The extent and quality of Julien Green’s work has earned for him a place in the pantheon of French, and, indeed, world letters. Born in Paris at the very start of the twentieth century to American parents, Green never felt completely at home in France or in the American South

Reviewed by: Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries: Commemoration, Gender, and the Postcolonial Carceral State ed. by Miriam Haughton, Mary McAuliffe and Emily Pine Eamon Maher (bio) Miriam Haughton, Mary McAuliffe and Emily Pine (eds), Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries: Commemoration, Gender, and the Postcolonial Carceral State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), 274 pages. This is a very important addition to the ever-increasing list of academic studies dealing with the dark shadow cast by the presence of the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland and the sad legacy they left in their wake. In their introduction, the editors explain how it is incumbent on Irish society to face up to the reality of what went on behind the walls of these institutions where girls and young women were sent, sometimes for having become pregnant outside of marriage, but often for the simple reason that their parents were deemed incapable of looking after them properly. One can detect the (justifiable) anger of the contributors to this collection at the obvious collusion of Church and state in what some would describe as the unlawful incarceration of more than 10,000 girls and women between the years of 1922 and 1996. As someone who comes from Roscrea where Sean Ross, a Mother and Baby Home, was located, I am well-placed to understand society’s ability to ignore things happening under its nose. I was totally ignorant of the previous function of the abbey before I read Martin Sixsmith’s award-winning book Philomena and saw the powerful film version of the same name. For me, St Anne’s (as it was called when I was growing up) was a much-lauded school for children with disabilities: I never knew it had been a place where unmarried mothers and their babies were sent. Philomena Lee, the heroine of Sixsmith’s book, gave birth in Sean Ross to a son Anthony, who went on to become a highly regarded member of the Reagan administration in the US before his untimely death from AIDS in 1993. Mike (the name given to him by his adoptive parents) travelled to Ireland and visited Sean Ross on more than one occasion in an effort to make contact with his birth mother, but his efforts came to naught when the nuns denied they had any knowledge of Philomena’s whereabouts, whereas they did, in fact, know her address. Such subterfuge is a feature of how the Magdalen (often spelt with an ‘e’ at the end) Laundries and other such institutions operated. The editors rightly argue that the treatment of women in the Laundries was an expression of ‘social attitudes that viewed vulnerable members of [End Page 196] the population as morally suspect, a ‘problem’ which the state, church, and citizenry responded to through mass institutionalization.’ The multidisciplinary approach adopted by the contributors to this volume employs methodological and theoretical lenses ranging from psychology to history, readings of political, artistic and oral testimonies, site-specific dramatic and activist performances, and autobiographical testimonies from those who spent time in the Laundries. The findings of the McAleese report into the operation of the Laundries are described as providing hard evidence that the state had been directly involved in committing a large number of women to them, that it conducted regular inspections of the Laundries under the Factories Act, that it funded some of the Laundries’ operations, that Gardaí returned women who attempted to escape from them. As such, ‘State culpability for the laundry was clearly demonstrated.’ Responding to the McAleese Report in 2013, then Taoiseach Enda Kenny said in a Dáil address: ‘The Magdalen women might have been told that they were washing away a wrong or a sin, but we know now – and to our shame – they were only scrubbing away our nation’s shadow.’ Indeed, the tendency to refer to Laundries offering a refuge to ‘fallen women’ and the idea that the inmates were given an education and some training, are shown to have had little basis in truth. James Smith’s description of the ‘architecture of containment’ embodied in places like industrial schools and Magdalen Laundries, is quoted by many of the contributors in a collection that aspires to be...

raged among Curragh internees, it was said that opinion invariably split three ways – between pro-Germans, pro-British, and Brendan Behan’.2 Ever attentive to the unique standing of Behan among the communities he simultaneously affiliated with and felt exiled from, Reading Brendan Behan wonderfully succeeds in showing that this iconoclastic personality was a major contributor to late-modernist, post-war literature and produced, on the page and on the stage, works of art that were unequivocally his own. Dr Matthew Brown is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Notes 1 Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy (Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1982), p.3. 2 Declan Kiberd, After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), p.25. Renée Fox, Mike Cronin and Brian Ó Conchubhair (eds), Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies (London and NewYork: Routledge, 2021), 502pp. This vastly rich and varied collection of essays supplies a wide-ranging account of the history and evolution of the vibrant academic discipline that is Irish Studies. Divided into seven sections – ‘Overview’, ‘Historicizing Ireland’, ‘Global Ireland’, ‘Identities’, ‘Culture’, ‘Theorizing’, and ‘Legacy’, – each of which has a very useful Introduction, and comprising 37 chapters, it will serve as an excellent reference point for anyone interested in the area. The contributors are a mixture of well-established and emerging figures in the field of Irish Studies. Along with Paige Reynolds’ edited volume, The New Irish Studies (Cambridge University Press) and Peter Lang’s Reimagining Irish Studies for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien, there is strong evidence of a concerted effort during the past 12–18 months to map the genesis, growth and possible future of Irish Studies. The Handbook is the most comprehensive of the three publications and there is a lot to ponder in the 500 or so pages contained between its hardback covers. Time will not allow an in-depth discussion of every contribution, so this review article will concentrate on a few key chapters which it is thought will be of most interest to the readers of Studies.1 Studies • volume 110 • number 439 362 Autumn 2021: Book Reviews Beginning with a brief discussion of the crash that came in the wake of the Celtic Tiger in 2008, the editors outline how the policy of austerity forced Irish Studies to turn outward, ‘resituating its scrutiny of the island in wider political, historical, theoretical, and ecological concerns’, all of which are traced in the book. With the massive social changes that have taken hold in Irish society in the past few decades, including the collapse of the moral authority of the Catholic church, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the legalisation of contraception, divorce and same-sex marriage, as well as of abortion in clearly defined circumstances, greater access to education and enhanced material prosperity, people have moved away from some of the traditional tropes associated with Ireland. As the editors note: ‘it became clear that Irish Studies needed to expand its critical networks in order to contextualize and engage with such social and political reforms’. They sum up their aims in the following manner: ‘As a body, this collection imagines how Irish Studies might thrive in the uncertain political, ecological, epidemiological, and academic future we currently face and begins a conversation about how we understand and reconstitute the value of our disciplinary inquiry as this future comes ever closer’. The remit could not be more ambitious, but it is achieved in large part. The essays were written and collated at a time when the Covid-19 virus had brought the world to a virtual standstill and when the traditional activities associated with travel, holidays abroad, trade/employment and, most importantly, people’s health, were under serious threat. The myth that Ireland is full of ‘normal people’, as the title of Sally Rooney’s best-selling novel and blockbuster television series might suggest, was debunked by Irish Studies scholarship, which emphasised just how diverse and complex Irish identity is. Scholars sought to raise awareness, for example, of the callous mistreatment of our immigrant community, many of whom find themselves in direct provision and deprived of the right...

The Poetics of Place in George Moore and John McGahern Eamon Maher Introduction This essay seeks to sketch out the way in which two, what might be called ‘canonical’, Irish writers, George Moore (1852–1933) and John McGahern (1934–2006), reveal comparable, though contrasting, sensibility to place. What is offered is a close textual reading of one short story by each author. There is no desire to suggest a direct influence by one on the other. George Moore was a prominent fin de siècle writer who died just a year before John McGahern’s birth. McGahern started publishing in the 1960s and continued until his death in 2006, by which time he was accepted as ‘the foremost prose writer now in Ireland’ by no less an authority than Declan Kiberd.1 Moore was the son of a Catholic landlord, who was also a member of parliament. This privileged background allowed him to indulge his burgeoning interest in art by spending a few years in Paris. While there he became friendly with some of the main Impressionist painters of the time, most notably Manet, Renoir and Degas, as well as with a plethora of literary figures, including Édouard Dujardin (the writer credited with first employing the stream of consciousness technique) and Théophile Gautier. Moore also befriended the most notable Naturalist writer of the nineteenth century, Émile Zola, for whom he did invaluable work by ensuring that English translations of his work were available in the Anglo-Saxon world.2 He would meet a number of the artistic luminaries who congregated regularlyintheNouvellesAthènes,whichisdescribedlovinglyinConfessions of a Young Man: What is the ‘Nouvelles Athènes’? He who would know anything of my life must know something of the academy of the fine arts. Not the official stupidity you read of in the daily papers, but the real French academy, the café. The ‘Nouvelles Athènes’ is a café on the Place Pigalle. Ah! The morning idlenesses and the long evenings when life was but a summer illusion, the grey moonlight on the Place where we Studies • volume 109 • number 436 400 used to stand on the pavements, the shutters clanging up behind us, loath to separate, thinking of what we had left said, and how much better we might have enforced our arguments.3 Moore’s sensitivity to place is well conveyed in these lines, which express something of the excitement of café culture in the Paris of the 1870s. He has the particular gift of transporting the reader to the unique atmosphere of that particular café, letting them experience the smoke curling about the figures crouched around a table, hear the writers and artists animatedly propounding their latest theories, smell the scent of wine and absinthe on their breath, sense the excitement of being at the epicentre of world culture at this time. Moore was very much a cosmopolitan figure, someone who was more comfortable in Paris or London than he was in his native Mayo. That said, he was also sensitive to the beauty of the area in which he spent his formative years, a sensitivity that is most apparent in a novel such as The Lake (1905), in which he depicts the obsession of the young parish priest Oliver Gogarty with a local teacher Nora Glynn, who has become pregnant outside of wedlock. When she refuses to follow the path he suggests, he denounces her from the pulpit, thus prompting her departure from the area. Afterwards, he regrets his action and undergoes a catharsis that sees him turn his back on the priesthood and move abroad to make a new life for himself. The opening lines of the novel reveal a lyrical, almost pantheistic fascination with nature as he contemplates Lake Carra: It was one of those enticing days at the beginning of May when white clouds are drawn about the earth like curtains. The lake lay like a mirror that somebody had breathed upon, the brown islands showing through the mist faintly, with gray shadows falling into the water, blurred at the edges. The ducks were talking in the reeds, the reeds themselves were talking, and the water lapping softly about the smooth limestone shingle. But there...

Reviewed by: Oscar Wilde and Contemporary Irish Drama: Learning to be Oscar’s Contemporary by Graham Price Eamon Maher Oscar Wilde and Contemporary Irish Drama: Learning to be Oscar’s Contemporary, by Graham Price (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 248 p., paperback, $59.99) Oscar Wilde is undoubtedly a literary figure of high standing, particularly in the area of dramatic production. That he should continue to exert an influence on contemporary Irish playwrights will not come as a surprise to many. However, what Graham Price achieves in this impressive monograph is to trace this influence on some of the best-known twentieth-century Irish playwrights: Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy, Frank McGuinness, and Tom Murphy. Such an undertaking is hugely ambitious, but then Price adds to his task by including a section on twenty-first-century writers Martin McDonagh and Mark O’Halloran, which was not a particularly judicious decision in the opinion of this reviewer. The Introduction attempts to justify the choice of subject and begins with a discussion of the exclusion of Wilde from The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) by the editors Seamus Deane and Christopher Murray on the premise that he was not really “an important Irish writer.” The irony of this position is not lost on Price, who detects a clear “trend towards Wildeanism” in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, arguably the best-known play by one of the founders of Field Day, Brian Friel. Price attributes some of the rehabilitation of Wilde as an Irish writer to the work of Declan Kiberd, who in one particular essay contended that Wilde’s “aesthetic of lying,” among other characteristics, “proved to be highly influential for colonial and postcolonial writers in Ireland in the twentieth century.” Kiberd also saw Wilde as a committed Irish nationalist, “whose work aims to deconstruct essentialist, British-inspired notions of Irish weakness and British strength.” Other notable features of Wilde’s dramaturgy according to Price include “a profound commitment to radicalism and subversion”; his vision of the role of the artist “as being focused on making the world rather than just imitating it in a realistic mode”; and his particular form of dandyism, which constitutes “an important precursor of the doctrine of camp.” The major obstacle Price needed to overcome was to demonstrate a lineage from Wilde through five twentieth-century playwrights and right up to some practitioners associated more closely with the twenty-first century. Would this be achieved through intertextuality, tracing the “anxiety of influence,” the thematic choices, or stylistic similarities? The answer seems to be through a combination [End Page 151] of all of these, a gargantuan undertaking. It may have been wiser for Price to concentrate on just two comparators, Friel and McGuinness, as these chapters are where the analysis is most surefooted. One has to admire the mountain of primary and secondary material he was required to read in order to cover such a large canvas. To his credit, he rises admirably to the challenge he sets himself and is clearly very knowledgeable about the eight writers he discusses. But the focus is not always as tight as it might be, and the result is an inevitable drop in intensity at various points. This unevenness may also be attributable to the fact that the Wildean influence is not always apparent, and one senses occasionally that the methodology has been retrofitted to suit the thesis that Price is anxious to prove. The chapter on Frank McGuinness works well precisely because there is a shared fascination with “liminality and undecidability in relation to life, subjectivity and reality in general” in the work and lives of the two writers. Price attributes this in part to McGuinness’s Donegal roots. He quotes from an interview with Tony Roche in which McGuinness admitted: “I never found a sense of place an easy thing to grasp and I certainly never found it an easy thing to celebrate. I’m not at ease anywhere. But I have no doubt where I absolutely belong and where I come from, and that is Donegal.” Price sees a real shared struggle in coming to terms with “home” in both writers. Wilde was someone who did not...

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This chapter takes a number of priests with a public profile and examines the extent to which they are prophetic voices or complicit functionaries. Choosing the French priest-writer Jean Sulivan (1913-1980) as a comparator, Eamon Maher examines the published work of Joseph Dunn, Vincent Twomey, Mark Patrick Hederman and Brendan Hoban, before concluding that they all share the prophetic tendency of raising uncomfortable and often unpopular issues while remaining within the institution. He further argues that being so closely aligned to the Church makes it difficult, and professionally dangerous, for priests to criticise certain practices within the institution. However, while retaining a huge love of, and devotion to, the main tenets of Catholicism, these men nevertheless feel obliged to point out things that are going wrong, even when expressing such views can often involve them in conflict with their superiors at home and in Rome.