Welcome to the second non-themed issue of the Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE) journal. As with our previous non-themed issue (5.2), this issue will evolve in the coming months to feature additional articles between now and the publication of our next issue 8.2 in Autumn/Winter 2025, rather than following the conventional print format of publishing an issue only when a sufficient number of articles have been peer-reviewed, revised and formatted. In this manner, we aim to bring new peer-reviewed research to our readers more quickly while featuring considerations of a range of topics relevant to Irish Studies within a single issue. RISE is dedicated to the publication of new and innovative research within and between the broad range of disciplines and areas engaged with Irish Studies, including Literature (in both English and Irish), History, Film & Visual Culture, Politics, Translation Studies, Music Studies and the Social Sciences. We are grateful to all the contributors of articles and reviews to this issue and welcome further submissions (to rise@efacis.eu) for future non-themed issues.
Review of The Edinburgh Companion to W.B. Yeats and the Arts, by Charles I. Armstrong, Adrian Paterson and Tom Walker (eds.) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 467pp., ISBN: 9781474499668, €195 (hardcover)
Review of A 'Proper' Woman? One Woman's Story of Success and Failure in Academia, by Pat O'Connor (Bern and London: Peter Lang, 2024), 223 pp., ISBN: 978-1-80374-305-9, €32.60
Review of Contemporary Irish Theatre: Histories and Theories, by Charlotte McIvor and Ian R. Walsh (London: Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2024), 352 pp., ISBN: 9783031550119, €41.50 (hardback)
This paper offers the first in-depth exploration of the Irish and Irish-American experience of World War One through the lens of US sheet music covers, drawing upon a dataset from 1914 to 1919 collected from the Ward Irish Music Archives. By examining the stylistic and compositional choices on these covers, I identify four key themes: nostalgia and longing for Ireland, farewells to Ireland, loyalty to Britain (and later to the United States) and idealised Irish qualities. These covers combined various images and stereotypes about Ireland, which was instrumental in shaping public perceptions of Irish and Irish-American roles in the war. Specifically, they constructed an idealised vision of the wartime experience, omitting violence, masking Ireland’s internal divisions and presenting the country as a unified homeland whose citizens fully backed Britain, and later the US, in their military efforts. This portrayal sought to address Irish-American anxieties regarding patriotism and loyalty amid scrutiny of their identities. The findings prompt a re-evaluation of seemingly mundane objects in mass-market media, revealing how they can provide fresh insights into race, nationhood and identity. They also encourage readers to consider whether the sheet music served primarily as propaganda, a commercial venture, or a complex blend of both, adding nuance to our understanding of World War One experiences from Irish, Irish-American and visual culture perspectives.
Review of The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney´'s Prose, by Ian Hickey and Eugene O'Brien (New York: Routledge, 2024), 224 pp., ISBN: 978-1-00345-614-8, $45.59 (paperback)
In The Open: Man and Animal (2002), Giorgio Agamben argues that the distinction between organism and matter, non-human animal and human is the result of continuous disjunction by what he calls ‘the modern anthropological machine’. Ecofeminist theories by Donna Haraway and others try to empower the non-human and to wipe out the changing lines of demarcation produced by the anthropological machine. Concepts of multispecies kin- and partnership can be developed by speculative fabulation in stories focussing on non-human animals. These narratives can be considered liminal zones of exception, in which Agamben’s anthropological machine explores the boundaries of the human. This article discusses two such stories in transatlantic perspective, ‘Green Tea’ (1869), a tale by Irish gothic writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, in which a cleric falls victim to a furious monkey, and ‘Circumstance’ (1860), an American frontier story by Harriet Prescott Spofford, in which a panther called the Indian Devil attacks a woman in the wilderness. Both stories can be read as early comments on the viability of interspecies alignments and entanglements. Synthesising the central conflicts of Victorian secularisation in a common semiosphere, the monkey in ‘Green Tea’ remains an anthropocentric phantasmagoria, while ‘Circumstance’ develops an ecocentric trajectory.
In his monograph Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First Century Fiction, Timothy Baker claims that ‘non-human animals haunt the peripheries of contemporary fiction’ (1) – while mostly remaining on the fringes, the fictional nonhuman animals are ever-present, ‘haunting’ the human world. This claim also applies to the works of contemporary Irish crime writer Tana French, in particular the first and fourth book in her Dublin Murder Squad series, In the Woods (2007) and Broken Harbour (2012). In In the Woods, the question is raised whether the unsolved disappearance of two children in a densely wooded area might have been caused by a large, ‘monstrous’ animal. In Broken Harbour, a family is seemingly threatened by a nonhuman animal that has found its way into the attic of their newly bought home. While initially perceived as potential threats or dangerous predators, this paper will show that the nonhuman animals, which remain invisible in both novels, can be read as haunting reminders of the ecological catastrophe unfolding in twenty-first-century Ireland. Following Avery Gordon’s reading of the ghost as a ‘social figure’, the spectral appearances of the nonhuman animals – which remain unexplained in both cases – point to unresolved acts of ecological violence such as rampant deforestation and the unsustainable politics of development in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years.
Review of Irish Food History: A Companion, by Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman. (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2024), 795 pp., ISBN: 9781900454827, open access.
Just as Irish cultural identity has been historically entwined with the domestic or farm animal, the island’s wildlife has long been a distinct presence in Irish literature. Recent fiction by contemporary writers puts an even more prominent emphasis of the nonhuman as focaliser. In novels and short fiction by authors such as Sheila Armstrong (How to Gut a Fish (2022), Falling Animals (2023)) or Frances Macken (You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here (2020)), among others, we often encounter a perspective or even voice that belongs to a non-human character. These animals native to Ireland, such as seagulls, seals, crows or hares, offer a new viewpoint on the Irish Anthropocene. While not portrayed as having significant agency and not appearing as protagonists, non-human animals reiterate a conflicted nature-culture dichotomy in a distinctly Irish context, while commenting on wildlife’s complicated relationship with human agents in the Irish landscape and its (so-called, but arguably absent) wilderness. Non-human voices not only observe, but actively criticise human interaction with nature by ridiculously displacing human characters, emphasising their ludicrous inadequacy yet simultaneously detrimental interference in natural surroundings.
From St Ciarán’s famous cow whose hide provided the vellum for one of the oldest surviving manuscripts in Irish literature, The Book of the Dun Cow (c.1100), which featured the first printed record of the Cattle Raid of Cooley, central epic of the heroic Ulster Cycle, to nineteenth-century cartoons of simian Irish, to John Connell’s 2018 best-selling memoir, The Cow Book, Irish cultural identity has been closely associated with the animal. In the British imperial imaginary, this association justified representing the Irish as less-than-human, not fully evolved, rationalising centuries of occupation and exploitation, a complicating factor in reclaiming and honouring Ireland’s traditional regard for the nonhuman. This themed issue opens with two contributions that consider Irish-language texts and the role of the nonhuman animal, from mythological tales to the early twentieth century, from the legends that feature in the Fionn cycle, to fiction and poetry by Seán Ó Ríordáin, Patrick Pearse and Pádraic Ó Conaire. Irish literature written in English that represent encounters between human and nonhuman animals—both real and imagined—provides the focus for the rest of the essays here, from the late-nineteenth fiction of Sheridan LeFanu to the twenty-first-century prose of Irish women writers Tana French, Jan Carson and Sheila Armstrong.
From St Ciarán’s famous cow whose hide provided the vellum for one of the oldest surviving manuscripts in Irish literature, The Book of the Dun Cow (c.1100), which featured the first printed record of the Cattle Raid of Cooley, central epic of the heroic Ulster Cycle, to nineteenth-century cartoons of simian Irish, to John Connell’s 2018 best-selling memoir, The Cow Book, Irish cultural identity has been closely associated with the animal. In the British imperial imaginary, this association justified representing the Irish as less-than-human, not fully evolved, rationalising centuries of occupation and exploitation, a complicating factor in reclaiming and honouring Ireland’s traditional regard for the nonhuman. This themed issue opens with two contributions that consider Irish-language texts and the role of the nonhuman animal, from mythological tales to the early twentieth century, from the legends that feature in the Fionn cycle, to fiction and poetry by Seán Ó Ríordáin, Patrick Pearse and Pádraic Ó Conaire. Irish literature written in English that represent encounters between human and nonhuman animals—both real and imagined—provides the focus for the rest of the essays here, from the late-nineteenth fiction of Sheridan LeFanu to the twenty-first-century prose of Irish women writers Tana French, Jan Carson and Sheila Armstrong.
The linking of the nonhuman animal with the animal by Irish writers is something that frequently recurs throughout the Irish literary canon. Animals, particularly in early and mid-twentieth century Irish literature, are often directly placed in connection with the human body, particularly if that body is injured or diseased. It is through certain animals, such as swallows and dogs, that the injured or ill human body can transcend its physical and social restrictions. Animals function, at times, as conduits for the afflicted human body, enabling the individual to transcend their present physical state. Some animals, however, only serve as reminders to the individual of their disease or injury. In early and mid-twentieth century Irish literature, animals often help project the human body into a world that would quickly reject them for being physical othered. The following article examines the connections between animals and humans in the poetry of Seán Ó Ríordáin and in the fiction of Patrick Pearse and Pádraic Ó Conaire. The connections that these writers make challenge the preconceived ideas and expectations society places upon the injured or diseased human body. The implemented disability studies approach provides a method through which these connections frame illnesses and injuries in the context of social function.
Review of Brian Friel’s Models of Influence, by Zosia Kuczyńska (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 278 pp., ISBN: 978-3-031-17905-1, €117.69 (hardback)
Review of The Battle to Control Female Fertility in Modern Ireland, by Mary E. Daly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 348pp., ISBN: 978-1009314879, €32,48 (paperback)
Review of Traditional Medicine in the Irish Literary Revival: The Works of W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory and J.M. Synge, by Holly May Walker-Dunseith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), 228 pp., ISBN: 9783031824586, 111,72€ (hardback)
The Fionn Cycle is a body of texts, lore and traditions dating from the seventh century to modern times and is centered around the hero and warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill and his followers known as the Fianna. Fionn and his Fianna spend a great deal of time in the wilderness and narratives of the Fionn Cycle are a rich source for depictions of nonhuman animals. In this article, the focus is on two narratives from the Fionn Cycle in which nonhuman animals are defamiliarised in ways that show them to be a source of strength and insight to humans. The narrative known as ‘Caoilte and the Animals’ is found to contain an undercurrent of reflections on freedom, captivity and differences between human and nonhuman animals, whilst a version of the Biography of Oisín son of Fionn mac Cumhaill, is read as challenging human exceptionalism and pointing to the intrinsic value of animal experiences.
Review of Narrating Irish Female Development, 1916-2018, by Jane Elizabeth Dougherty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 296 pp., ISBN: 9781399528283, £95 (hardcover)
This article examines the concept of 'self-possession' as crafted by Henry James in his representation of Madame Serena Merle in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and traces how John Banville adapts this characterisation in his 2017 sequel Mrs Osmond. Madame Merle’s self-possession, a carefully crafted public persona that conceals private agency, represents both her survival strategy as a nineteenth-century woman who has transgressed social boundaries and her capacity to function as a kind of author who propels the novel’s central action. Through close textual analysis, this article argues that Madame Merle’s self-possession operates as a dual phenomenon: an outward performance of composed refinement 'for other people' and an inner retention of guarded autonomy. The article then explores how Banville appropriates this template of female self-possession to enliven his iteration of Isabel in Mrs Osmond. This analysis reveals that Banville’s only female protagonist emerges through his adaptation of James’ portrait of female self-possession, suggesting that the template established by Madame Merle remains essential to imagining female autonomy within patriarchal constraints.
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These transforms the novella form into a moral and formal intervention that exposes Ireland’s enduring complicity in the Magdalene Laundries. Through the ethical awakening of Bill Furlong, a working-class man in 1980s Ireland, Keegan stages a confrontation between individual conscience and collective denial. This article argues that the novella operates metaleptically, collapsing the boundary between fiction and reader, to compel ethical recognition through both structure and story. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theories of intervention and gendered power, alongside trauma and narrative theory, the analysis situates Keegan’s novella as a site where literature performs historical work. Keegan’s novella’s compression, moral clarity and refusal of catharsis embody a sustained interrogation of silence, complicity and institutional violence. In this way, Small Things Like These not only reanimates collective memory but demonstrates how the novella form itself can enact ethical and political agency, bridging private conscience and public reckoning. By reconfiguring the boundaries between history and imagination, Keegan reclaims the novella as a mode of resistance, insisting that moral responsibility persists beyond historical closure.
