Editors’ Notes

EDITORS’ NOTES best known in North America for the lessons and tapes of Learning Irish (1980), Micheal O’Siadhail has since 1978 published nine collections of poems, three in Irish. Knitted together, O’Siadhail’s two vocations—the linguistic and the poetic—have led him to play an active role in the evolving literary life of European Dublin, and it is the ethical purposes and rewards of such a life that O’Siadhail engages in the opening essay of this issue of ÉIRE-IRELAND. With a glance back at Ireland’s renewed immediate nationalist past, and with a gaze out over the renewed traditions of Europe, O’Siadhail personally interrogates the changing ecology of meanings in which Ireland’s languages act for him and for his community. O’Siadhail is also the author of Modern Irish (1989). ß revered in later life for the Quixotic enterprise of Kavanagh’s Weekly and for the trenchant honesty of The Great Hunger (1942), Patrick Kavanagh also composed several novels—chief among them, Tarry Flynn (1948)— usually interpreted only as autobiographies in spite of themselves. Prof. Thomas O’Grady seeks here to expand that limited view by exploring Tarry Flynn’s debts to Joyce and Carleton—debts that reveal perennial Irish themes and place, thus, Tarry Flynn square in the genealogy of the modern Irish novel. Dr. O’Grady’s studies of Irish writers and writing have appeared in such journals as Studies in the Novel, Études Irlandaises, and Studies in Short Fiction. ß current understandings of the origins of contemporary Ireland have been informed by, and have informed, the historiographical debate over the Tudor and then Stuart subjections of Ireland. Reviewing this debate, here Prof. William Palmer suggests that the proper analogue for England’s presence in late Tudor Ireland may not be the seventeenth-century colonization of North America but, instead, the eighteenth-century governance of the Thirteen Colonies. Dr. Palmer is the author of The Political Career of EDITOR’S NOTES 3 Oliver St.-John, 1637–1649 (1993) and of numerous articles in journals as diverse as Albion, Catholic Historical Review, and the Colby Quarterly. ß at the turn of the past year Michael O’Siadhail was touring North America reading from Hail! Madam Jazz (1992) just then newly distributed by Dufour Editions. This selection of O’Siadhail’s poems borrows from that collection and especially from the new poems titled together “The Middle Voice.” Readers familiar with the verbal textures of seventeenth-century poetry, with Ó Bruadair and Donne, or with Austin Clarke and Thomas Kinsella, will feel in O’Siadhail’s measured and sonorous line an extension of craft to the newer trials and tendernesses of Irish life. In O’Siadhail’s poetry the overlapping tides of Gaelic and Renaissance poetry have shaped contemporary circumstance more tangibly than the fractured devices of postmodernity or the “Open” American poetic. ß local newspapers in nineteenth-century New England often reprinted fiction for their readers, as did The Concord Freeman, and often without recompensing the authors. A number of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories appeared there, and here Prof. Monica Elbert explores the ramifications of the reprinting of “Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe” in 1844 in the midst of swelling Irish imigration to New England. The story’s humor of ethnic stereotypes possesses darker undertones revealed by the possible editorial motives behind its republication. Author of articles in Essays in Literature and the American Transcendental Quarterly, Dr. Elbert has recently published Encoding the Letter “A”: Gender and Authority in Hawthorne’s Early Fiction (1990). ß butte, Montana, offers the exceptional instance in the history of the American West of the immigrant Irish dominating both a city and an industry for some four decades around the turn of the century. And in Butte the Ancient Order of Hibernians, as here anatomized by Prof. David Emmons, filled both tangible and intangible roles—from labor exchange and union to social service agency and patron of culture. Dr. Emmons ‘s numerous articles on the American Irish of the West can be found in such journals as Labor History, Arizona and the West, and the Journal of the West. In part supported by the Irish American Cultural InEDITOR ’S NOTES 4 stitute, this article continues...