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W.B. Yeats’s presence at the December 1896 Paris performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi has become well known for the famous phrase that it inspired: “After us the Savage God.” Yet the significance of Jarry’s play to Yeats’s drama has been almost entirely overlooked. Expanding on my previous work in Yeats and European Drama, this article illustrates the profundity and the significance of Jarry’s revolutionary avant-garde play for two of Yeats’s plays: The Green Helmet (1910) and The Player Queen (1922). Following a discussion of the connections between Ubu Roi, The Green Helmet, and the disturbances at the Abbey Theatre during the performance of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, I address the deep affinities that Jarry’s play also has with another later play by Yeats: The Player Queen. Although it was first performed long after the Symbolist movement in literature and drama had passed, The Player Queen carries strongly Symbolist features. Like Ubu Roi, however, Yeats’s play disturbs the religious ideals of Symbolism through a tension that it sustains between mysticism and animality, a tension that I explore through the medieval aspects of both plays. Taken together, The Green Helmet and The Player Queen demonstrate the continuing influence that the European avant-garde in general, and Jarry’s work in particular, had on Yeats’s dramaturgy throughout his career.

A founding member of the Irish Literary Society, an early member of the Gaelic League, and a leading figure in the Irish Co-operative Movement, Thomas William Rolleston was one of the most notable figures in movements for Irish cultural and economic revival during the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Rolleston also had a keen interest in German literature and culture, developed originally from the four years that he lived in Wiesbaden and Dresden between 1879 and 1883. This experience granted him some appreciation of conditions that obtained in Germany prior to the outbreak of the First World War, including Prussian-Polish relations. In 1917, Rolleston published a significant pamphlet assessing Irish-British relations during the decades preceding the 1916 Rising in Ireland as compared with relations between Prussia and Poland over the same period. Rolleston rejects a widespread view in Ireland that the moral authority, which the British Government had accorded to itself as a defender of the rights of small nations in the war against Germany, had been fatally compromised by its willingness to countenance Polish independence while continuing to oppose Irish independence. This essay considers the contrasts that Rolleston draws between Ireland and Poland in 1917 in the light of his general views on the Irish language question and Irish politics during the 1900s.

Michael McAteer addresses the nature of myth as excess in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Noting Sorel’s anarcho-syndicalist reading of myth in political revolution, he considers the myth of origins in Finnegans Wake in relation to the mythological narratives that emerged during the Irish Revival from the late nineteenth century. McAteer examines the associations made between ancient Irish and ancient Eastern civilization in Finnegans Wake, attending to the linguistic excess that is generated in the process. McAteer also addresses the technique of doubling through which Joyce transforms mythical narratives of Irish Revival from order to anarchy. In particular, he draws attention to Joyce’s reconfiguration of Irish-language terms and Irish historical allusions through the multi-lingual form of narration in Finnegans Wake.

In this chapter, McAteer develops his analysis of material excess in modern Irish writing through a consideration of material waste and leftovers as represented in works by Irish authors. Central to his discussion is Roddy Doyle’s 1999 novel on the 1916 Rising and the Irish War of Independence, A Star Called Henry. McAteer examines how the novel illustrates Marx’s ideas on the production of excess within the capitalist economic system in the form of material and human surplus. McAteer also discusses the representation of material leftovers in O’Casey’s plays Juno and the Paycock and Red Roses for Me; in O’Brien’s The Third Policeman; in Beckett’s novel Molloy and his play Endgame. McAteer draws upon the thought of Adorno, Heidegger and Sloterdijk in this critique.

Excess has only been addressed sporadically in modern Irish criticism and interpreted in conflicting ways. Sometimes it is regarded negatively as a crude stereotype of the Irish temperament. Sometimes critics admire it for transgressing Irish social norms and traditional conservative values. Michael McAteer considers these critical views before turning to Matthew Arnold’s idea of the excessive nature of the Celt as a point of origin for understanding excess in modern Irish writing, taking into consideration Oscar Wilde’s and W. B. Yeats’s revaluation of Arnold’s thought in the late nineteenth century. He argues that this revaluation marks the transition from Arnold’s specifically Celtic notion of excess to excess as a feature of the modern human condition.

In this chapter, Michael McAteer addresses excess in modern Irish writing in material terms, discussing plays by Dion Boucicault, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Considering the economic and material aspects of excess in Marx’s thought, McAteer discusses their significance to the existential aspect of excess as it first appears in the thought of Kierkegaard. He then discusses Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn as a play that exemplifies the intersection of economic and affective senses of excess in Irish drama. McAteer extends this reading to assess the relation between melodrama and money in The Importance of Being Earnest and John Bull’s Other Island. McAteer examines marriage in both plays in relation to Badiou’s association of excess and the void.

McAteer provides a new perspective on Northern Irish writing since the outbreak of political violence in the late 1960s. Looking at works by Belfast novelist Glenn Patterson and Belfast playwright Christina Reid, he considers excess in the connection between material waste and the idea of the parasite. Drawing upon Derrida’s notion of writing as ‘parasitology’, McAteer frames his discussion in terms of Northern Ireland itself as a political formation standing in excess of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. He looks at how Reid’s plays represent unemployed people as excess in the form of social leftovers, and how this relates to political violence in Northern Ireland. McAteer engages ideas on violence in Sorel, Benjamin and Žižek in this analysis.

Michael McAteer provides a new reading of the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett through a consideration of excess as negation in their fiction. Noting also Heidegger’s and Sartre’s ideas on nothingness, McAteer addresses language, circumstance and character in Bowen’s novel The Heat of the Day in terms of the connection that Badiou draws between excess and the void. He observes the affinities between Bowen’s and Beckett’s fiction in relation to key aspects of Badiou’s theory of the event. Engaging these ideas in conjunction with Derrida’s notion of ‘the hinge’ in signification, McAteer shows how the language of non-saying in Bowen and Beckett is a language of excess in the face of the void that it is employed to convey.

Michael McAteer considers excess in a number of poems from Northern Ireland that were published during the Troubles from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s. He offers new perspectives on poems by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian that address the violence and political division of the North during that period. In this analysis, McAteer engages Heidegger’s notion of the remoteness of being, Badiou’s set theory concepts of belonging and inclusion, Bataille’s association of luxury and death, and Sloterdijk’s idea of the twin birth. The result is a new understanding of ways in which excess appears in relation to violence, exclusion and loss in Northern Irish poetry.

This chapter addresses Oriental aspects of excess in Irish writing with reference to works by Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice, taking Joseph Lennon’s idea of Irish Orientalism into account. Michael McAteer discusses Wilde’s play Salome in terms of Edward Said’s argument for the figuring of the Orient as excess within the discourse of Orientalism. Turning to excess in Yeats’s 1923 poem, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, McAteer examines its Orientalist aspect in relation to Derrida’s concept of the supplement and numerical excess in Badiou’s mathematical set theory account of being. From this McAteer consider excess as it appears in two poems by Louis MacNeice that were composed during his time in India in 1947.

While Oscar Wilde’s plays—particularly his comedies—have often been read in terms of politics of gender identity and social class, it has not often been observed that they were also responding to a sense of political crisis in the 1890s. This chapter unravels the traces of a wider geopolitics in Wilde’s plays, extending beyond London or Dublin. It argues that the magnificent, unsettling witticisms of Wilde’s dramas, their constant play with the dangers of social and political subterfuge, and their fascination with the sacrificial act all contribute to the sense of his theatrical achievement as a portent of the calamities that would follow the age of Wagner. It concludes that while Wilde did not write for Ireland, the influence of Ireland’s historical conflict with England prompted and enabled him to develop his distinctive theatrical perspectives on art, politics, and sacrifice as prophecies of this future.

Antagonism of the human A(2A) receptor has been implicated as a point of therapeutic intervention in the alleviation of the symptoms associated with Parkinson's disease. This is thought to occur, at least in part, by increasing the sensitivity of the dopaminergic neurons to the residual, depleted levels of striatal dopamine. We herein describe a novel series of functionalized triazolo[4,5-d]pyrimidine derivatives that display functional antagonism of the A(2A) receptor. Optimization of these compounds has resulted in improvements in potency, selectivity, and the pharmacokinetic properties of key derivatives. These efforts have led to the discovery of 60 (V2006/BIIB014), which demonstrates strong oral activity in commonly used models of Parkinson's disease. Furthermore, this derivative has shown excellent preclinical pharmacokinetics and has successfully completed phase I clinical studies. This compound is presently undergoing further clinical evaluation in collaboration with Biogen Idec.

The phrase Celtic Revival describes past movements in literature, the arts, and social practices in which legends, poetry, art, and spirituality of a distinctive kind were revived. Writers and artists identified these with the Celtic people in parts of pre-Christian and early Christian Europe. The most significant Celtic Revival took place in Ireland toward the end of the 19th century and into the first two decades of the 20th century. It is commonly referred to as the Irish Revival, though it has also been considered a Celtic revival in Ireland that had associations with revival movements in Scotland, Wales, the English regions, and Brittany. The Irish Revival was felt most strongly in literature, drama, and the Irish language. It was also evident in art, design, music, and sport. The political and economic features of the Irish Revival were complex. The influence of militant nationalism was strong, yet unionist, Home Rule nationalist, socialist, and feminist political views were held by different figures involved in the Irish Revival across a range of different groups and activities. Much academic scholarship concerned with Celtic Revival has focused on the literary and dramatic movement in Ireland, producing as it did three of the most important international literary figures of the 20th century—W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey. The term Celtic Revival, however, was contested by some cultural activists in Ireland. During the Irish Revival, some regarded the notion of “Celtic” Revival as softening the national “Irish” nature of the movement, implying affinities with the ancient inheritances of England, Scotland, and Wales, its focus more among literary societies in London than among those engaged in “nation-building” activities in Dublin. For others, the Celtic aspect of the Irish Revival was precisely what distinguished it from the modern character of English urban society. Aside from this, the question arises as to how much Celtic Revival in Ireland and Britain grew out of inventions of the Celt as a cultural ideal from the 16th century in Europe. This article opens with a section covering studies of Celtic civilization in Ireland and Britain. Subsequent sections address scholarship on the literary and dramatic aspects of the Irish Revival from the late 19th century, its historical contexts, as well as the range of its political ideas, movements, and activists. Academic publications are also listed on a range of individual literary and language-revival figures associated with the Irish Revival. Later sections cover studies of Pan-Celticism and Celtic Revival in Britain. The final sections identify scholarship on the Irish Revival in the fields of art, design, music, and sport, addressing correspondences between activities in Celtic revival in Ireland and Scotland in the process.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1948 to ensure that the atrocities that took place during the course of World War II would never be allowed to happen again.1 On this premise, the refusal of any state or group to recognize the legitimacy of the thirty clauses of the Declaration — either in legal constitution or in legal practice — was tantamount to equivocation or, at worst, lending tacit justification to those atrocities. Considered in terms of international law, therefore, the refusal of any state to endorse the clauses of the Declaration might well be construed as a legitimation of the techniques of the Hitler regime or, for that matter, the mass extermination of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States Airforce in 1945. If the international community of nations, in other words, has proven either unable or unwilling to abide by the Declaration, then it is plausible to conclude that international law cannot provide protection against genocide or mass killing of civilians.2

(2000). A Split Unity: Gender and History in A.E.'s Poetry. Irish Studies Review: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 179-194.

The incident of management misbehavior has been increasing in the last decade. The present financial crisis has exposed additional episodes of questionable, improper, and possibly illegal actions by managers of financial institutions. By combining techniques used in financial analysis and theoretical constructs of the study of managerial fraud, the Analytic Model of Management Fraud is developed. The conceptual framework reflected in the Analytic Model of Management Fraud is that financial statements provide a lens to view the actions of management and determine conditions that increase the likelihood of management fraud occurring. Using three groups of financial ratios produced by the FDIC the model was tested on Community Banks for a period of three years before the occurrence of management fraud. The results of study supports that certain performance ratios are predictive of conditions that increase the likelihood of management fraud occurring.

International audience; Concentrating on the German, French, and Spanish translations of Robert McLiam Wilson’s 1996 novel, Eureka Street, this chapter explores the challenge of translating aspects of Belfast’s urban signs into different cultural environments and the forms of silencing that arise in the process. Urban spaces in Belfast have been marked by a specific “mural language” relating to the political conflict in the city from the late-1960s, often taking the form of acronyms with coded sectarian meanings. These acronyms are central to the action of Eureka Street. Understood only by different sections of the local Belfast population, this secret language appears hermetic to the outside observer. Dealing with the inscriptions on the city’s walls, translators face the difficulty of communicating these political and religious acronyms—the meaning of which is already hidden in many cases—to the readership of a target culture in which they carry no meaning at all. The chapter shows how the silences of the acronyms in the original English-language version of Eureka Street are consequently doubled in the translated versions.