Irish Studies: New Voices in Irish Criticism 4 has a range of topics from essays on established literary figures to the impact of globalisation, writes Clare Hutton
The New Voices in Irish Criticism initiative made something of a splash in the world of Irish literary and cultural studies when it was launched in 1999. Consisting of both an annual conference for postgraduates in the field and a series of related projects, New Voices instantly became a respected and important forum for new inter-disciplinary research on the history and culture of Ireland. The 22 essays gathered here, which were presented as conference papers at Trinity College Dublin in 2002, uphold the innovative spirit of the first event.
In this volume, topics range widely, from essays on established literary figures such as Wilde, Beckett, McGuckian and Yeats to more overtly cultural inquiries into issues such as refugee narratives, the impact of globalisation, and the popular stage. Nonetheless, literature - viewed as a historically rooted cultural artefact - remains the dominant concern. Sinéad Mooney argues persuasively that Beckett's literary translations of the 1920s and 1930s enacted his lack of imaginative rootedness in Ireland, and taught him a lesson which was indispensable to his subsequent development as a writer - that there is no universal idiom for speech, and that all language, and the selfhood it creates, is multiple as well as provisional.
Similarly excellent is the essay by Anne Pulju on P.J. Bourke's Kathleen Mavourneen, a musical melodrama which proved popular during the revolutionary period, when audiences, in the wake of ongoing violence and social upheaval, sought the solace of a predictable fable that reinforced traditional family values.
For several generations, Irish studies scholars were so enthralled by the Literary Revival and its associated cultural nationalism that they tended to overlook the literature of other periods. The scholarship presented here is testimony to the fact that this trend has been conclusively reversed. The several strong essays on drama, for example, include a piece by Aimée Waha, which argues that recent plays by Dermot Bolger and Marie Jones negotiate more inclusive notions of Irish identity, and a piece by Aidan O'Malley, which looks at the cultural status of Brian Friel's version of Three Sisters, first performed in Derry in 1981 when Field Day was just beginning to invent an audience and an "idea of origin".
In 'Medbh McGuckian and Her Critics', Leontia Flynn engages in an act of meta- criticism by surveying the steadily accruing body of writing on McGuckian and speculating that McGuckian herself might be seen as an "absent (or unreliable) centre around whom critical discourse circles in search of meaning". It is refreshing to read work of such a high calibre on such relatively recent figures.
The 19th-century context comes up for fresh attention too, with Aoife Leahy's illuminating study of the connections between The Importance of Being Earnest and the case of Ernest Boulton, a Victorian drag queen who had to face the courts because of his habit of wearing ballgowns when attending the theatre. There is also an essay by Jim Shanahan on 'Charles Lever and the Crisis of Union', and Michael Rubenstein's highly readable piece on John Mitchel, the figure who popularised the interpretation of the Famine as a deliberate and genocidal policy of the British government.
Such seemingly diverse pieces are in fact united by a desire to recognise what one contributor memorably terms a "plurality of Irelands", and to excavate micro-histories that reveal the process by which Ireland - both in the past and the present - has absorbed a set of myths and fables that obscure national complexities.
Clare Hutton researches Irish book history at the Institute of English Studies, University of London
New Voices in Irish Criticism 4. Edited by Fionnuala Dillane and
Ronan Kelly, Four Courts Press, 228pp. €19.95