Editors' Notes: Notai na nEagarthoiri

With this issue, New Hibernia Review offers something new in its eight-year history: a themed issue, devoted to neglected works of Irish-American literature. In an issue that aspires to step back and to reconsider, it is fitting to open with the most ruminative and retrospective of literary forms, a memoir by Dr.James Murphy—now director of the Irish Studies program at Villanova University, "Finding Home: Aughkiltubred, 1969," recalls its author's first trip to Ireland in the company of his immigrant father. The journey began worriedly, with the newly widowed father wondering if he could pick up the threads of a life he had left behind four decades earlier. In the end, the journey that began so uncertainly was gratifying for all - though, as befits a memoir, in unforeseen ways.

Writing from the perspective of a linguistic anthropologist, Dr. E. Moore Quinn, who is currently engaged in a study of Irish-American folklore, draws our attention to the 1902 collection St. Patrick's Day: Its Celebration in New York and Other American Places, 1737 - 1845, compiled by John D. Crimmins. In particular, Quinn probes the cultural significance of the many toasts of St. Patrick's Day celebrations in that period. Sometimes eccentric, often bombastic, the multiple toasts that were de rigueur encomia to the national holiday provide a rich resource by which to understand the aspirations of the Irish in colonial America and the Early Republic. Quinn shows that there was more than self-congratulation at work: the grandiloquence of the toasters was, in fact, a sophisticated strategy for asserting a claim to cultural legitimacy and full citizenship.

Rooted in Puritan religious testimonies, the genre of the captivity narrative took many forms, but always framed itself around the basic story of a forced detention among aliens. As Dr. Joanna Brooks demonstrates, the Pennsylvania backcountry gave rise to a particular subset of such narratives in which Quakers depict themselves as surrounded by the savage Scots-Irish minority. Examining this little-studied literary genre, Brooks finds that these narratives reflect the Quakers' wish to portray the frontier realpolitik to their own advantage: She observes that Quakers thought that, "Were it not for this barbarous minority . . . [they] might have maintained a more peaceful relationship to the Indians; the outrages of a few Scots-Irish frontier settlers dragged the whole of the colony into war with the Indians and the Quakers into open conflict with their own peaceful principles." Joanna Brooks is the author of American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (2003).

However much popular culture may promote the image of the raffish, rough-and-tumble "Paddy" in nineteenth-century America, there was always a simultaneous tradition of literary high culture to refute it. A ready example is Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920), a selection of whose poetry we present in this issue. Associated with the "aesthetic revival" school of New England poets that included John Boyle O'Reilly, John Jeffrey Roche, and other writers at the Catholic Boston Pilot, Guiney looked to the Romantics and earlier for her forms. But in these poems from the 1880s, we find a woman of far-ranging interests, alert to the world around her. "Two Irish Peasant Songs" offer lush natural images, while in "An Epitaph for Wendell Phillips," Guiney pays tribute to the famous Abolitionist orator. And in "Gloucester Harbor " she alludes to Al Borak, the horse of Arab myth—hinting at Guiney's future career as a student of Arab literature, and as the "discoverer" of Khalil Gibran.

As Professor Jack Morgan notes, the presence of famine immigrants was an inescapable fact of life in the New England of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the Transcendalists. The 1855 essay "The Shipwreck" opens a window on Thoreau's particular perceptions of the immigrant Irish. At one level, the essay is invaluable reportage; at another level, it can be read as a meditation on human indifference. At a still deeper level, Morgan argues, "The Shipwreck" illustrates Margaret Kelleher's theories of catastrophe literature by conflating voyeuristic and transgressive elements in its descriptions of female drowning victims...