Critical Essays on Irish Literature

• "The Tain as Literature," Patricia Kelly
• Argument: The "primary purpose is not to provide an aesthetic experience, but to convey information." The argument here is the Tain is not creative literature but instead functional writing.
• Argument: The meaning of the text "deals with issues of perennial and immediate concern to its tenth-century audience, ranging from the familial (kiniship, father-son relations) and political (the need for unity in the face of the Viking threat." It is strange that Christian monks were preserving these old stories, so the thought is there must be contemporary relevance for these stories.
• Argument: The "central purpose of the Tain is to depict [Medv] in a thoroughly unflattering light." Women should not try to take man's role: "The final verdict of the narrative on Medb is therefore that she has usurped a man's function, and this is what has doomed the expedition from the start."
• Argument: The theme of the Tain argues that the breakdown of relationships important to Irish society causes all the problems. It "present[s] the tragic breakdown of those relationships which early Irish society was founded: the relationships between host and guest, between kindred, between fosterbrothers, between men and women, between lords and clients and kings and overkings, between the human world and the gods." It is "a picture of society moving to dysfunction and self-destruction."
• Argument: The Tain is a roman a clef -- a novel in which real people or events appear with invented names. (This does not seem relevant for our purposes.)
• "Approaching Cuirt an Mhean Oiche/The Midnight Court," Briona Nic Dhiarmada
• Unlike the previous article, this essay has only one argument: "we, as readers and critics, bring to each text our own particular expectations, experiences, and prejudices," and so we use the literature to help us explore the human condition.
• Example: You can contrast the bailiff to the speirbhean from the classic Irish aisling.
• Example: Douglas Hyde used it to argue in favor of the Irish language.
• Example: Some study the European enlightenment influences on Merriman.
• Example: The argument that it is a feminist story.
• "Narrating Cultural Encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish National Tale," Ina Ferris
• Contemprory readers of WIG complained that it was performative -- "the presentation of something to someone so as to create a certain effect."
• Lady Morgan's defense: "if a political bias was ultimately taken, it originated in the natural conditions of things."
• In an important sense the national tale is a tale that can be written neither by a foreigner nor by a native.
• It requires the stranger, someone neither inside nor outside. The tale must be the space of the encounter between the inside and the outside.
• The stranger is not a tourist or a foreigner. The stranger suspends his own identity and enters another's space.
• The stranger can decide to be a foreigner, leaving the other's space.
• The national tale displaces the skirmishes between foreigner and the native.
• The main take-away from this third article: getting us to think about what is the purpose of the literature we are studying.
• "'Appalling Spectacles': Nineteenth-Century Irish Famine Narratives," Margaret Kelleher
• This is the first chapter of The Feminization of Famine. It has three sections: (1) the contemporaneous view of the famine, (2) the depiction of the famine in William Carleton's The Black Project, (3) the depiction of the famine in Anthony Trollope's Castle Richmond.
• The main take away: this is what we want to do with our final, explore our topic (authentic Irishness) through the lense of three of our works.
• Admittedly, the first section is more along the lines of our midterm, but anyways, here was the most disturbing contemporanous example:
• Kelleher quotes Osborne from Gleanings from the West of Ireland, relating a story of a young girl, dying of the famine, running alongside their car, noiselessly begging. The author Osborne is annoyed. His companion, despite Osborne's continuous argument not to support the begging girl, finally gives her some coins. Osborne coldly concludes that at least the poor girl really had to work for the coins, having run alongside their car for a long distance.
• This first section serves as an introduction as to why the famine is often depicted through women. It does give an argument that women were more likely to survive during the famine, and that the men would die quicker. It also gives an argument that the men would run off, leaving the women to suffer in the famine.
• The Black Prophet is a love story and murder mystery, but also argues for an interventionist role to alleviate the famine.
• The narrative focus of the famine seems similar to the narrative focus of Irishness in WIG.
• Castle Richmond is a love story, but one of the first reviewers clocked the main interest of the novel was the famine. Since that review, most people have overlooked the importance of the famine in the story.
• Kelleher focuses on the active male role to look at and the passive female role to be looked at.
• Trollope's imaging of famine is female spectacle similarly functions to ensure that the problem of famine is at once communicated and obscured.
• The last line maybe gets to the point of challenging the use of this female depiction of the famine.
• "An Irish Carmilla," Jarlath Killeen
• Carmilla can definitely be read as a tale of lesbian desire, but Killeen explores whether it can also be read as a tale of Ireland.
• Carmilla is Daniel O'Connell in drag. Catholics were thought to have been gotten rid of a number of times, but they keep coming back, with O'Connell being the Catholic liberator of the time.
• Laura, like the Anglo-Irish, is part of a hyphenated culture. They try to maintain their English identity by drinking tea and speaking English.
• Laura, like the Anglo-Irish, is isolated from and ambivalent to the culture around her.
• This whole article seems to go along with our class discussion looking at Carmilla as a sympathetic character.
• Killeen cites Kelleher in arguing the languid nature of Carmilla is another feminine image of the famine.
• All of these articles continue to support my overall reading of these articles as being motiviation for how we should approach the final -- using our works to make our own argument about authentic Irishness.
• "The Snake's Pass and the Irish Question(s)," Mark Doyle
• The land is "the most interesting character in the book."
• The Irish question is stated as "who owns the land?" Through plantations, the land was taken from Catholics and given to Anglo-Irish Protestants. This fight for ownership of the land mirrors the central plot of Snake's Pass.
• The Land League used legal means (in addition to other methods) to secure the land for the Irish people. The use of law also mirrors the characters, including the Gombeen man, methods for acquiring the land.
• Dick's main effort is to improve the land, but the Irish were not incentivized to improve their land. If they did, they risked rises in rent.
• The article concludes with a critical assessment of Arthur turning the land into a capitalist exercise:
• This scenario must have been comforting to Stoker's metropolitan readership, but as with many other aspects of The Snake's Pass, we should not imagine that it represents the way things really were.
• The main purpose of this article seems to provide for us is an example of how we might critically examine our works and not just accept what they say uncritically.
• "For Ireland's Good," William Hughes
• Hughes begins by saying no one recognizes Stoker for his Irish literature. He goes on to argue that Snake's Pass is not for Ireland's good.
• The land is only saved by the English characters, Arthur and Dick.
• The good things that happen are because of Dick and Arthur, and not the Irish characters. The wealth discovered at the end is really the limestone and the improvements Arthur and Dick will make, not the gold Joyce acquires.
• The villian is not an outsider, but instead a greedy Irish man.
• Andy views women like the bog -- a negative portrayal of women.
• "The Snake's Pass and the Limits of Romance," Nicholas Daly
• I examine how the novel is a vehicle for Anglo-Irish political fantasies--fantasies related to the Land War of the 1880s but also the fantasies of origin that derive from peculiar liminal position of the Anglo-Irish as a class.
• SP uses the trope of an English man marrying an Irish woman.
• Land War pitted financially vulnerable Catholic tenants against wealthy Protestant landlords. Daly argues this is distorted with the Protestant Joyce and presumably Catholic Murdock.
• Daly cites Phyllis Roth in connecting the misogyny of the bog/woman metaphor.
• "The West as Metaphor," Sighle Breathnach-Lynch
• The west is thought of as two separate things: (1) beautiful, unspoiled natured, and (2) a symbol of authentic Irishness. Breathnach-Lynch argues SP exhibits both ideals of the west.
• Breanth-Lynch explores Stoker's and others interest in art, but also his collaborations with Lady Jane Wilde.
• Stoker's portrayal of the peasant class, especially in Mrs. Kelligan's shebeen, demonstrates the "welcome, warmth, and generosity" in this portrait of authentic Irishness.