The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism

525 Pages·2021·50.773 MB·English

by  Maud Ellmann (editor), Sian White (editor), Vicki Mahaffey (editor)

The Edinburgh Companion to
Irish Modernism
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The Edinburgh
Companion to
Irish Modernism
Edited by Maud Ellmann, Siân White and
Vicki Mahaffey
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To Seamus Deane
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in
the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject
areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge
scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic
works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com
© editorial matter and organisation Maud Ellmann, Siân White and
Vicki Mahaffey, 2021
© the chapters their several authors, 2021
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the sources listed in the List of
Illustrations for permission to reproduce material previously published
elsewhere. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders,
but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be
pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the fi rst opportunity.
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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printed and bound in Great Britain.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 5669 2 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 5670 8 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 5671 5 (epub)
The right of Maud Ellmann, Siân White and Vicki Mahaffey to be
identifi ed as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright
and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
List of Illustrations ix
Notes on Contributors xii
Introduction: Out of Ireland 1
Maud Ellmann
Part I: Heresies of Time and Space
1. Rising Timely and Untimely: On Joycean Anachronism 35
Paul K. Saint-Amour
2. Temporal Powers: Second Sight, the Future and Celtic Modernity 51
Luke Gibbons
3. Waking from History: The Nation’s Past and Future in Finnegans Wake 67
Jeremy Colangelo
4. W. B. Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones and the Limits of Global Modernism 82
Cóilín Parsons
5. Borderation: Fictions of the Northern Irish Border 96
Maud Ellmann
6. Hereseas: Water in English and Irish Modernism 112
Nels Pearson
Part II: Heresies of Nationalism
7. ‘A Fairy Boy of Eleven, a Changeling, Kidnapped, Dressed in an Eton Suit’:
Precarious, Lost and Recovered Children in Anglophone Irish Modernism 131
Margot Gayle Backus
8. Legacies of Land and Soil: Irish Drama, European Integration and the
Unfi nished Business of Modernism 147
Sarah L. Townsend
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vi contents
9. Ireland’s Philatelic Modernism 165
Julieann Veronica Ulin
10. Modernism Against / For the Nation: Joycean Echoes in Postwar Taiwan 182
Shan-Yun Huang
11. Rage’s Brother: The Bomb at the Centre of Wilde’s Trivial Comedy 200
Kathryn Conrad
Part III. Aesthetic Heresies
12. Modern Irish Poetry and the Heresy of Modernism 219
Eric Falci
13. Modernist Heresies: Irish Visual Culture and the Arts and Crafts Movement 234
Kelly Sullivan
14. The Insurgent Romance and Early Cinema in Ireland 252
Matthew Brown
15. ‘Put “Molotoff bread-basket” into Irish, please’: Cruiskeen Lawn,
Dada and the Blitz 268
Catherine Flynn
16. Irish Christian Comedy: Heresy or Reform? 284
Vicki Mahaffey
Part IV. Heresies of Gender and Sexuality
17. The Irish Bachelor 301
Ed Madden
18. ‘Purity, Piety, and Simplicity’: Heretical Images of the Female Catholic
Reader in Irish Modernism 320
T. J. Boynton
19. ‘Stolen fruit is best of all’: The Pleasures of Subversive Consumption
in the Late Novels of Molly Keane 336
Lauren Rich
20. ‘Stories Are a Different Kind of True’: Gender and Narrative Agency in
Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction 351
Siân White
21. Challenging the Iconic Feminine in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry:
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin 368
Ailbhe Darcy
Part V. Critical Heresies
22. ‘A form that accommodates the mess’: Degeneration and / as Disability
in Beckett’s Happy Days 387
Seán Kennedy and Joseph Valente
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contents vii
23. Jumping Cats and Living Handkerchiefs: The Queer and Comic
Non-Human World of Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction 405
Maureen O’Connor
24. Theorising Irish-Language Modernism: Voicing Precarity 421
Sarah E. McKibben
25. Affective Alchemy: W. B. Yeats and the Transformative Heresy of Joy 437
Wendy J. Truran
26. Watery Modernism? Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones and
W. B. Yeats’s John Sherman 452
Claire Connolly
Index 470
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Acknowledgements
The editors wish to thank our contributors for collaborating in this Companion and
for their patience as we pulled it all together. We also thank Jackie Jones at Edinburgh
University Press for her inspired idea of organizing the volume in terms of modernist
heresies. Ersev Ersoy and Fiona Conn at EUP provided expert and responsive edito-
rial guidance, and Wendy Lee did an admirable job of copy-editing the manuscript.
Thanks go too to Hank Scotch for proofreading, Samantha Clark for indexing and
Zachary Hope for editorial assistance. We are grateful to Bill Hutchison for his invalu-
able assistance throughout this project, and to Kate Ravin for her shrewd editorial
advice. Christopher Fox as Director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies
at the University of Notre Dame brought many of the authors in this book together,
including two of the editors, and we greatly appreciate his vision and generosity.
We also wish to thank Sean Mooney at the National Gallery of Ireland and Daniel
Trujillo at the Artists Rights Society for their generous assistance with images and
image permissions. In addition we thank the following artist estates, institutions, and
individuals for permission to reproduce images: the Estate of Evie Hone; the Estate
of Francis Bacon; the Geddes Estate and Elizabeth Kerr and family, WM Geddes
legacy trustees; National Gallery of Ireland; the Artists Rights Society; the Department
of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame; the
Trustees of National Museums Northern Ireland; the Spurlock Museum, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Des Moines Art Center; Ulster Museum; South Dublin
County Libraries; Westmeath County Library; Michael Shulman at Magnum Photos;
and photographers Philip Jones Griffi ths, John A. Ulin, Edita Kapović and Tomás
Maher.
We have made every effort to obtain permission to reproduce the image of the
Dominican Church at Athy, from the collection of Irish Dominican Photographers and
credited to photographer Fergal Mac Eoinín.
Finally, thanks to John Wilkinson, John Casteen, Amanda Dennis and Laura
MacMullen for their unfl agging support and wisdom.
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Illustrations
Figures
Figure 1.1 Telephone Silence Cabinet, Dublin General Post Offi ce.
Photograph from Irish Builder and Engineer, April 1916. 36
Figure 1.2 Burned remains of O’Rahilly’s De Dion–Bouton after the
Easter Rising. 37
Figure 11.1 ‘The Disastrous Explosion at Victoria Station’, The Graphic,
1 March 1884. From author’s collection. 208
Figure 13.1 Lithograph drawing of the Tara Brooch, from Henry O’Neill,
Fine Arts and Civilization of Ireland (Dublin: George Herbert,
1863). Image from archive.org. 237
Figure 13.2 Streetlamp, Kildare Street, Dublin, after 1892. Photograph by
Kelly Sullivan. 239
Figure 13.3 Wrought iron lamp with Irish inscription, possible attribution
W. A. Scott, Loughrea Cathedral, Loughrea, County Galway.
Photograph by Kelly Sullivan. 242
Figure 13.4 James F. McMullen, exterior of Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork,
1915–17. Image from John Robert O’Connell, The Honan Hostel
Chapel, Cork (Cork: Guy & Co. Limited, 1916). 243
Figure 17.1 Cover of the 1956 Bachelor’s Digest, souvenir programme for
the Bachelors Ball. Image courtesy of the Westmeath County
Library, used with permission. 307
Figure 20.1 In the narrow terraced streets built for working people every house
except the last needs only three walls. Northern Ireland, 1965.
Photo credit Philip Jones Griffi ths/Magnum Photos, printed
with permission. 352
Plates
Plate 1 Francis Bacon (1909–92), Study After Velásquez’s Portrait of
Pope Innocent X. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights
reserved. / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2020.
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