“Poetry and «the Pencil of Love»: The Early Anglo-Irish Ekphrasis of Mary Tighe”
Charles Armstrong, University of Agder
Although ample critical attention has been paid to Irish literature responding to the visual arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, little notice has been given to pre-Yeatsian ekphrasis in Ireland. This paper will look at two early instances of poetry about pictures in the writings of Mary Tighe (1772-1810). Tighe’s “The Picture: Written for Angela” and “To Lady Charlemont, in Return for her Presents of Flowers, March, 1808” will be shown to be heavily marked by their time, evincing distinctive traits characteristic of the Age of Sensibility, Irish Protestant privilege drawing upon the tradition of the Grand Tour, and a form of Romantic manuscript culture. But Tighe will also be shown to anticipate later developments that still not have been given full critical cognizance. By demonstrating links between her ekphrastic practice and Richardson’s novels, I will challenge the usually so water-tight separation between poetic and prose ekphrasis, even while showing how Tighe probes into the neglected parerga at the borders of the visual representation. Tighe will also be shown to anticipate later emphasis on the aesthetics of ekphrasis, as she aligns visual art with a non-instrumental gift of flowers from her friend, Lady Charlemont. The Eros and agency of the visual object – what pictures want, as thematized in the work of W. J. T. Mitchell – will also be seen to be at work in these early and unjustly neglected instances of Irish ekphrasis.
“New Strands in the Fabric of the Nation – English Migrants to Irish Citizens?”
Vikki Barry Brown, Queen Mary University of London
English people in Ireland form a significant but under-researched group set within a complex and entangled historical relationship between the two countries. Through colonialism, the presence of English people in Ireland could be viewed as simultaneously contested and banal. The Irish State, established in opposition to British rule to an extent constructed Irish identity as white and Catholic, shaping enduring assumptions around who ‘gets’ to be Irish.
In the three years following the UK’s ‘Brexit’ referendum, applications for Irish citizenship by British nationals residing in Ireland, rose year upon year, despite those citizens being somewhat protected by the reciprocal rights afforded to British and Irish nationals under the Common Travel Area (CTA), unlike British Citizens in the remainder of the EU27. These applications may symbolise attempts by British citizens to retain EU membership that would be otherwise lost following Brexit, but is that the whole story? Drawing on research gathered as part of my PhD ‘Being English in Ireland’ which explores the lives of English migrants to Ireland since 1960, this paper will consider how these individuals negotiate their identity through the examination of their motivations and experiences as new and soon-to-be Irish citizens.
‘“A Young Man Is Dead, a Legend Has Been Born.’ The Death of Bobby Sands: an Extreme Act of Redemptive Violence?”
John Braidwood, University of Oulu
In the contested space of Northern Ireland Bobby Sands has remained a powerfully divisive figure; he is much derided by his detractors and the subject of much hyperbole by his supporters. To some he is a Christ-like, messianic, martyr-icon, to others a bloodthirsty, murderous terrorist. For many Bobby Sands represented a combination of traditional sentimental Roman Catholic devotionalism and the collective self-deification of the anticipation of ultimate salvation, a liberation theology of sorts; for others this convicted bomber and ‘gunman’ quickly came to embody all of the heinous crimes of the IRA. His emaciated body lies at the core of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, his death being the watershed in the Troubles, representing the point where a vortex of hopelessness turned paradoxically into glimmers of hope and the seeds for an end to the conflict; a potent, redemptive event of catalysing intensity in a time of deepening despair. Where is the real Bobby Sands? The H-Block Protests and the ten deaths were greeted with increasingly uncomprehending consternation by the British, and mostly with bemused indifference towards a distant and remote – almost foreign – ‘northern problem’ in the South of Ireland, while worsening the old antagonisms in the North. The manner of his dying and death attracted global sympathy and interest, which rapidly tipped the balance in favour of northern Republicanism. Is it time now to finally lay Bobby Sands to rest?
‘“A Society of Blatant Inequalities’: Identifying Injustice in Rocky Road to Dublin (Peter Lennon, 1967)”
Seán Crosson, NUI Galway
For much of the twentieth century, Ireland on screen was defined to an overwhelming extent by foreign directors and perspectives. Within the oppressive context of early twentieth Ireland, film was viewed with suspicion by the establishment, evident in the restrictive Censorship of Films Act enacted in 1923 under the auspices of the Ministry of Home Affairs (a precursor to the Department of Justice), and one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the newly independent Dáil Éireann (parliament) of the Irish Free State. As a result, the employment of film as a critical tool to examine Irish society and identify injustice was slow to develop. Rather, film was an important part of the popular cultural context that sustained prevailing conceptions of Irishness and the position of moral authorities (above all the Catholic Church) within Irish society, evident in particular in the sympathetic portrayals found repeatedly of the Irish priest, one of the most recognisable Irish stereotypes in the cinema. This paper examines Irish cinema in the first half of the twentieth century in light of the existence of Ireland’s ‘architecture of containment’ (Smith 2001) that contributed to ongoing injustices highlighted in Peter Lennon’s ground-breaking 1968 documentary Rocky Road to Dublin, a key text in identifying the “society of blatant inequalities”” that prevailed in Ireland.
“Beckett and the Bedsit: The London Rented Rooms of Murphy”
Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi University
Variations on the near-empty space appear in multiple works by Samuel Beckett. This paper explores those found in his 1938 novel Murphy, asking how its textual space relates to actual rented rooms. Put bluntly, did the bedsit life affect literary content? People’s access to residential property is an aspect of urban spatial justice in which economics figures alongside perceptions of gender and ethnicity. It fits into a broader study of London residential space in literature, which works with the dialectic of slum and neighbourhood. The word slum first (in the 1820s) labelled a crowded central London neighbourhood said by writers to have been packed with Irish immigrants. In the twentieth century, working-class Irish incomers to London faced racism.
Toponymically rich, Murphy depicts both street-level neighbourhoods and neighbour relations inside houses. The former are identifiably those of 1930s London in low-status localities close to industry but also not far from central and wealthy districts. It also has bigger spatial frames: spanning London; using London as a link in a chain from Ireland to France. I read the novel against three contexts. In relation to the spaces of Beckett’s life and works, Murphy’s identifiable topographies distinguish it from Beckett’s post-war works, but I trace connections between the different phases. Second is evidence on the spatial politics of room renting in 1930s London, specifically as they affected incomers from Ireland. Thirdly, the paper adds to a growing body of work investigating housing and modernist-era British literature (Cuming 2016; Finch and Kelly 2021).
“Migrants in the City: Spatial Injustice and Inward Migration in Contemporary Irish Literature”
Deirdre Flynn, Mary Immaculate College
In 2000 the Irish Government established the Direct Provision system as a temporary measure to deal with the growing numbers of international protection applicants arriving in Ireland. Designed to be a short-term solution, it was expected that the direct provision centres would house people for a maximum of 6 months while their application was being processed. Twenty years later the system is still in place, housing nearly 7000 people for an average of 24 – 36 months, with over 5% waiting over 7 years for a decision on their application. Left in limbo, these people are citizens of nowhere.
In 2018, Melatu Uche Okorie published a collection of stories called This Hostel Life, detailing life in direct provision, and the racism experienced on the streets of Dublin for inward migrants to Ireland. In her story ‘Under the Awning’ Okorie, who spent eight years in the Irish Direct Provision system, illustrates how the streets of the city are not a welcoming place for black migrants. Her protagonist is ‘desperate not to stand out…so people were not made to feel uncomfortable’ by her presence (Okorie 2018). For the inward migrant the public space of the global city does not correspond with the public image of Ireland of the Welcomes.
This paper, using examples from contemporary writing on Ireland’s Direct Provision system, will discuss Ireland’s response to inward migration. Focusing on how the global city of Dublin is represented and negotiated in these works.
“Justice in the War and at Home – Utopian Hopes of Fair Solutions in Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End”
Hedda Friberg-Harnesk, Mid-Sweden University
If one definition of justice is “ceaseless individual responsibility for the victims…of wars and violence”, it is safe to say that injustice is the ceaseless shirking from such responsibility. In Days Without End, a novel of Irishmen involved in wars in nineteenth-century United States, Sebastian Barry is unsparing in his critique of such avoidance. His depiction of atrocities committed by whites against Native Americans – and also, more briefly, against black Union soldiers in the Civil War – leaves no doubt about the extent of that which he refers to as “the sheer…brutality of it all.” The novel is grim, but funny and gentle, too – remarkably so in the light of the ground it covers.
If, moreover, justice is a “complex term for finding fair solutions to challenges in personal relations,” then, indeed, the central characters in Barry’s tale – Thomas McNulty, “child of poor Sligonians,” and John Cole, “whose people were run out” of the American East long ago – find themselves enmeshed in questions of justice. They are professional soldiers, but they also, seemingly nurturing an unspoken – arguably utopian – hope, pursue possibilities of finding sustainable alternatives to conventional modes of being in society. My paper will explore how, driven by silent hopes of fair solutions in their lives, Thomas and John come to engage, not only in warfare, but in cross-dressing, adoption across ethnic boundaries, and same-sex marriage. In doing so, they attempt to resist the false and destructive boundaries by which individuals of certain ethnicity or sexual orientation are separated from mainstream society.
“‘You Can’t Grab Anything with a Closed Fist’: Reflections on Ulster Protestant Identity in Derek Lundy´s Memoir Men that God Made Mad: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland”
Billy Gray, Dalarna University
In Ireland and within Irish studies itself, considerable effort has been expended in the attempt to disclose the complex interaction between past conflicts and contemporary attempts to recoup their significance in the present. Given that the interpretation of historical events has often been at the heart of national conflict, there have frequently been fierce clashes between rival versions of a common past. Derek Lundy´s Men that God Made Mad: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland a work of non-fiction published in 2006, is an invaluable and timely contribution to our understanding of the selectivity of national memory and the indelible link that exists between familial remembrance and its communal counterpart. As a work of historical investigation, it sheds light on the interaction between repressed cultural memories, communal and national amnesia and the evasion of the past.
A generically hybrid work, part historical investigation, part memoir, Lundy´s text combines a blend of meticulous research with autobiographical snapshots, interspersed with an exploration of the connection between personal and collective identities. Claiming that ´the lives of my ancestors resonate in the very core of Ulster history´´ Lundy uses the lives of three such ancestors as a prism through which to examine the standard, received stories of myth and history so prominent within the Ulster Protestant tradition. In doing so, Lundy´s narrative provides support for Jean Braham’s view that “We see the past in something of the same way as we see a Henry Moore sculpture. The ‘holes’ define the shape. What is left repressed or what cannot be uttered, is often as significant…as what is said”. Moreover Lundy, through an engagement with his own personal background as a member of an Ulster Protestant family, positions himself in a metaphorical space where individual memory, cultural allegiance and concepts of the self merge. My paper will seek to show how Lundy’s text, in attempting to investigate the past with ‘thoughts of salvage,’ can be viewed as an attempt at achieving a renegotiation of selfhood.
“Environmental Justice and Posthuman Poetics in Contemporary Irish Poetry”
Anne Karhio, National University of Ireland
This presentation addresses the idea of environmental justice in contemporary Irish poetry in the context of an emerging posthuman consciousness, and a posthuman poetics. This means the questioning of the centrality of the category of “human”, and exploring forms of engagement with the world as more than an “object of knowledge” or “thing”, a creation of “the productions of knowledge [by] the human knower”, as Donna Haraway has argued (“Situated Knowledges”). In the poems addressed here, environmental justice or injustice is addressed in specific contexts related to the consumer society, the effects of multinational capitalism, or the destruction of human and non-human habitats. There is also, however, a more profound paradigm shift in the implicit challenging of the human perspective as a foundation for a sustainable ethics, or the human as “the food chain’s top banana” as Leontia Flynn writes in “Second Dialogue” (The Radio, 2018). In a number of poems, this is expressed through a recalibration of the first-person verbal-visual point of view, as well as of sense of scale. The perspectives of non-human animals or machine perception often replace the presumed subject-position of the speaking voice. In Derek Mahon’s “Being a Dog” (Against the Clock, 2018) there is “no inter-species dialogue” to translate what the dog “knows” into human terms (or into human knowledge”), and Peter Sirr’s “Vision” similarly recognizes the “dog’s eye view of the world” (Gravity Wave, 2019). In the long sequence that forms the second part of Justin Quinn’s Fuselage (2002), the distinction between human and machine vision is blurred in the repeated image of eyes monitoring individuals at different stages of the global trade on consumer goods (“Two eyes watch the earth”, “The two eyes watch them all the time”, “the sky-hooked eye…of fluidity and ochlocracy”). At the same time planetary and microscopic scales co-exist in the flow of goods and pixels on screen, across the planet. Mahon’s “A Country Road” moves beyond the familiar trope of a rural landscape and senses, and recognizes how “cloud swirls on the globe” while “bacteria, fungi, viruses [are] squirming in earth and dirt” (Life on Earth, 2008). The speaker of Nick Laird’s “Feel free” (Feel Free, 2018) similarly seeks to “interface / with Earth” and while sensing “the presence of numerous and minute quanta moving…in unison”. In these poets’ writing, such an imaginary of the more-than-human domain is also a prerequisite for a meaningful framework of environmental justice.
“Insurgent Spaces: The Many Dublins of Contemporary Irish Literature”
Liam Lanigan, Governors State University
21st-century Dublin has been defined in cultural, socio-economic, and spatial terms by a series of ruptures; the divide between the city’s north and south has been compounded by a division between the “old” city in the west and the new city of the Docklands, for example, or the temporal division between before the Celtic Tiger and after. However, during the last two decades the meaning of Dublin space has also been contested by previously marginalized or silenced groups such as migrants and LGBTQ communities. Within the dominant conceptions of Dublin space, such groups have established “insurgent spaces” that transform existing uses and meanings of the cityscape, creating new cartographies of the city and challenging our understanding of Dublin’s meaning. Focusing primarily on Barry McCrea’s 2005 novel The First Verse, this paper will examine how Irish literature has sought to map these insurgent spaces. The novel captures a moment of profound transformation in Dublin, including the emergence of new transport systems, the financial district, and the city center’s cosmopolitan gentrification. However, it also maps a host of “other” spaces that emerge within this topography, including then-new immigrant neighborhoods in Parnell Street and Moore Street, and an LGBTQ subculture radiating from The George pub. In its representation of these intersecting cartographies, and in its transgression of existing ruptures in the city’s spatiality, The First Verse provides a model for narrativizing the city through multiplicity and interconnection, challenging the economic and social divisions by which it is increasingly defined.
“‘The Battles We Refuse to Fight Today Become the Hardships Our Children Must Endure Tomorrow’: The Troubles and Its Legacy in Children’s/Young Adult Fiction”
Michaela Marková, Technical University of Liberec
The recent Ulster University research paper on the current state of the educational system in Northern Ireland reports that education in this region is ‘divided and splintered’. It appeals for vested interests of ‘the traditional political blocks’ to be reformed. Indeed, it argues that ‘history, politics and ecclesiastical interventions’ have contributed to the development of such a divided system and need thus to be addressed if an ‘ambitious and radical’ transformation, which it calls for, is to be achieved. Although not being its primary objective, the UU’s report draws attention to the sentiment that unless the contentious issues related to the legacy of Troubles, are openly addressed, future will be thwarted. The current debate concerning the Northern Ireland protocol and post-Brexit Irish Sea border further attests to how widespread this sentiment actually is. It also illustrates that children and their prospects for future are used to justify the assumed call into action, as is alluded to by the title of the proposed paper, which references the signs that have appeared in relation to the debated issues. The paper takes the aforementioned sentiment as a departure point. It proceeds from the impediments to implementation of community restorative justice in Northern Ireland as related to the conflict the sentiment warns us about to examine how the urgency to address the contested legacy of the Troubles is communicated to children, namely in ?in fiction. While the discourse about/of the conflict in fiction for adults has been widely discussed, the paper seeks to examine how the crimes of the past and/or the peace-dividends are portrayed in works for children/YA, as such remains an under-discussed topic.
“Medieval Irish Law as Alternative Justice in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Ireland”
Ciaran McDonough, University College Dublin
The mid-nineteenth-century project to translate the corpus of medieval Irish law brought a specialist subject area into the public domain. The publication of the legal tracts across the second half of the nineteenth century, not only highlighted the vast amount of medieval Irish legal material, but served also as a rallying point for Irish nationalists, who saw another way to shake off the British yoke. This paper examines the presentation of the laws as, what Heather Laird terms, an alternative legal space separate from English law in the nineteenth century; how medieval Irish law was considered as a replacement legal system in an imagined independent Ireland to serve justice in a more Irish way; and, in an independent Ireland, as a means to justice when denied by official channels.
“Poetry, Prisons and Voices from Beyond the Grave: Some Thoughts on Sinéad Morrisey’s The State of the Prisons (2005) and Current Memoirs of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland”
Ruben Moi, UiT The Arctic University Norway
In the questions of justice and literature in Northern Ireland, Sinéad Morrisey’s profound and painful concept volume The State of the Prisons (2005), places itself in a long tradition of prison journals on the island, raises questions of justice beyond its own time and place, and overlaps with recent publications from the Boston project, such as Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing (2018) and Ed Maloney’s Voices from the Grave (2010). This paper takes its point of departure in some of the controversial issues of Keefe’s memoir and Maloney’s biography before attending to some of the parallel questions in Morrisey’s poetry.
‘“The State of the Prisons’: A Historic Perspective”
Britta Olinder, Gothenburg University
In 2005 Sinéad Morrissey published The State of the Prisons, a collection taking its title from the last poem in it. In six sections, each consisting of six stanzas of six lines the reader is here confronted with John Howard, prison reformer judging himself ruthlessly. Although not explicitly, the issue is justice in legal terms, reflected in social justice, moral justice and spiritual justice. The subtitle of the poem is “A History of John Howard, Prison Reformer, 1726-1790”, a history told in poetic form and poetic spirit. The difference between history and poetry becomes evident as the historical facts in this case are loaded with poetic subtlety. Words and concepts take on double or manifold meanings as biographical data are placed in a spiritual perspective.
The poem is written in the first person, in John Howard’s own voice. Ill by the plague in a Russian field hospital in the Crimea he is facing death, looking back on his adventurous life and great mission but blaming himself for his fatal mistake in betraying his own son.
“From the ‘Dim Coming Times’: The Call to Justice of Ireland’s Spoken Word Poetry and Internet Culture”
Charika Swanepoel, University of Turku
In W.B. Yeats’s 1892 poem “To Ireland in the Coming Times”, he writes of the artist’s work as the making of song in order to “sweeten Ireland’s wrong”. Yeats suggested that politics is “an effect of art, not a cause of it; that poetry instigates action, instead of responding to external events”1. Certainly, the same can be said today of the younger generation of artists who attempt to “sweeten Ireland’s wrong” when one considers the recent rise in spoken word poetry in Ireland and its call for justice. Spoken word poets are no longer limited to open mics at small-time pubs but form an integral part the cultural hub of Ireland. These artists are, for instance, seen performing outside the Dáil Éireann and on popular television programs on public broadcasters such as RTÉ.
In line with these spoken word performances and the written poetry that emerges from them, the global development of internet culture further allows for immediate and worldwide attention to injustice. Spoken word poetry performances often draw hundreds of thousands of views online and gain further interest by being shortened and shared on various online media and social platforms. This paper therefore hopes to illustrate how current spoken word poetry and internet culture in Ireland succeeds in challenging the established social order. This will be done by providing an overview of the issues addressed by young Irish spoken word poets Stephen James Smith, Emmet Kirwan, Emmet O’Brien, and Natalya O’Flaherty. On the whole, these issues include the housing crisis, the Irish identity, mental health and addiction, global warming, and the effects of the internet culture itself.
‘“Out of the Lamp-Bestarred and Clouded Dusk’: The poetries of Lola Ridge and Rudolf Nilsen in Comparative Perspective”
David Toms
On the face of it, Lola Ridge and Rudolf Nilsen are not two poets one might ordinarily put together. Ridge, born in Dublin and living in Australia and later America, was a modernist and avant-garde poet who was until recently all but forgotten in her country of origin. Nilsen, on the other hand, lived his entire life in Norway, though he travelled, focussing his efforts on his journalism and poetry. His poetry was popular and remains so. Where both poets intersect in their interests was their deep commitment to the class struggle of the period following the Russian Revolution right through the interwar period. In this paper, I will explore similarities and contrasts in the poetics of Ridge and Nilsen and the tensions in their practice between radical politics and a radical poetics. In doing so, I will attempt to bridge the gap between both poets’ search for justice, across linguistic barriers, enacting an internationalism for which they both stood and suggest that though they were separated by language and distance, their poetry aimed towards the same goal.
“Divine (In)Justice in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer”
Joakim Wrethed, Stockholm University
In his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Melmoth, Chris Baldick suggests the following: “When … Melmoth defends the Protestant view of the Bible against the Catholic Church, and we recall that this uncharacteristic behaviour is being related to us in a Jewish text transmitted by a Catholic, something more is involved than mere clumsiness or forgetfulness: an inadvertent dissolution of distinctions is taking place in which the same voice can utter sacrilegious sarcasms and pious platitudes almost in the same breath, erasing the clear line that was expected to lie between them in an ‘improving’ work of fiction” (xvi). The Irish context of Maturin’s self-deconstructing project is decisive. The Protestant rhetoric only strengthens the Catholic resistance in the way it would in an Irish political context (applied power always provokes opposition). In the novel, the Protestant impulse that Maturin at least seems to be driven by is a sterness that only functions as a catalyst for the dissolving of distinctions that Baldick draws attention to. The Gothic outcome is a display of the only justice, the fate of desire. The sought purity of the Panoptic eye becomes something like the eye in Georges Bataille’s The Story of an Eye: “‘Put it up my arse, Sir Edmund,’ Simone shouted. And Sir Edmund delicately glided the eye between her buttocks” (66). This paper examines the functioning of (in)justice in Melmoth, mainly in its theological dimensions.
“‘A Map of Bird Migration’: Redefinitions of National Identity through Transnational Mobility and Multidirectional Memory in Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky”
Carmen Zamorano Llena, Dalarna University
Evelyn Conlon’s novel Not the Same Sky (2013) was published almost twenty years after the 150th anniversary of Ireland’s An Gorta Mhór, the Great Hunger or Famine. Nowadays, this dramatic historical event is unquestionably acknowledged as playing a crucial role in the making of Irish national(ist) identity and determining the fate of the subsequent relationship between Britain and Ireland. However, the significance of this event was not made explicit until its 150th anniversary, when political manifestations as well as scholarly enquiry started to acknowledge the dramatic socio-cultural and historical consequences of the Irish Famine. The 150th anniversary did not only bring about a change in approaches to the Famine, but it also posed the question of the nature and role of remembrance in tragic historical events and the construction of collective national identities. In the field of literature, Terry Eagleton’s seminally observed the lack of literary expressions relating to the Famine before 1995 (1995). Since then there has been a proliferation of studies focusing on the study of Famine literature, which quite often has included a variety of genres beyond fiction, poetry and drama (Fegan 2002). This body of literature and its scholarly analyses have often focused on the impact of this event on individuals and on Ireland as a contribution to the shaping of national identity (Fegan 2002: 5). A number of literary texts and studies have focused on the Irish diaspora caused by the Famine and its crucial role in narratives of national(ist) identity. However, Evelyn Conlon’s historical novel Not the Same Sky invites a re-examination of the role of the Famine and the Irish diaspora in Irish narratives of national identity. Conlon’s novel offers a critical engagement with forced migration as represented by an understudied chapter in the history of the Irish diaspora, namely the Famine orphan girls migration to Australia as part of the Earl Grey’s assisted migration scheme. This paper considers how Conlon’s novel foregrounds transnational mobility and the transcultural migration of memories interconnecting nineteenth-century Irish migration with contemporary transnational mobility in the post-2008 financial crisis. This paper contends that the migration of memories, transformed under the influence of the present vantage point from which they are revisited, contributes to redefining past lieux de mémoire as “noeuds de mémoire” (Rothberg 2010), thereby challenging inherited narratives of Irish national identity.