Periodical: The publication of the inaugural Field Day Review in 2005 represented a weighty (in every sense) critical intervention in Irish Studies, its stellar cast of contributors and lavish production values setting new standards in Irish periodical literature.
Volume two is no less impressive; yet unusually for a serious scholarly journal, the Review eschews editorial comment, evidently relying on readers to infer its critical mission from the Field Day "brand", though what exactly that brand stands for in 2006 is not entirely clear.
Field Day has never been the programmatic monolith that some have perceived it to be. Those who denigrate it as an essentially nationalist and chauvinist enterprise ignore its evolving objectives and willingness to examine the grounds of its own possibility. All the more reason, then, for Field Day to mark its latest incarnation with a renewal of its critical vows, especially at this time of tectonic socio-cultural change.
The closest we get to meta-commentary in this volume is James Chandler's lucid meditation on the value of an Irish Studies methodology. Drawing on his own classroom experiences, Chandler exemplifies the ways in which an Irish Studies approach can bring about a reversal of perspective, uncovering suppressed dimensions of key events in "English" cultural history. This leads him to consider how the "Irishing" of authors such as Edmund Burke and Maria Edgeworth can have a transformative impact on received understandings of their work.
Marjorie Howes offers another variety of revisionist scholarship in her "alternative" postcolonial reading of WB Yeats. Arguing that Yeats was as much a theorist of the public sphere as he was of the nation, she shows how his engagement with the ideas of John O'Leary led him to imagine a civil society in which passion is regulated by culture.
Maud Ellmann's exploration of the role of animal imagery in Ulysses is no less provocative. Prompted by Joyce's complaint that the effort of composing the "Circe" episode was turning him into an animal, Ellmann suggests that the novel's "bestiary of figurative speech" continually undermines the integrity of homo sapiens.
Emer Nolan's subject is Tom Moore's Memoirs of Captain Rock, the "radical novelty" of which has led many to disregard it as a slight satire. Nolan skilfully unpacks the complexities of Moore's representation of 19th-century agrarian violence and persuasively reads the rebel Rock as a character who both confirms and confounds metropolitan expectations of Irish barbarism.
In this volume, as in its predecessor, due critical attention is paid to Irish visual culture. Siobhán Kilfeather's sensitive exploration of Alice Maher's feminist artwork questions the appropriateness of reading experimental art representationally, while Sara Smith presents a compelling sequence of Civil War photographs, the most poignant of which shows Sean Collins staring into the coffin of his brother Michael in Dublin City Hall.
Early modern Ireland is also well catered for. Peter McQuillan inventories the shifting meanings of the term suairceas in Gaelic society, while Michael Griffin and Breandán Mac Suibhne provide a fascinating analysis of A Voyage to O'Brazeel, an allegorical tale which re-imagines relations between Catholics and Protestants in 1752. Its grim conclusion - that people of different religions cannot coexist in a single state - shadows Susan McKay's hard-hitting critique of "the deep, destructive undertow of sectarianism" that blights hardline unionism in contemporary Northern Ireland.
The volume also contains a stimulating review section, which includes excellent articles by Joe Cleary and Katie Trumpener.
Liam Harte lectures in Irish and modern literature at the University of Manchester. His latest essay, on migrant autobiography, appears in a special issue of the Irish Studies Review out now
Field Day Review, Volume 2, 2006 Edited by Seamus Deane and Breandán Mac Suibhne Field Day Publications, 349pp. €35