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Seamus Heaney is widely seen as one of the significant Irish writers of the twentieth century who authored and edited a number of well-known books and collections. Heaney's work reflected concepts of political violence, sexual desire, landscape, childhood memories and myths. Research has been conducted on the mentioned concepts. However, research about Heaney's concept of scopophilia is scarce, despite its wide depiction in Heaney's poetry. Therefore, this study investigates Heaney's stance as an Irish scopophilic in his poems. To explore this, the present research views Heaney's work from a psychoanalytical perspective. To examine the texts, this study employed a critical qualitative approach that entailed a close reading of Heaney's selected poems. The analysis was supported by background research of the context of the poems. This study mainly found that sex and power manifested through scopophilia are recurrent phenomena which motivate human ambitions and lead to world problems and suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study is primarily concerned with identifying the means of characterisation of the characters in the Dorian Gray opera by composer Ľubica Čekovská and librettist Kate Pullinger. The first part of the study introduces the literary source of the Dorian Gray opera - the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by an Irish writer Oscar Wilde. It interprets the results of a comparison between the libretto of Dorian Gray and its literary source. The second part of the study is devoted to the characterization of the musical language and characters of the Dorian Gray opera. Ultimately, the study interprets the opera's focal theme - The Voices of the Painting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the many themes in which the Irish modernist novelist, James Joyce, was intellectually and emotionally engaged, the issue of British imperialism and Irish nationalism was paramount. While Joyce despised the English colonial occupation of his country, he was equally dismissive of a mythical Irish nationalism, particularly in the way it was endorsed by the Gaelic Athletic Association. While Joyce is not renowned as a writer of sport; nevertheless, sporting pursuits can be found throughout his novels. Joyce's nuanced understanding of how English culture has permanently altered Irish social subjectivities (and vice versa) can be found in sharp relief in his novels, particularly Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This article takes sport as a theme in Joyce's work through which to explore fractured national identities through a framework inspired by the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Their post-Marxist work enables an examination of sport and nationality that goes beyond the existing orthodox Gramscian theory that has proven so productive in the understanding of sport in Cultural Studies. The article will commence with a brief review of existing studies of Joyce with respect to sport and national debates. After summarising the broad Gramscian approaches to understanding sport and nationalism, some of the key concepts in Laclau and Mouffe's political philosophy are then outlined. The article will apply those concepts to the way Joyce depicts sport, especially cricket and hockey, to deconstruct the binaries in the debate between British colonialism and Irish nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, informed by scholarship on middlebrow culture, places Mary Lavin's stories in the textual space of The New Yorker, reassessing the supposed 'conservatism' of her short fiction. Lavin's literary fame has often been marred by her perceived conservative streaks – in terms of her literary sensibility and her gender politics. Lavin's literary style is inclined to the realist mode, which appears to be old-fashioned in comparison with the experimentalist work of her modernist predecessors; moreover, her ideas of family and marriage largely adhere to established social mores, disconnecting her from the progressive feminist movement in the post-war years. This essay argues that both aspects of Lavin's 'conservatism' should be radically reassessed by placing her stories in the context of The New Yorker and the magazine's affiliation with middlebrow culture. Her seemingly conservative literary and gender views in fact register a critical attitude toward urban modernity and domestic ideals, which resonated with The New Yorker's liberal, albeit complacent, middle-class readers. In particular, the essay reads Lavin's island story 'The Bridal Sheets' as a critique of materialism; it also considers the symbolic currency of the widow figure in 'In a Café' vis-à-vis The New Yorker's tepid gender politics in the mid-twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussion of Burke begins with an early essay from the late 1750s in which Skjönsberg sees Burke as a sceptical defender of the necessity of party within a mixed constitution. Skjönsberg begins his discussion of Bolingbroke by drawing attention to the commonly held view that Bolingbroke is an anti-party thinker (while acknowledging Kurt Kluxen's important, but largely ignored, views to the contrary). Before engaging with Hume's considerable partisan oeuvre, Skjönsberg discusses first the Huguenot historian Paul de Rapin-Thoyras and Henry St John, viscount Bolingbroke, both of whom were crucial to shaping discussion of partisan politics more broadly. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Revista Soletras is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines a series of poems by contemporary Irish authors writing in English, and focuses on the role of media technology in considering post-human ethics and human rights issues in these poems. Human rights discourse has faced the challenge of addressing the broadening of the category of 'human' through post-human ethics and aesthetics. What is therefore needed is a consideration of how the sphere or concept of human rights can encompass what Rosi Braidotti describes as 'post-human subjects of knowledge – embedded, embodied and yet flowing in a web of relations with human and non-human others'. This theoretical framework informs the article's discussion of selected poems, how these poems approach human rights conflicts and violations in a distinctively post-human context, and how different manifestations of media technology shape and reflect such discussions. Poetry, technology, and the post-human subject are understood as equally embedded in the material, cultural, and political assemblages within which human rights and post-human ethics also emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways in which Irish women writers have employed the Irish domestic interior as a representation of the female body in national politics from the late nineteenth century through the present. Using The Burning of Bridget Cleary, Angela Bourke's classic case study of the murder of a nineteenth-century woman, to introduce the biopolitics underlying the modern Irish female body as a metaphor for the Irish nation, this article shows how that metaphor continues to resonate in twentiethcentury texts written both during Irish independence and the massive economic changes of the Celtic Tiger years. Comparing work by Elizabeth Bowen and Pamela Hinkson to the contemporary detective fiction of Tana French, I argue that both the modernist era and the period after the fall of the Celtic Tiger, particularly after the great recession of 2008, were transformative times in Ireland where discussions of Irish feminine subjectivity offered hybridized understandings of gender and power during moments of great change for the nation. The textual reverberations of the Bridget Cleary story show us how a woman's body can become a metonymical symbol for both progress and oppression in modern Ireland, exposing the tense relationship between modernity and tradition in Irish culture that is the backbone of Irish identity throughout much of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Best known as co-writer of Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted (1995–98), Irish writer Arthur Mathews is among the most versatile in recent British and Irish television comedy. Mathews's other British work includes sketch show Big Train (1998–2002), Toast of London (2013–15) and Toast of Tinseltown (2022–present), while his work for Irish television includes the sitcom Val Falvey TD (2009). Drawing on interviews with Mathews concerning his formation and development as a writer, this article situates his distinctive comic sensibility within Ireland's changing social and cultural landscape from the 1960s to the 1980s and the east coast of Ireland's unusual 'mediascape' as a confluence of Irish, British and American currents. Mathews's career and work illustrate how comic sensibility, national and regional identities intersect in the 'British Isles' as a geo-cultural archipelago rather than a collection of distinctive national identities. The article examines how he relates his acutely surreal humour and love of generic and stylistic incongruity to his formative experiences of watching and absorbing British television from a vantage point both 'outside', in a different national jurisdiction, and culturally on its margins. Finally, it gauges the limits of Mathews's work in offering forms of cultural and social critique through comedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anne Enright's writing evinces a nuanced sensitivity to words which nourishes a tension between the realist style and a strong self‐consciousness. This is evident in The Gathering, in which the seemingly chronological occurrences weave out a dynamic pattern of narrative time. Examining Veronica's experimentation with tense, I argue that the ongoing writing aligns with her progressive mourning. Specifically, her reconfiguration of memories in the past reveals her temporal perspectives in the present, which sheds light upon her struggle to come to terms with Liam's death. While Liam's ghost exposes Veronica's wish to prolong his presence, his last journey arranged in the present tense is her reenactment of his death. Veronica's imagination of the inaccessible past and the disruption of retrospective narration suggest an overall strategy of presentification to counter the afterwardness of her belated writing. In addition, a series of changes in Veronica's attitudes towards sex and motherhood attest to her progress in mourning, even though mourning for one's loss is an unsolvable issue. The temporal self‐reflexivity in The Gathering, exhibited in Veronica's manipulation of tenses and temporal perspectives, not only aligns with the Irish women writers' battle against the amnesia imposed by the state and the church but also echoes the postmodern challenge of authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of The Iraqi University is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In fact, Callaghan and Howe argue, "it is difficult, if not impossible, to assert a meaningful distinction between an author's letters and their literary productions" (9). Wolfson moves from reading William Wordsworth's I The Prelude i as a "quasi-letter" to Coleridge into noting the qualities that make Dorothy Wordsworth's journals a "proto-letter" for William (65, 67). According to editors Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe, their collection I Romanticism and the Letter i serves to correct a prevailing fallacy that, after an eighteenth-century zenith of fine epistolary prose, the nineteenth century "ushered in a decline in letter writing" that was soon to become "absolute" (1). [Extracted from the article]

The word 'queer' is an umbrella term covering genders falling outside the heterosexual binary. As one of the representations of queer literature, in Breakfast on Pluto (1998) by Irish author Patrick McCabe, Patrick is born as a male, yet he wants to take place in society as a woman by nurturing her 'feminine' tendencies with performative actions. Cal in Middlesex (2002), by American writer Jeffrey Eugenides, is biologically born with having both male and female genitals and he wants to take place in society as a man by supporting his 'masculine' tendencies. The abandonment of Patrick's biological family and the rejection of his sexual identity by his adoptive family and social circle lead him to leave the small Irish town of Tyreelin and emigrate to London. Similarly, Cal is displaced to San Francisco after his family tried to change his sexual orientation into "female" by taking him to a clinic in New York where the doctor and his family showed negative attitudes. Both are displaced because their families do not support their sexual identity, so they move away where they can freely display their sexual identity in this new space, away from any pressure or restriction. In this respect, these two novels, written in different countries and published four years apart, establish a transcultural dialogue with one another because both characters undergo a similar social predicament. In this respect, this study aims to examine the factors which force the characters falling outside of social norms to move away with a discussion of how the two novels establish a transcultural connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the meanings of iustitia manifested in De duodecim abusiuis saeculi, a text from seventh-century Ireland that presents ethical teaching through reflecting on twelve abuses in behaviour, beginning with the sapiens who fails to live out his teaching, and climaxing with reflection on a people without law. It argues the debt of this treatise to patristic tradition, with particular attention to ascetic traditions manifested in different ways by Jerome, Cassian, and Pelagius. Whereas iustitia was often understood by early Christian writers in terms of personal righteousness, this Irish author considered its implications within many sectors of society and for its well-being as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on Irish writer Kevin Barry's first collection of short stories, There Are Little Kingdoms (2007). The Ireland depicted in this work is the Ireland of the new millennium - a territory facing the transformations of Celtic Tiger prosperity. The analysis of these short stories, which provide several snapshots of contemporary Ireland, will explore how the Republic depicted in Barry's work is a territory in some ways bound to its rural past, often characterised by its short-sightedness despite pretensions of development. Changes are occurring, but at the same time stasis permeates the scenarios of the plots. The irony is salient, considering that the Celtic Tiger era is a time associated with prosperity and joy, yet the lives and stories of the characters of There Are Little Kingdoms (2007), as this essay will reveal, are downbeat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the success of Irish female authors and the increase of Irish Young Adult literature publications have contributed to a wider recognition of narratives of girlhood. Such is the case of Claire Hennessy's YA fiction novel Like Other Girls, which focuses on the experiences of sixteen-year-old Lauren Carroll as she navigates being a queer young female in contemporary Ireland and deals with having an abortion in the pre-Repeal Republic. This article analyses Like Other Girls focusing on three key aspects depicted in the novel: female body and sexuality, the concept of an LGBTQ+ group as a support network for queer youth, and the experience of abortion in pre-Repeal Ireland. Such analysis is carried out with the objective of giving recognition of Irish girlhood, as well as acknowledging the importance of narratives where the female body, diverse sexualities and those concerns involved in growing up female in contemporary Ireland are depicted so that young girls can find a space to identify themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until relatively recently the works of the early twentieth-century Irish novelist Patrick MacGill have been neglected by literary commentators. MacGill made his reputation, initially, through his poetry that was centred on the hard lives and conditions of the 'Navvy' - the itinerant labourers of the British industrial world. He subsequently published two novels that record the conditions of the Irish migrant agricultural and industrial labourers in Scotland, namely The Children of the Dead End and The Rat-Pit, establishing his reputation as a social commentator of the lower reaches of the working class. Several literary commentators such as Jack Mitchell (1982), Seamus Deane (1985), Owen Dudley Edwards (1986), and Terry Phillips (2010), have considered these early works to have a socialist view while others, Lochlinn McGlynn (1944), and Joe Mulholland (1972) have admired the descriptive skills and the realism in his writings. This article considers their points and places in context MacGill's education in socialism in Greenock and Glasgow around 1909 and highlights examples where his socialist views are manifestly visible outside his novels. Patrick MacGill and Jack London were writers whose early literary works are formed of their experiences in the lower layers of the working class. In this article, the similarities in the formative years of MacGill and those of Jack London are exposed showing a striking commonality in their experiences that leads them both to socialism and to record those experiences in literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Odisea is the property of Revista Odisea and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the present study, he not only places Yeats firmly in the poetic line, but he also uses recent as well as seminal Yeats criticism in order to convey his theme of Yeats as spiritual seeker and Petrarchan lover. Patrick J. Keane, Making the Void Fruitful: Yeats as Spiritual Seeker and Petrarchan Lover (Open Book Publishers, 2021) pp. xii + 254, £21.95. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies is the property of Associacao Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article examines the figure of the spy--alongside themes related to espionage--as employed in two books by the Northern Irish writer Ciaran Carson (1948-2019): the volume of poems For All We Know (2008) and the novel Exchange Place (2012). Carson's oeuvre is permeated with the Troubles and he has been hailed one of key writers to convey the experience of living in a modern surveillance state. His depiction of Belfast thematizes questions of terrorism, the insecurity and anxiety it causes in everyday life, as well as the unceasing games of appearances and the different ways of verifying or revising identities. In Carson's later work, however, these aspects acquire greater philosophical depth as the author uses the themes of doubles, spies, and makeshift identities to discuss writing itself, the construction of subjectivity, and the dialogic relationship with the other. Taking a cue from Paul Ricoeur's and Julia Kristeva's conceptions of "oneself as another," the article examines how Carson's spy-figures can be read as metaphors for processes of self-discovery and identity-formation, tied to the notion of "self-othering." Carson employs the figure of the spy--who juggles identities by "donning" different clothes or languages--to scrutinize how one ventures into the dangerous territory of writing, translation and love, as well as to reconsider notions of originality and self-mastery Ultimately, Carson conceptualizes literature as specially marked by deceptions and metamorphoses, defining in these terms the human condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines two elegies in which Howe (re)collects both herself and her lost beloveds in and through the lacunae of the archive: The Midnight (2003), Howe's elegy for her mother, the Irish actress and author Mary Manning, and That This (2010), Howe's elegy for her late husband, the philosopher Peter Hare. In both works, Howe's acts of (re)collection and collage constitute a liminal theater in which the boundaries between text and image, poet and reader, archival object and the page, and the living and the dead, dissolve. Howe's is ultimately a poetics of tactual attention, a "telepathy of archives" that recalls and materializes what has been forgotten or marginalized and makes present what has been absent, lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first translation into Spanish of Samuel Beckett's Comment c'est (1961), by José Emilio Pacheco, Cómo es (1966), stands out as a dazzling and unprecedented landmark in the history of the reception of the Irish author in non-English-speaking countries. In his translation the 27-year-old Mexican poet took the French original version as his main source but, despite its daring quality and the brilliance of the text rendered into Spanish, it had little impact in the cultural atmosphere of its day. In light of Pacheco's standing in the world of letters as a first-rank critic, translator and poet, it is deemed necessary a reassessment of this unique text. The aim of this article is to analyze Pacheco's translation of Samuel Beckett's novel; for this purpose, the historical context and the personal elements that the poet incorporated from his personal background into his version of Comment c'est will be studied in detail. All in all, the final objective of this research is to explain how Beckett is read in Spanish through Pacheco's version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]