Editors’ Introduction

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION This issue marks the end of a five-year collaboration and thus offers an occasion to reflect on our efforts. When we assumed stewardship of the journal, we altered its name slightly to Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies, a change that signaled our interest in encouraging scholarship that was both rooted in and resonant to a wide spectrum of disciplines. We sought contributions that aimed not merely to delineate things Irish, but to interrogate them critically—and, when appropriate, to situate them in broad theoretical, chronological, and global contexts. Both in several multidisciplinary special issues (the Great Famine, the Visual Arts, 1798, and Translation) and within more eclectic issues such as this one, we have welcomed approaches from a range of disciplines. Our interdisciplinary stance has been preliminary—a work in progress that is best approached through an openness to multidisciplinary perspectives . This issue, for example, contains articles by historians and literary scholars, but it also includes submissions from the fields of law, journalism, anthropology, political science—many treating subjects that cross disciplinary boundaries. We find enhanced possibilities for interdisciplinarity as practitioners from such a range of areas increasingly privilege context over structure, thus opening space for more comparative and historicized work. Marilyn Cohen’s review of recent anthropological literature on Northern Ireland reveals such a shift toward contextual and historical approaches and away from an empiricist structural-functionalism that had long dominated one Irish Studies discipline. The interrogation of Irish identity continues to foster multidisciplinary approaches and provides a theme pursued by many contributors to this issue. Female agency and representation—from George Yeats as postmortem helpmate to pistol-packing terrorists—are considered in the articles by Saddlemyer, Coulter, O’Connell, and Talbot. Anne O’Connell recounts the uncertainties and stark terrors experienced during every stage of a young single woman’s passage from Ireland to America in the latenineteenth century. Her focus on the neglected experience of assisted EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION 3 immigrants—the very poor and those without supportive connections in America—usefully differentiates the female migration experience and queries some “certainties” of emigration history. Carol Coulter rejects a corrosive universalizing “metropolitan” feminism—inherently individualistic , modern, and western—and explores a more organic family and community-based feminism likely to be found in colonial societies. In Ireland, she argues, Catholicism and republicanism more frequently honored women’s claim to the public sphere promoted by bourgeois liberal feminists. Coulter’s insistence on a comparative global framework is echoed in Rhiannon Talbot’s survey of the representation and experience of women terrorists and informs Gerry White’s reading of the postcolonial Irish cinema of Joe Comerford. Like Coulter and Talbot, White considers his subject from a global perspective, emphasizing the influence of the French New Wave and the decolonizing international Third Cinema on Comerford’s films. National identity and its political articulations—enduring concerns within all fields of Irish studies—provide another set of thematic connections in this issue. Stephen Small locates the language of late-eighteenthcentury patriotism within a European, English, and American context while exploring Irish particularities. He demonstrates how a radicalism whose logical growth suggested revolutionary and anti-colonial republicanism was stunted among the Anglo-Irish élite by adherence to a discourse of Protestant superiority. Gordon Hutton examines an earlier version of this patriot opposition; his and Small’s essays, in conjunction with contributions by John Ellis and Michael McAteer, provide a wide-ranging consideration of the variety among patriot and nationalist ideologies. Ellis explores contrasting representations of diverging constitutional and republican nationalisms during the Great War. In his examination of George Russell’s (A.E.) organic view of nationhood and its conservative origins, McAteer demonstrates how fully A.E. merged material and cultural worlds in the Irish cooperative movement. We recognize that readers may approach each issue differently, selecting and reading articles primarily within their own academic areas. Yet the interdisciplinary perspective that informs our introductions (our suggestions on how to read the issue) in turn reflects the nature of our editorial collaboration. Although one editor approaches Éire-Ireland from literature and the arts, the other from history and the social sciences, our intellectual engagement with one another and with our...