Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors' Notes

In the years following the Great Emergency, The Bell anchored Irish literary and intellectual life, and Val Mulkerns's recently completed memoir "Friends With the Enemy" will open an invaluable window on that essential journal and its milieu. Here, we are honored to present an extract from her forthcoming book, beginning just after Mulkerns returned to her native Dublin from England, where her novel A Time Outworn had been published in 1951. As associate editor for the eccentric, often crotchety, but always humane Peadar O'Donnell, Mulkerns moved at the heart of literary Dublin: telling and touching glimpses of David Marcus, Micheál MacLiammóir, Richard Power, and others fill these pages. Here, too, she shares memories of Frank O'Connor, whom she admired and often corresponded with, but somehow never met. Well known as a columnist, reviewer, and broadcaster, Val Mulkerns is the author of four novels and three collections of short stories, and a member of Aosdána.

Virtually synonymous with quackery today, phrenology was by no means confined to the margins of scientific inquiry in the early nineteenth century. In this issue, Dr. Enda Leaney tracks phrenology's history in Ireland from its arrival in 1815—where it gained a significant following among the small, but influential, Unitarian and dissenting community—through to its fading away after midcentury. In lectures, demonstrations, and pamphlets, phrenology's rationalist adherents participated in a lively public culture of science in Ireland. Their interests were rooted in a sincere belief in the liberatory and improving powers of intellect: most of the men who embraced this physical science of character were keen to throw off any trace of superstition. Notably, the "science" was also used to give physiological support to the theorizing of the Anglo-Saxon superiority over the Celt. Enda Leaney has published widely on the social history of Irish science, in Irish Historical Studies, the Dictionary of Irish Biography, and elsewhere.

Born in Belfast in 1952, Gerald Dawe has published seven collections of poetry from Sheltering Places (1978) through Lake Geneva (2005), as well as pioneering collections of criticism like Against Piety (1995) and Stray Dogs and Horses (2000). His adventurous suite of poems in this issue has two homes: the Victorian suburbs of Dublin and the neighborhood of Boston College, where Dawe recently spent a year in residence. All the hallmarks of Dawe's writing appear in these poems, especially his quiet mistrust of ordinary appearances. The now suburban environs of nineteenth-century Boston appear in "American Notebook," where "At Hawthorne's Graveside" registers the disquiet of post-9/11 America. Readers familiar with Dawe's poetry will find invention in the displacement of Belfast memory in the prose poem "The Fair," but most telling is Dawe's wonderfully antique refrain in the lyric "The Lady of the House." Gerald Dawe teaches at Trinity College, Dublin.

Patrick McCabe's dark 1992 novel The Butcher Boy was brought to film by Neil Jordan in 1997—though Dr. Laura Eldred reminds us that the big screen was in many ways already present in the novel's origins, as she traces the influence of horror-film conventions on the novel's structure. She notes that McCabe himself has remarked on his tastes for cinematic horror "schlock"; when the protagonist of his novel, twelve-year-old Francie Brady, internalizes the moral universe of such movies, his skewed understanding of reality launches him on a murderous rampage. Eldred draws on both the Kristevan concept of the abject and on critical theorizing of contemporary horror movies as she examines the "chain of monsters" in the novel, of which the repressive Irish society of the 1960s itself may be the most horrific. Laura G. Eldred's most recent work appears in The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories (2006).

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault famously posited the panopticon, wherein one is never certain who might be watching, as the model for modern social control. Here, Temple Cone examines Ciaran Carson's intricately layered 1989 collection Belfast Confetti as a study in the poet's negotiation with the uncertainty created by such free...