This essay explores the semiotic complexity and cultural significance of Debbie Jenkinson's Midlands (2023), situating it within the evolving landscape of Irish graphic storytelling. Through a close analysis of visual grammar and panel structure, the essay examines how Midlands addresses themes of grief, belonging, and identity formation in the aftermath of personal and cultural disruption. Drawing on semiotic theory, Irish literary traditions, and the legacy of oral storytelling, the article positions Midlands as a quiet but radical contribution to the Irish literary canon-one that reimagines inherited narrative forms through the lens of sequential art. Rather than focusing on mythic or heroic tropes, Jenkinson turns to the textures of everyday life, using visual narrative to explore emotional ambiguity and psychological transition. The essay argues that Midlands marks a significant evolution in the expressive potential of Irish graphic literature, both theoretically and formally.
This article explores the way in which Eil & eacute;an N & iacute; Chuillean & aacute;in uses perception and perspective in her poetry to transcend the boundaries that separate reality from the worlds of imagination, folklore and spirituality, with a particular interest in colour and the visual. It will also be argued that language is one of the fundamental tools the poet uses to analyse the otherness and the difference between contrasting dimensions, and that the margin that divides them is a significant space in itself. The texts examined belong to different phases of the author's career in order to emphasise the presence of these nuances of thought throughout her literary production.
Drawing on transfeminist critique and autofiction theory, this essay explores three autofictional writings by three female Irish authors. Acknowledging the systemic and patriarchal oppression of women, the analysis of the novels A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (2013), A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (2020) and Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett (2021) will focus on how each author deals with individual manifestations of this condition. Furthermore, the different strategies of emancipation and liberation that each writer adopts will be taken into consideration. The main goal of this essay is to demonstrate how the experience of oppression distorts the authors’ perception of their identities, leading them to represent themselves as autofictional characters.
Despite being regarded as one of Ireland’s foremost short-story writers, O’Faolain’s literary output also encompasses travelogues, although this literary genre is sometimes considered as a minor phase in his writing career. His travel books include An Irish Journey, A Summer in Italy, An Autumn in Italy, and the article “In Search of Sardinia”, written for the American magazine Holiday. This essay analyses the characteristic traits of his travel writing, namely the constant presence of characters, delineated through the deliberate and sophisticated dialogic form, the setting of the narrated stories, and the personal reflections. His way of narrating and describing the places he visited, between wonder and reality, with disenchantment and irony, makes his travel books a personal form of narrative, thanks to the rich vocabulary due to the artistic maturity, intertextuality, and internationalization of his work.
This essay explores how Doyle’s novel utilises the jazz aesthetic to demythologise some of the most pernicious and persistent misconceptions around historical migration. Adopting a bifocal approach to Irish travel, it looks back to when the novel was published, a period characterised by sustained net in-migration to Ireland, from our current vantage point, which has witnessed the emergence of new far-right political parties in Ireland and a spike in violent anti-migrant criminality. This essay argues that Doyle’s reimagining of the Jazz Age allows him to move beyond the constraints imposed by the short story format in which he initially addressed the subject of racism in contemporary Ireland, i.e. the serialised stories published in the Irish multicultural monthly newspaper, Metro Éireann.
After a brief introduction to “frame” and “framing” in various disciplines, I will attempt to show that these notions can be applied to the analysis of the play The Cordelia Dream (2008) by the Irish playwright Marina Carr. I will analyse the various interrelated frames which compose the macro-construct and cognitive worldview of the play. This play is a contemporary reworking of William Shakespeare’s King Lear in which I highlight similarities, dissimilarities and references. In moving from one frame to another, in fact, a conceptual activation process is started, and it partly revises the ‘acquired knowledge’ underlying Carr’s play, such as the father-daughter relationship and the reading of King Lear. Finally, I will apply frame analysis to the process of translation in the Italian version, highlighting the various translational strategies adopted.
The Irish-Canadian lawyer John Mitchell had an unexpected effect on the history of the Ontario legal profession and vice-versa with his 1933 novel The Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside. Elements drawn from the profession were incorporated into the novel. The significance of the novel to the profession exemplifies a relationship that may develop between the history of the profession and the persons and works that conserve or promote it. The Yellow Briar, which promoted and influenced the history of the profession, resulted in the profession incorporating Mitchell and his novel within its history as subjects of lawyer lore. Mitchell and his novel were consequently afforded a place in history arguably greater than what they otherwise might have attained.
This essay traces the evolution of the Irish and Palestinian cultural identities of Dilly in Edna O’Brien’s The Light of the Evening and Amal in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin. It implements Stuart Hall’s Three Conceptions of Identity to uncover the dynamic development of their evolving cultural identities, tracing the three stages of cultural identity evolution. First, the Enlightenment subject outlines the relationship between the protagonists, their homeland. Second, the Sociological subject analyses the protagonists who have been shocked by societal and political changes. Third, the Postmodern subject portrays the fragmentation and hybridity of the protagonists. O’Brien and Abulhawa subvert colonial binaries, generating a radical vision of selfhood that thrives in ambiguity.
This article explores the 1930s phenomenon of Irish pilgrimage cruises which visited a range of religious destinations, but most frequently travelled to Lourdes or Rome. Although these were unquestionably sincere religious undertakings, they were also structured to resemble and eventually intertwine with the commercial cruise industry. The 1930s was the decade when Mediterranean cruises first became a luxury holiday form, combining sea and sun with the distinctly modernist aesthetic of cruise-liners themselves. This article explores the development of pilgrimage cruises, maps their relationship to the commercial cruise industry of the 1930s, and argues that the phenomenon was a forerunner of the package holidays to southern Europe which would later become so popular with Irish tourists.
This article explores the way in which Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin uses perception and perspective in her poetry to transcend the boundaries that separate reality from the worlds of imagination, folklore and spirituality, with a particular interest in colour and the visual. It will also be argued that language is one of the fundamental tools the poet uses to analyse the otherness and the difference between contrasting dimensions, and that the margin that divides them is a significant space in itself. The texts examined belong to different phases of the author's career in order to emphasise the presence of these nuances of thought throughout her literary production.
In the conservative Dublin of the 1950s, a tiny Pike Theatre was making a name for itself by staging the controversial American playwright, Tennessee Williams, for Dublin’s first International Theatre Festival. Its director, Alan Simpson, was arrested, however, for “presenting for gain an indecent and profane performance”. According to The Lost Letters of Flann O’Brien, O’Brien apparently wrote to Williams for advice about resuscitating his own flagging theatrical attempts (McGowan, Sherlock 2021, 155-56). This essay contextualizes the letters to situate O’Brien’s grafting an American mythos and its idiom onto “The Auld Sod”.
A land historically marked by the sorrows of astonishingly numerous (in-voluntary) “emigrants” and/or “exiles”, in recent decades Ireland has also undergone remarkably significant waves of immigration and return migration, which have inevitably questioned the nature of “true Irishness” today. Drawing on fictional and non-fictional narratives of metaphorical and/or literal (e)migration produced by the contemporary generation of (non-)Irish women writers, this paper aims to shed light on the personal and national implications related to a woman’s “decision”/“necessity” to seek, leave, and/or return to a “new” home away from home, and therefore to her attempt to “reconcile” with or forge her identity/ies and ambivalent longing and sense of (not) belonging elsewhere or within an ever-changing Ireland.
The essay explores how Luigi Meneghello translated some of W.B. Yeats's poems into the dialect of Vicenza.Yeats's compositions became a source of sustenance for the poet from Malo, offering profound insights into various aspects of life and art.Meneghello's fascination with Yeats led him to undertake the translations of his works into the Vicentine dialect, resulting in the collection Trapianti, consisting of seventeen compositions by Yeats, and showcasing Meneghello's skill in capturing the essence and rhythmic tension of the originals while infusing them with new life and meaning.
Starting from the anthology 300.000 Kisses by Seán Hewitt and Luke Edward Hall, we aim to analyze the literary manifestations of queer themes, exploring how the act of anthologizing serves as an orienting and guiding force. In this case, the “anthology operation” functions as a compass, highlighting significant trends and providing a cohesive understanding of queer literary landscapes. Through reading 300.000 Kisses, it is possible to trace not only the archetypes of queer culture but also to propose new reading methodologies that allow for a fresh approach to literary text analysis, as well as the storytelling forms that populate contemporary imagination.
This essay explores the relationship between the Tarot and the poetry of W.B. Yeats. It argues that Yeats was deeply fascinated by the Tarot, and that this fascination is evident in many of his poems. The essay begins by discussing Yeats’s interest in the occult. Yeats was a member of several occult societies, including the Hermetic Society and the Golden Dawn. He was also a friend of Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society. The essay then goes on to examine the ways in which the Tarot is used in Yeats’s poetry. Yeats often uses Tarot imagery to create a sense of mystery and suspense. He also uses the Tarot to explore themes of love, death, and rebirth. The Tarot provides Yeats with a way to explore the hidden depths of the human psyche. It also helps him to create a poetry that is both beautiful and profound.
Much from George and W.B. Yeats’s channelling sessions left little or no trace in A Vision yet provided important material for the poet. The Daimon, an antagonist spiritual counterpart, though unclear in A Vision, was a vital concept to Yeats, and could be symbolised in bird or animal form; similarly, the dove and swan that appear in the annunciations to Mary and Leda embody the daimonic on a macrocosmic scale. Another daimonic beast at both individual and world level is the unicorn; one related to the new religious age is the sphinx, which embodies a complex conjunction of ideas, including the reawakening of ancient ways of thought. The Daimon brings crisis to human life, and the daimonic beasts are associated with crisis in world history, the irruption of the irrational divine.
