Oral Culture and Popular Autonomy

William Carleton at times conceived of his great narrative enterprise as a form of naive ethnography, asserting that his stories contained more “facts” about Ireland…

Reason of Past History

While sympathy for Poland, as the recurring victim of Tsarist repression, was widespread in nineteenth century Europe, in Ireland this assumed an intensity and duration…

Oscar Wilde and the Irish

Far from being a marginal figure in independent Ireland, Wilde was viewed with considerable interest and good will.

Oscar and the Irish

A history of Oscar Wilde’s reputation in Ireland is uplifting and rhetorically adroit. But perhaps we should also ask if it is true.

DUBLIN AT WAR

There has been no collective amnesia in Ireland about the Great War. The event was remembered in Dublin for many decades after it ended, but…

Fighting With Shadows

This equation of the county with mindless violence and chaos has long since been forgotten, and Tipperary has become one of the most respectable of…

Blood Relations

Murray’s attitude is, at times, one of barely concealed impatience with the Freudian and other theoretical perspectives which have been brought to bear on his…

The Sea of Anecdotes

While this merriment was afoot, I lay on my bunk straining to understand, and to be admitted to some small share of the pleasure which…

Ár Scéal Féin

Although the urge to control and condemn was at its most explicit in relation to works dealing with religion and Irish history, it could surface…

A Bit of the Same

Mulligan’s insinuations link up with one of the novel’s main themes, the convergence of Bloom and Stephen, when he tells the company how he saw…

By Reason of Past History

The palpable sense of the dead and living coming together that is the undeclared but unmistakable meaning of the hundreds of candles flickering in the…

Voices of the Dispossessed