Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South by Kathryn Stelmach (review)

A cursory glance at the contents of practically any journal or CFP listing reveals increasing scholarly interest in cultural and literary exchange around the globe. By applying the lens of transatlanticism and reading texts in conversation rather than isolation, we are often rewarded with new understandings of how these exchanges complicate or broaden our perceptions of national identities and important moments in time. In Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South, Kathryn Stelmach Artuso contributes to this ever-expanding dialogue by considering historical and literary connections and exchanges between the US South and Ireland. She draws parallels between the Irish Literary Revival, “which pitted the rational, mature, and masculine Saxon against the sentimental, childish, and feminine Celt,” and the Southern Literary Renaissance, driven by a desire to “subvert the idealizing fiction that perpetuated the ‘moonlight and magnolias’ myth of the Old South, the plantation legend of paternal-istic masters, happy slaves, and medieval gallantry,” opposing the “oppressive outside influences of the North” (xiv). This project ultimately seeks to reassess regional or “minor literature” in order to raise “new questions of gender and genre in Irish and southern literature,” focusing on “the women writers and the literary forms often ascribed a minor role in their region’s revivals” in order to examine how their contributions challenged dominant patriarchal systems (xvii).

The first chapter of Artuso’s book, “Minor Literature Comes of Age,” offers an impressive, sweeping account of the historical parallels and connections between the southern United States and Ireland, ranging from Irish involvement in Caribbean colonies and rebellion to ancestral ties between Ireland and the US, and later friendships and intellectual exchanges between writers like Mark Twain and Lady Augusta Gregory, William Faulkner and James Joyce, and Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen. Artuso adopts an interdisciplinary strategy in constructing her critical framework, addressing seminal texts on the subject not only by literary scholars, but also historians and linguists, including Grady McWhiney’s controversial Cracker Culture, Kieran Quinlan’s Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South, and works by David N. Doyle and Kerby Miller, Patrick Sims-Williams, and David Gleeson. This critical overview would prove especially useful to those who are new to conversations about the intimate relationship between Ireland and the US South, as Artuso succeeds in constructing a well-rounded yet concise discussion of cultural exchange without denying the unique qualities of each region.

The chapters that follow are thoughtfully organized so that the reader is lead from the plantation-era South of Gone with the Wind, to the transformative world of Ireland, and finally to Harlem via Ireland. In “Transatlantic Tara: Irish Maternalism and Motherland in Gone with the Wind,” Artuso responds to critics who see Gone with the Wind as a nostalgic and romanticized depiction of the antebellum era. Artuso instead aligns the “under-valued” Margaret Mitchell with high modernism, arguing that the novel was actually written “as a specific critique of this ‘moonlight and magnolias’ myth” and claiming that critics too often overlook “the truly volatile, anti-nostalgic, and revolutionary nature of the novel, in which an Irish anti-heroine, both magnetic and repulsive, disrupts colonizing dynamics and evaluates subordinate terms” (xxi, 41, 44).

The third and fourth chapters are by far the most convincing sections of Transatlantic Renaissances, as Artuso reveals her intimate knowledge of and genuine interest in the works and lives of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen. “‘A Child of this Century’: Rites of Passage in the Friendship and Fiction of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen” serves as a bridging chapter between the South and Ireland, as it explores a relationship that proved mutually influential and beneficial. Artuso’s thoughtful and thorough discussion of the intellectual and affectionate relationship between the two authors is where her project most clearly applies a transatlantic approach, while “Anglo-Irish Revivals: Doubling and Defamiliarization in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day and The House in Paris” offers a skillfully written close...