Irish American Literature

This outline of the theoretical and historical parameters of my recently published Famine Irish and the American Racial State synthesizes the work of Nicos Poulantzas, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and David Theo Goldberg, among others. In so doing, it advances a model of the nineteenth-century US state-in-formation that demonstrates how the legal status of the transatlantic Famine Irish took on greater significance than any cultural differences with White Anglo Saxon Protestant America. Key concepts are explored, such as citizenship, nationality, race, ethnicity, the fractional state, the racial state, and the Black and Green Atlantic. Introduced, moreover, is one of the most important yet most overlooked American patriots of the nineteenth century, Irish-born Archbishop John Hughes of New York, whose efforts helped to mold the corporate Catholic Church into a major ideological apparatus of the US state.

Set among the New York Irish during the twentieth century, Alice McDermott’s novels At Weddings and Wakes (1992) and Charming Billy (1998) are widely acknowledged as works of great aesthetic and emotional power that also deliver exceptional insights into the character of ethnic culture and identity. In this essay I explore the role of scenes and motifs involving literal and symbolic haunting and uncanny effects in McDermott’s 1990s writing of ethnicity, with a primary focus on AWW and a briefer discussion of CB. In these, her two finest novels to date, McDermott skillfully combines symbolist and realistic storytelling, subtle management of viewpoint, and deft use of flashback and flash-forward to show the psyches of second-and third-generation Irish Americans born up to the early 1950s as a ground of struggle. An ever-present past reaches out to haunt possible futures with, in AWW, its burden of loss and mourning and, in CB, a constricting system of Irish and Catholic beliefs, psychological formations, and cultural practices, imperfectly modified in the process of integration. I argue that her writing of the uncanny, and in particular its gendering, constitutes a resistance to the dominant values of inherited Irish cultures and a way toward different futures.

McDermott’s work is rightly admired both inside and outside Irish America. Fanning’s fine and canon-constituting The Irish Voice in America develops discerning and nuanced interpretations of her novels, according them high praise and incorporating them as the culmination of its own literary-historical narrative.3 However, McDermott’s work sits uneasily with any consolidating strategy simply to memorialize and valorize Irish Catholic ethnicity, creating a certain dissonance between writer and critics: she has herself often gestured toward universality in her aims, insisting that she wrote about the Irish of the five boroughs because this was the material that fell to her hand and sedulously disclaiming any intention to be the laureate of this ethnic group, still less to attribute exceptionalism to it.4 McDermott needs to be considered as a contemporary American novelist, not merely, perhaps scarcely at all, as a dutiful daughter of Catholic Irish America. Her work is indeed a sympathetic fictional realization of New York Irish worlds, but it is also a searching critique of a white ethnic group and its inherited values.5

McDermott has often in interviews defined the process of storytelling itself as a dominating concern of her work (see Osen 113–14). The primacy of storytelling also, albeit partly in a different sense, characterizes those major canonical fictions—especially by Emily Brontë and William Faulkner—which she repeatedly cites as important antecedents. A key feature of both is that within their fiction, different stories clash and contradict one another, so that no single verifiable truth emerges. Particularly relevant to CB is Faulkner’s interest in passionate but subjective versions of the truth that make it a plural, not a singular category. This is both constitutively modernist and deeply rooted in his white Southern ethnicity with its constant backward look to fateful past moments. The nested but mutually disruptive stories narrated in Absalom, Absalom (which McDermott nominates as among her favorite novels) make it an important predecessor to her own project in these novels: “There’s nothing more passionate in that book than the relentless demand that the story must be told, again and again” (Osen 115).

Another characteristic is closely bound up with storytelling in her vision. If the classic project of the predominantly realist bildungsroman is the achieving of autonomous selfhood, McDermott directs attention, though far from uncritically, toward family and community as the crucible of individual identities. Such absorbing, often deforming, family milieus have their avatars in Brontë and Faulkner too, but the oft-alleged tribalism of Irish culture, so effectively adapted politically in America, is obviously relevant here. McDermott’s work is placed at the intersection of two largely incommensurate influences: New York Irish Catholic immigrant culture and the skeptical perspectives of urban modernity, inaugurated by modernism and fostered by the secular vision of much twentieth-century art and...

"The biblical figure of Lot’s wife (Genesis 19:26; Luke 17:32) in the novels of Mary Anne Sadlier functions typologically, assigning the role of Lot’s wife to both men and women. This essay explores how such an interpretative move functioned to reverse the charges leveled against Catholic men by muscular Christianity and Catholic women by the Protestant Cult of True Womanhood. Sadlier’s audience was the burgeoning Irish American immigrant community, but the ethnically porous character of Sadlier’s sources of inspiration for that community might be attested by her family’s Catholic catechetical publishing company’s reprint of Cardinal Wiseman’s Fabiola in the United States a mere two years after its initial publication in Britain and by her numerous translations from the French. The choice of a typological figure with a widely acknowledged perceived historical basis helped Sadlier to navigate between progressive and conservative Catholic biblical interpretation contemporary to her writing. Typology also facilitated Sadlier’s participation in the Catholic polemics against anti-Catholic, nativist literature by assimilating a negative biblical exemplar to biblically devoted Protestants.

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For an example of the continuing cultural impact of Wiseman's Fabiola and the Oxford Movement, see this newspaper article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/5345000/Fabiola-Francis-Alys-at-the-National-Portrait-Gallery.html"

The substantial displacement of people following the Irish revolution (1916–1923), particularly of women, has little place in the state-sanctioned commemorative history of the period. This migration poses a number of problems for the ‘social remembrance’ (Beiner) of the revolution. How does a community remember when it no longer exists in the geographic place of origin? Drawing on an array of disparate narratives, including letters, memoirs, and fictional self-representation, this chapter aims to recuperate a number of the counter-memories of female revolutionary émigrées in order to consider the spaces available to women for coming to terms with the past within diasporic communities. Furthermore, it explores how these memories of revolution can oscillate between nostalgic and anti-nostalgic remembrance and how less conventional forms of testimony often offer more complex readings of women’s diasporic remembrance than first-person narrative.

A testament to the global dimensions of the Irish language is the fact that one of its most anthologized poems, ‘Ochón, a Dhonnchadh’ by Pádraig Ó hÉigeartaigh, was written not in Ireland, but in Springfield, Massachusetts. Although composed in the USA in 1905, Thomas Kinsella and Seán Ó Tuama note that the poet marries ‘his grief to traditional professional expertise in something of the manner of the distant masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ and Muiris Ó Droighneáin regards the poem as 'an caoineadh is deise agus is fileata san Nua-Ghaedhilg’ / ‘the finest and most poetical lament in Modern Irish’. Yet despite the wide publication of this lament, very little is known about Ó hÉigeartaigh and much of the information about the poet provided in certain poetry anthologies is inaccurate.

Not only has Ó hÉigeartaigh’s career as a poet and Gaelic Revivalist been overlooked, but the poem itself is in fact an edited version of the original lament Ó hÉigeartaigh wrote on the drowning of his five-year-old son, Donnchadh. This essay assesses Patrick Pearse’s editing of the lament and considers the ideological perspectives which may have informed Pearse’s editorial decisions. It is argued that Pearse intentionally repressed elements and characteristics singular to the poet in order to ascribe this lament to the oral tradition, and also to uphold the literary conventions of contemporary European poets such as Roden Noels and Robert Bridges. The paper thus questions the location of this poem within the Gaelic literary traditions of the 17th and 18th centuries and also demonstrates the need for a critical understanding of the editorial practices of this period.

Lamda Lit Review: “The world of South Boston, 1974: a white neighborhood fighting change that came in the shape of school buses carrying African American children from Roxbury. Such is the backdrop for Stephanie Grant’s novel, Map of Ireland. Ann Ahern likes playing with fire, both literally and figuratively. Grant’s true gift is her uncanny ability to climb inside the skin of a character.”

The expression, "you have a face like a map of Ireland," sets the themes of place and identity. An edgy coming-of-age story set in a fraught landscape of white racism, black nationalism, class loyalties, and erotic desire. In Ann, "it is as if Charles Dickens had written a tomboy" (Honor Moore) -- a flawed, intense protagonist. voids sentimentality and the pitfalls of white learning at black people's expense.

For readers interested in intersections of race, queer desire, US history, female (butch) protagonists, urban studies. Book group/teaching questions available at https://www.stephaniegrantwriter.com/readers-guide-map.

Elizabeth Cullinan’s short story “Life After Death” depicts a day in the life of a young New Yorker, Constance, walking along Lexington Avenue, attending the evening Mass at a Dominican church and visiting the Catholic college where she worked part time to pick up her paycheck. Though the woman is involved with the married Francis Hughes and confronted with the burden of the past and of intricate family dynamics, her voice, which is “the Cullinan narrative voice has become that of one of those sceptical granddaughters grown into a reasonably assured and independent adulthood [...] balanced between then and now, the ethnic and the worldly, and better able to judge self and others because of the doubleness” (Fanning qtd. in Bayor and Meagher 528). Thus, the paper will discuss the manner in which Elizabeth Cullinan maps, in her story, the oscillation of Irish Americans between the ethnic drive and a cosmopolitan individuality gained in New York, with a focus on the value of the duality of consciousness and spirituality, which facilitates enriching and clarifying answers to identity dilemmas.

New Yorker essay, about familial rupture and reconciliation between a devout strict mother and a lesbian daughter.

Themes are mothers and daughters, Catholicism, postpartum depression, forgiveness, reconciliation, midcentury US culture, family dynamics, queer children and homophobic parents, religious homophobia.

In 1926, director James Light wrote a detailed letter to the manager of London’s Ambassadors' Theatre – Captain H. M. Harwood – providing him with tips regarding how to stage Eugene O’Neill’s expressionist masterpiece The Hairy Ape. These recommendations were based on the premiere staging of the play by the Provincetown Players in New York in 1922. (Light was the director of that production, although – it should be noted – he was significantly assisted by O’Neill.) Harwood ultimately chose not to stage the play in 1926, but he did put it on in 1931 and interestingly chose to have Paul Robeson star as “Yank”. That 1931 Ambassadors production was directed by Light; therefore, the letter from Light to Harwood helps us to get a strong sense of what it was like to actually experience the early, high-profile productions of The Hairy Ape, as mounted in New York and London.

The article discusses the rewriting, in McCann's novel Transatlantic, of the transatlantic achievements of real characters - F. Douglass, travelling to Ireland during the Great Famine, Alcock and Brown, flying the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic and the US Senator Mitchell, chair of the Northern Ireland Good Friday peace talks.

This article examines Irish-American identity in Eugene O’Neill’s early work, including his “lost” plays. It demonstrates that characters such as Al Devlin in The Movie Man, Joe and Nellie Murray in Abortion, Eileen Carmody and Stephen Murray from The Straw, Robert “Yank” Smith in The Hairy Ape, and even the “Papist” child Mary Sweeney in The Rope are socially marginalised by American “WASP”s due to their Irish Catholic backgrounds. In the case of “Yank”, such marginalisation eventually convinces him that he is too “animalistic” to find a place in mainstream American society. Like “Yank”, the Irish-American characters in the other plays being examined find it hard to connect with (or are brutally disrespected by) the WASPs in their lives. Previous discussions of WASP/Irish-American tensions in O’Neill’s work have focussed primarily on the late masterpieces A Touch of the Poet, A Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Moon for the Misbegotten; this essay demonstrates that such tensions are a key feature of O’Neill’s early work, as well.

Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009), considered a New York, Irish-American, immigrant, 1970s and post 9/11 novel, starts with Philippe Petit’s walk on a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers in New York in 1974. This historical event is used as a symbol which links space (Park Avenue and the Bronx at the extremes), time (1974 and 2006, the post 9/11 period) and characters’ stories. An overpopulated city in permanent change, New York is constructed in the novel vertically, horizontally as networks. The article will explore the relation between the real and fictional spaces of New York in its three dimensions, or as “thirdspace”, superimposing pre- and post-9/11 cartographies. The most relvant dimension of the overcrowded city, the horizontal connection, is achieved through the hard work and dedication of an Irish Jesuite priest (in 1974) and two community volunteers (in 2006), each of them part of dedicated networks.

Since the Irish have been travelling to the US for centuries now, contemporary poets have also been taking this well-beaten path to America. Contemporary Irish poets, such as John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Eamon Wall have been born in America, have lived and worked there for a while, some having crossed the Atlantic regularly, some others to settle in the US, such as Paul Muldoon and Eamonn Wall. Their poetry has been consequently written in response to the transatlantic connection.

Contemporary Irish poets, such as John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Eamon Wall have been born in America, have lived and worked there for a while, some having crossed the Atlantic regularly, some others to settle in the US, such as Paul Muldoon and Eamonn Wall. Their poetry has been consequently written in response to the transatlantic connection. If America as an extension of Ireland and having to come to terms with a new place were dominant in the exile’s lament, the contemporary poet would rather see himself/ herself as a cultural “commuter,” assuming hyphenated or multiple identities, i.e. Irish, American, Irish-American.

This article explores Irish-American identity in the writing of American author, Eileen Myles, whose Cool for You (2000) and Chelsea Girls (1994) reveal the melancholic underpinnings of working-class twentieth-century Irish identity in the United States. The essay brings together psychoanalytic theories of loss and mourning in order to think about productive ways of transforming grief into grievance.