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EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION One of the pleasures of editing an increasingly interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary academic journal becomes obvious when the editors begin to contemplate the work as a whole rather than the sum of its parts. Although articles in general issues of ÉIRE-IRELAND are chosen for their intrinsic excellence —not for adherence to a predetermined theme or theoretical position —we are struck by the ways in which the field of Irish Studies encourages contributors to make connections with one another’s work. The cover illustration—Rita Duffy’s painting Dancer, as read by Adele Dalsimer and Vera Kreilkamp—might well serve to navigate the reader through the seemingly disparate articles contained in this issue. Duffy’s constrained and weary step dancer engages with the same pressures of an oppressive Catholicism and nationalism in Northern Ireland that Steven Curran shows us preoccupying Dublin-based journalist Brian O’Nolan in the 1940s. Sources of many of these same nationalist pieties are revealed in Keiko Inoue’s article on the calculated and sophisticated propaganda campaign launched by Dáil Éireann during the Anglo-Irish War of Independence . And Gareth Ivory’s timely review of southern political responses to the current peace process examines the rearticulation of these pieties under the rubric of contemporary Fianna Fáil constitutionalism. But according to Desmond Fennell, a generation of Irish writers coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s was more successful than Duffy’s dancer in distancing itself from “Irishness.” In reaction to nationalist pieties these writers embraced what they saw as its opposite—the contemporary and cosmopolitan —creating what Fennell acerbically describes as the “Paddy No More” movement. Duffy’s preadolescent step dancer is not only physically constrained, but also stands before us unable to articulate her own experience and situation . Yet the iconography of the painting speaks powerfully—as do many of the following articles—about how silenced voices in the traditional literary and historical record can be amplified. Duffy entitled her series of autobiographical works Palimpsest, a word denoting a manuscript in which original marks have been effaced to make room for new ones. A palimpsest EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION 3 is a powerful image for the historical processes of colonization—as in the effacing of the native Irish to assuage the anxieties of a colonial settler class, a theme Glenn Hooper explores in his essay on Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland. But many of the articles in this issue also suggest means by which the forgotten presence of those who have been effaced by conventional historical and literary narratives can be recovered. The early voices of a major generation of Irish creative writers—for example, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Stewart Parker, and Bernard Mac Laverty—appear in Philip Hobsbaum’s recollections of a now legendary Belfast writing group in the 1960s. Joan Vincent considers how anthropology can amplify the local, national , and global resonances of an “event”—in this case the Great Famine— particularly in Fermanagh, where the despairing voices of victims have been drowned out in apparent silence by the well-documented cases of the western counties. Megan Sullivan’s interview with filmmaker Margo Harkin about her own work and that of the Derry Film Collective demonstrates a conscious use of film to give voice to a generation of women whose experiences parallel those of Duffy’s dancer. The marching season is now upon us, and Sean Farrell examines the atavistic defense accorded to this peculiar mode of self-articulation by rank-and-file Orangemen in the 1860s. And in an examination of voices protesting marginalization, Pauline Prior and David Griffiths recount how local and national authorities vied over the religious care of lunatic souls in Victorian Belfast. We draw the reader’s attention as well to Eavan Boland’s essay, “Daughters of Colony,” which considers the intersections and culs de sac of gender, history, and theory in recent postcolonial interpretations of Irish culture. Boland suggests that “if the distance between the past and history is not navigated, is not charted through its dark spaces and sinuous turns, the effect can only be this: History will suppress the past.” We are again brought back to Duffy’s palimpsest...

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