Editors’ Introduction

This issue of Eire-Ireland begins with five essays—addressing poetry, fiction, autobiographical writing, and Irish performance—that retrieve and explore historical and political sources for cultural production. Contributors reevaluate existing interpretations or initiate new critical readings by deploying a richly interdisciplinary range of contexts in their scholarship. The essays offer new work in the areas of feminism and gender studies, material culture, and a historically informed cultural criticism. Following these explorations of culture, two articles open up fresh ground in the history of science in Ireland, an interdisciplinary subject deserving more scholarly attention than it has received. We also include three articles exploring key issues in Irish or Irish-American politics during the twentieth century. In different ways these political contributions are all attentive to cultural issues of linguistic formulation and the languages of “Irish” politics.

In her opening article Sarah McKibben argues that the early modern aisling form, a “poetic recalibration” of a longstanding trope of national sovereignty embodied in the figure of a woman, specifically addresses the crisis of male humiliation following the 1601 defeat at Kinsale and the subsequent 1607 “Flight of the Earls” to continental Europe. Exploring the gendered imagery of a literary form emerging with the final Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, McKibben demonstrates how the Irish poets negotiated a range of responses in order to redress their sense of masculine shame and dishonor in the unrecognizable and disturbingly new political landscape of defeat.

Providing an unexplored context for Sydney Owenson’s initial national tale, Julie Donovan examines how The Wild Irish Girl reflects the author’s staunchly materialist perspective. This essay argues that Owenson’s much debated 1806 work of fiction, initially criticized for its “frothy romantic nationalism,” thematically and stylistically “interweaves Irish history with the physical world of material objects—primarily textiles and clothing.” Through her grounding of the essay in both the history of Irish textile production and a study of Owenson’s literary references to clothing, Donovan reinforces a growing critical interest in this writer’s serious antiquarian scholarship and literary allusions.

Rose Novak’s retrieval of the original versions of poet Ellen O’Leary’s contributions to the Fenian newspaper The Irish People belongs to the larger project of feminist recovery of Irish women’s writing, exemplified by volumes 4 and 5 of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. But in addition to recovering O’Leary’s poetry, Novak examines significant differences between the political poems as they were originally published in the 1860s and as they later appeared in a heavily edited form in an 1890 volume. The essay exposes the erasure of this poet’s political voice by her male editors in the early years of the Irish Literary Revival and argues for the creation of a category of “minor” political literature operating outside a more traditional canon.

Casey Jarrin explores two Victorian confessional texts—Oscar Wilde’s 1897–98 post-prison letters to the Daily Chronicle and Thomas J. Clarke’s memoir of his 1882–98 incarceration, Glimpses of an Irish Felon’s Prison Life—as “textual and ethical refusals to endure disciplined prison silence.” She reads these autobiographical writings as part of an emerging late nineteenth-century discourse that demanded “penal reform as a means of anticolonial mobilization” and that envisioned the prison as a viable space for aesthetic production. In her “Cover Note” in this issue for the cover image Cell—Alice Maher’s 1991 site-specific installation in Dublin’s Kilmainham Jail—Jarrin suggests the continuing role of visual art and the written text in resisting regimes of state-imposed and colonial punishment.

In a wide-ranging work of cultural criticism Lance Pettitt explores the 1949–74 career of James Young, Belfast’s dominant comic performer and conservative theatrical businessman. Pettitt traces Young’s life from his working-class Protestant origins, arguing that despite the reputation of this media star as an apolitical and ecumenical figure, he operated within cultural institutions that were “adjacent” to the “dominant politics of unionism and unionist business interests.” Pettitt concludes, however, that through his hugely popular “camp” performances, especially those featuring effeminate male characters or cross-dressed females, Young...