two decades after the union through continued publication of collections of poetry and other works (Samuel Thomson, James Orr, William Drennan). The essay explores how this work took shape and how it responded to the trauma of 1798, particularly in how the Scots language was deployed as a cultural tool/ weapon in the early 1800s. Alongside this, I discuss the creation and development of a range of “Enlightenment” ventures such as Academical Institution, Poor House, Literary Society and question the extent of these undertakings by looking at how far these were “enlightenment” or were generated by factional, mercantile interests operating under the guise of philanthropic endeavours (e.g. extension of cotton industry in Belfast, economic expansion built on Transatlantic slave trade, imperialist/colonialist animus of many ventures, rewriting of recent history to fit establishment view). These developments are contextualised and questioned alongside the creation of post-Union “Union-ist” Agendas and Groupings (Conservative Anglican and Presbyterian alliances in the cultural sphere in the work of Bishop Thomas Percy, Thomas Romney Robinson, Hugh Porter and Thomas Stott). The trauma and memory of the late eighteenth century left a legacy played out in Belfast’s development post Union and in its articulation, or non-articulation as an Enlightenment space.

Ireland’s paradoxical status within the British empire has been thoroughly researched and theorised. Ireland can now be imagined as both a subject nation and a recruiting ground for imperial profiteers. The thin red line emerges as disproportionately green while research into the slave trade reveals heavy Irish investment. Meanwhile eighteenth-century European imperialism flourishes alongside the earliest theorisations of “World Peace”, whether figured spatially as “universally peace” or temporally as “perpetual peace”. The Abbé Saint-Pierre’s influential work Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (1713) attracted the appreciative attention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Scholars debate the credibility of such projects, but their influence was considerable. Saint-Pierre’s notion of a European union which can arbitrate to prevent war fascinates, but it ignores conflicts arising from competitive global colonisation and by freezing pre-existing frontiers it may crush nationalist aspirations. What is Ireland’s place in the imagining of a world without war in the eighteenth century? To what extent is Ireland complicit in the entrenched injustices of a Pax Britannica and to what extent does a projected demilitarised world offer prospects for genuine self-determination? Looking at verse which celebrates the conclusion of various eighteenth-century conflicts, this article considers celebrations of the idea of “Peace” from Irish literary (and sub-literary) sources and attempts to consider the mixture of hopes and fears that animate understandings of how particular conflicts are concluded. The ways and means whereby “peaces” are extended in the literary imagination give a clue to versions of “enlightened” Irish futurity.

This article reads A Modest Proposal from the darker side of the westernised/anglicised Enlightenment. Firstly, it critically engages with the proclivity within the Anglocentric academy to celebrate English language literary figures associated with “The Enlightenment” in Ireland without a questioning of their role in the colonial project and in shaping its discourses of racism and sexism. Secondly, it focuses on how, from an Irish decolonial perspective, Jonathan Swift can be understood as a manager of the colonial racial/patriarchal matrix of power. Thirdly, it argues that the satire written by Jonathan Swift should be understood as an Anglocentric geo-cultural category and may be understood as westernised/anglicised Enlightenment satire. Finally, A Modest Proposal is analysed in terms of the exceptionality principle of irony, Swift’s project of improvement and salvation of the colonised, and modernity/coloniality’s rhetorical promise yet inability to solve the problems it produces.

Since the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, theatres and theatre companies in the twenty-six counties have had an uneasy relationship with the work of Derry-born playwright George Farquhar. This is presumably because Farquhar’s fervent loyalty to the English crown and his “unenlightened” views on religious tolerance – including the frankly sectarian treatment of Catholicism in his later plays – do not sit well with theatremakers who want to rebrand him as a narrowly and uncomplicatedly Irish playwright. While some post-independence productions of Farquhar have subtly and cleverly exploited Irish elements already present in his scripts, most have crudely imposed Irish elements onto his work. Farquhar is, of course, not the only playwright from the distinguished line of England-based, Irish Anglican dramatists to have had his England-set works “Hibernicised” in this way; works by Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, and Bernard Shaw have all suffered a similar fate in the Irish Free State and Irish Republic since 1922. However, Farquhar has been subjected to this “Hibernicising” process significantly more than any other playwright from the august Irish Anglican dramatic tradition. And, as this article demonstrates, a reluctance to fully engage with Farquhar’s Irish/British hybridity and his views on religion is a key feature of most productions of the playwright’s work in the twenty-six counties since independence. This is, of course, an insult to a man who – according to legend – was inside the walls during the Siege of Derry, who fought for King Billy at the Battle of the Boyne, and whose childhood home (his father’s parsonage) was burned to the ground by Catholic rebels.

This article traces Jonathan Swift’s legacy in the work of three modern Irish poets: Jessica Traynor, Rita Ann Higgins and Derek Mahon. I use two motifs to explore this inheritance: institutions and shadows. Using the work of Genevieve Lloyd, I argue that meaningful engagement with Enlightenment’s legacy must recognise its moral ambiguity and emotional complexity through the metaphor of shadow. Institutions, whether in the case of St Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin (Ireland’s first psychiatric hospital, founded by Swift), the residential institutions of the twentieth century or the modern apparatus of Direct Provision, embody a continuing legacy of suffering, control and containment. Imagination and empathy are the difficult but necessary means through which these legacies must be acknowledged and confronted.

In Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, the first-person narrator details her scholarly endeavour to translate into English Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire – the Irish-language lament of the eighteenth-century Kerry woman, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, on the death of her husband, Art Ó Laoghaire. Interwoven with this narrative, is the narrator’s intimate account of her lived personal experience whilst researching and translating this caoineadh. And yet, even as her search for the Caoineadh’s origins grows increasingly fervent, the narrator becomes ever more wary of the viability and implications of such historical retrieval. Caught between a desire to recover Ní Chonaill’s voice and presence and a recognition of the illusory nature of such longings, Ní Ghríofa’s text probes the interstices between the Caoineadh and its myriad iterations in performance, transcription, and translation. In this way, Ní Ghríofa confronts longstanding European anxieties regarding the relationship between writing and orality. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s seminal critique of this eighteenth-century crisis of writing, this article commences by revealing the caoineadh as an unacknowledged yet ongoing flashpoint in Enlightenment debates concerning orality and textuality. The article then turns to a discussion of Derrida’s associated reflections on haunting to consider the ways in which Ní Ghríofa responds to the marginalisation and silencing of the matrilineal tradition of keening in which she engages. Departing from Derrida’s genealogy of political inheritance, it argues that Ní Ghríofa’s narrative rehearses an alternative gothic textuality in which the oral and the written are intricately interwoven within Ireland’s past, present, and future. In so doing, it eschews the androcentric, ethnocentric and, as the text’s conclusion lays bare, anthropocentric hierarchies that continue to impinge upon both the Caoineadh’s legacy and the Irish literary canon in the twenty-first century.

In this article I will examine aspects of the work of the Irish writer Brian Dillon which allow us to propose the continuing relevance, from an Irish perspective, of a strain of critical discourse which engages with the legacy of the Enlightenment. Specifically, I look primarily at Dillon’s 2014 essay collection Objects in This Mirror as well as his 2017 collection Essayism, with a view to establishing some key characteristics of his artistic project, while showing their compatibility with the cultural materialism of key scholars of the Frankfurt School, before finally making explicit the compatibility of Dillon’s work with the values which underpin the Irish Field Day project which has influenced Irish studies since the 1980s.

In the wake of the era of Trump and Brexit, legacies and values of European Enlightenment seem under threat as never before. Cosmopolitanism in particular, generally understood as an Enlightenment virtue, has come to be associated with a sort of rootlessness, and has not, as generally understood, valued local affiliation. For David Goodhart, writing in 2017, this characteristic has resulted in a polarisation between “anywheres” (liberal middle-class cosmopolitans) and “somewheres” (broadly speaking, conservative working-class voters who have strong attachments to their nation and places of origin). An Irish Tory monarchist who sought in his poem The Deserted Village (1770) to defend rural communities from the ravages of economic modernity, Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74) was also in other key works a cosmopolitan commentator who compared countries in order to warn Britain against the dangers of economic liberalism, as he did in The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society (1764). Thus, he could be thought of as a more conservative cosmopolitan than many of his British and French peers; as such his particular enlightenment legacy is his example of a middle ground between the “anywheres” and “somewheres” of Goodhart’s thesis.

These poems form part of a sequence on the life of Bridget Cleary (1867-1895). Cleary was killed by her husband, who claimed at trial to be acting under the belief that his wife had been abducted by fairies and replaced with a changeling. A conversation with Joe Lines establishes the poems’ context and development.

Issue information for Jewish Historical Studies: A Journal of English-Speaking Jewry 55(1).