In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Young Irelands: Studies in Children's Literature ed. by Mary Shine Thompson
  • C. W. Sullivan III (bio)
Young Irelands: Studies in Children's Literature. Edited by Mary Shine Thompson. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011.

Young Irelands is the fourth book in a fairly new series, Studies in Children's Literature; the first three were Studies in Children's Literature 1500-2000 (2004), Treasure Islands (2006), and Divided Worlds (2007). The first three volumes were edited by Thompson, and coedited by either Celia Keenan or Valerie Coghlan, but Young Irelands was edited by Thompson alone. All four volumes are worth reading, especially for American children's literature scholars who may well be largely unaware of the rich and vibrant field of Irish children's literature and its associated scholarship.

Young Irelands seems a bit less cohesive than the previous volumes; its essays are divided into three broad categories. The first and largest category contains the essays discussing the concepts of Irishness presented in children's literature against the backgrounds of the British Empire and Ireland's place in that empire. Sharon Murphy's "'The fate of empires depends on the education of youth': Maria Edgeworth's writing for children" discusses Edgeworth's writings as "they both addressed and appeared to offer solutions to the socio-political problems of their era" (22). Joy Alexander's "Arthur Mee, the 'happy wonderer': instructing children and constructing knowledge in the Children's Encyclopedia" looks at this very popular work (probably over six million sets sold if one [End Page 113] counts those purchased in the serial version) as a depiction of Ireland in an essentially English encyclopedia. Marnie Hay's "The propaganda of Na Fianna Éirann, 1909-26" is an account of the Irish National Boy Scouts, an organization founded by two Protestant nationalist activists, Constance Markievicz and Bulmer Hobson, and the role that organization played in preparing boys "for their future role in the fight for Irish freedom" (49). And Michael Flanagan's "'Tales told in the turflight': the Christian Brothers, Our Boys, and the representation of Gaelic authenticity in the popular culture of the Irish Free State," looks at the ways in which traditional Irish tales were used to promote a distinct Irish identity centered in the rural areas, especially those of western Ireland.

The next two articles form something of a bridge between the first four and the three that make up the second section proper. Ciara Ní Bhroin's "Recovering the Heroic Past: the Táin retold" looks at various nineteenth- and twentieth-century translations and retellings of the Táin Bó Cuailgne (Cattle Raid of Cooley) to assess how those versions were shaped by the times in which they were written and how many of them countered the English assertion that the native Irish writings were of "low" quality and subject matter. This article also examines the ways in which the retellings were essentially bowdlerized for younger Irish readers. Anne Marie Herron's "Kate Thompson, James Stephens, and the Irish literary landscape" looks at Stephens's influence on the contemporary award-winning writer Thompson, discussing the concepts of Anglo-Irish literature, fantasy literature, and the use of ancient mythology in modern fiction for young Irish readers—among other topics.

The next three articles, Anne Markey's "Irish and European Echoes in Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales," Jane O'Hanlon's "Narnia: The last battle of the imaginative man," and Valerie Coghlan's "Bellsybabble for the childers," cast somewhat wider nets. According to Thompson's introduction, these articles discuss works that "to varying degrees and in diverse ways [disrupt] the process of homogenization and thereby liberate and privilege the 'other'" (18). Markey's article is, essentially, a folkloric analysis of the international materials, often motifs and tale types, in Wilde's fairy tales, and points out his "recourse to Irish folklore in particular" (95). As Thompson admits in her introduction, O'Hanlon's essay on Lewis, exploring his muscular Christianity and its association "with the courage and bravery valued in the British empire," might well have been included in the first group of essays, but in fact it contains very little about the Irishness of Lewis's writing. Coghlan...

pdf

Share