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This paper examines the inner debate in Basque nationalism resulting from the Easter Rising between 1916 and 1918. Basque nationalists firmly believed that the Irish Revolution would affect the British war effort, the outcome of the Great War and hence Basque political vindication itself. The official nationalist leadership and its organ, Euzkadi, supported Great Britain, arguing a British military triumph in Ireland and in the Great War would bring a worldwide era of autonomy for national minorities. Pro-independence militants, however, not only expressed solidarity and outspoken support towards the rebels, but also associated their victory with a post-war scenario favourable to independence movements. This study focuses on the two competing Basque nationalist interpretations as presented in the media. Simultaneously, traditionalist parties (i.e. Carlists and Integrists) exacerbated nationalists’ differences in order to weaken a direct political rival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at analysing the liminal and thus ambiguous position of both Ireland and the Irish within the British Empire through Mary O'Donnell's short story "Empire", published in an eponymous collection in 2018. My approach is critically informed by the theoretical perspective of liminal studies, which have characterised the short story as the liminal genre par excellence, and are thus especially suitable to address the complexities of postcolonial identities. This paper focuses on the different thematic and narrative techniques the story employs to represent different Irish experiences, while negotiating conflicting identities and spaces at a time of political upheaval and social unrest - in the years surrounding the Great War and the Easter Rising - thus providing a contemporary perspective that invites reflection and re-consideration of the official Irish national memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Celtic Tiger years, Irish society seems to have transitioned into a much more welcoming environment for the production of literature, and in general, for the arts. The proliferation of literature, and, more specifically, of women writers and portrayals of girlhood, is giving way to a significant visualization of female voices and female issues, Sally Rooney being one of those voices. Therefore, in this paper I aim to analyse her contribution to the current Irish literary landscape through her novels Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), where sex and female sexuality become two of the major themes. Trauma, guilt and shame (Free and Scully 2016), as key traits of recessionary Irish identity, will also be taken into account by looking into Rooney’s characters’ attitudes as they perform their own sexuality. Hence, both the advantage of a higher social awareness of female issues and the disadvantage of an ashamed Post-Celtic Tiger society mix, thus influencing the representation of 21st century Irish female sexuality, and also creating a definitely contradicted society (Crowley 2013), where social advances keep pushing forward while post-boom trauma and self-regulation keep them back. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse the new perspectives on the locus amoenus put forward by contemporary women poets in Ireland, in particular those by the female authors included in the anthology Our Shared Japan, edited by Irene De Angelis and Joseph Woods (2007). This paper argues that these writers provide alternatives to traditional pastoralism that trigger new reflections on women’s identities and subjectivities. As Donna L. Potts asserts, some constitutive aspects of the pastoral tradition are “the relationship between nature and human nature, and between the present and the mythicised past, the motif of transformation, etc.” (9). These aspects will be scrutinised in the context of travel to the new, exotic space of Japan. The alterity that the poetic voices meet with in their travel provides them with new perceptions of themselves and their affective life in relation to the environment. This renegotiation of identity is mostly made through the body, which becomes a tool for knowledge and communication. The heterotopia (Foucault) of the trip, therefore, provides the perfect space for the poetic subjects to interact, change and reflect about their identity, their sense of belonging or alienation and the impact of travel on their emotional life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse the new perspectives on the locus amoenus put forward by contemporary women poets in Ireland, in particular those by the female authors included in the anthology Our Shared Japan, edited by Irene De Angelis and Joseph Woods (2007). This paper argues that these writers provide alternatives to traditional pastoralism that trigger new reflections on women’s identities and subjectivities. As Donna L. Potts asserts, some constitutive aspects of the pastoral tradition are “the relationship between nature and human nature, and between the present and the mythicised past, the motif of transformation, etc.” (9). These aspects will be scrutinised in the context of travel to the new, exotic space of Japan. The alterity that the poetic voices meet with in their travel provides them with new perceptions of themselves and their affective life in relation to the environment. This renegotiation of identity is mostly made through the body, which becomes a tool for knowledge and communication. The heterotopia (Foucault) of the trip, therefore, provides the perfect space for the poetic subjects to interact, change and reflect about their identity, their sense of belonging or alienation and the impact of travel on their emotional life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the outset of the Spanish Civil War, Ireland's ruling party were faced with the challenge of maintaining political hegemony. Revealing the old fault lines of the Irish Civil War, the opposition cast the government's Non-intervention policy as pro-Communist and anti-Catholic; a refusal to support Spanish insurgents in what was perceived by the majority as their defence of the Catholic faith. Following McNally, this paper utilises Gramsci's theory of hegemony to explore political equilibrium in the contexts of the Irish and Spanish conflicts. The notion of the "organic intellectual" enables a Gramscian reading of war photography, finding common visual language in the works of Robert Capa and W.D. Hogan as they contributed to national and transnational projects of hegemony. Through such a reading, the author finds cultural compatibility between the conflicts and casts the Irish revolutionary period in new international light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sara Baume has become one of most brilliant recent voices in the literary and artistic panorama of contemporary Ireland. She has managed to combine in a unique way an already established career as a writer with her vast knowledge of art and her own artistic projects. Baume has written two unanimously critically acclaimed novels, spill simmer falter wither (2015) and A Line Made by Walking (2017) and a handful of short stories which have been published in prestigious literary magazines and collections such as The Stinging Fly, Granta, The Moth, The Dublin Review, or The Davy Byrnes Collection. More recently, she published Handiwork (2020), a most intimate account of her life, interests and projects as a writer and as an artist, as well as a deeply felt personal homage to the figure of her dead father. In the present interview, the writer comments on the contemporary panorama of Irish literature, on the social and economic changes that have taken place recently in her native country, and on the two languages between which she has always felt caught, the one that goes down on paper and the one that goes down in small painted objects. These two languages have been put at the service of one of the most obvious and recurrent interests of the writer, her endless fascination for and deep concern with nature and animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sara Baume has become one of most brilliant recent voices in the literary and artistic panorama of contemporary Ireland. She has managed to combine in a unique way an already established career as a writer with her vast knowledge of art and her own artistic projects. Baume has written two unanimously critically acclaimed novels, spill simmer falter wither (2015) and A Line Made by Walking (2017) and a handful of short stories which have been published in prestigious literary magazines and collections such as The Stinging Fly, Granta, The Moth, The Dublin Review, or The Davy Byrnes Collection. More recently, she published Handiwork (2020), a most intimate account of her life, interests and projects as a writer and as an artist, as well as a deeply felt personal homage to the figure of her dead father. In the present interview, the writer comments on the contemporary panorama of Irish literature, on the social and economic changes that have taken place recently in her native country, and on the two languages between which she has always felt caught, the one that goes down on paper and the one that goes down in small painted objects. These two languages have been put at the service of one of the most obvious and recurrent interests of the writer, her endless fascination for and deep concern with nature and animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samuel Beckett displays an interest in portraying figures normally regarded as insane within their communities, and who are frequently depicted interacting with institutions of mental care. Taking the representation of three asylums in three separate works, this paper aims to explore a developing and complicated meditation on the subjects of mental health and incarceration by the author. Beckett's recurring reference to Jonathan Swift and the constant presence of sexual anxiety in these narratives allows him to produce a nuanced critique of the development of modes of confinement in the emerging Irish state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a Cork merchant family, Terry, with particular attention to the causes of their exile to Spain about 1700. Their significant sway in the civic and commercial affairs of Cork City at the beginning of the 17th century, and their downfall by the mid 17th century due to the impact on Catholic families of The Cromwellian Wars are detailed. After their exile to Spain, the success of this Irish family is linked to the recognition by the Spanish crown of their proofs of nobility, and the rights they gained to trade with the Indies. Their descendants quickly rose to influential positions in Spain and in South America where they moved to during the 18th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Easter Rising was a turning point in contemporary Irish history. Although it lasted for a few days, from Monday 24 to Saturday 29 April, 1916, it had great impact in Ireland itself, and it also aroused considerable interest in many other countries, particularly in those with a significant Irish community, as in the case of Argentina. The aim of this paper is to study the way in which the contemporary Argentine graphic media (published in Spanish and in English) presented and commented about the events that took place in Dublin. While it will try to contribute to the knowledge of the global echoes of the Easter Rising, this analysis will seek to help in a better understanding of the ideas of the English-speaking groups in Argentina, and particularly of the Irish community in that country, a group formed mainly by Argentine-born people of Irish descent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article utilises the surviving working papers of the Irish, Inter-Departmental Committee on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders of 1962-3 (IDC) to critically evaluate its work on the industrial and reformatory schools. The industrial and reformatory schools were populated by vulnerable children, from largely poor backgrounds, who were not well regarded by Irish society. The work of the IDC in regard to adult prisoners is argued by academics and politicians to have been a turning point in Irish penal policy; representing the point at which a more enlightened approach to the treatment of offenders began to feed through into the penal system. This positive assessment of the IDC's impact on adult penal policy is demonstrated to stand in stark contrast to its actions in regard to the children detained in the industrial and reformatory schools. Children, against whose interests, the IDC and its political masters chose to place economic expediency and the perceived interests of departmental and religio-political sensibilities. The actions of the IDC left these children exposed to the worst excesses of abusive institutions despite clear evidence of their plight. It was not until the years after the publication of the Kennedy Report in 1970 that the Irish State took it first hesitant steps in reforming the rotten and abusive system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the manner in which single women are represented in contemporary Irish women's short stories. Typically in these stories, such women are portrayed as a distinctive social group within a society in which a traditionally negative image of the spinster has been reinforced by a dominant social ideology which has as objective the exertion of social control over women. Contemporary Irish female writers attempt to ridicule this problematic "single-woman phobia" by demonstrating that this phenomenon is actually the result of women's "selflessness" rather than the "selfishness" associated with the spinster stereotype. Irish women's stories demonstrate also a fundamental unfairness inherent within Irish society in which women are compelled to sacrifice their own lives and needs for the benefit of others by assuming a surrogate mothering role as "social mothers". Ironically, this paradox acts as the main obstacle preventing Irish spinsters from fulfilling their roles as wives and biological mothers. In response, Irish female writers de-demonise the witchlike spinster stereotypes by deconstructing through their narratives those paradoxical social norms which have actually nurtured and reinforced negative perceptions of the "single women" within Irish society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]