For Information...

The following book review appeared in the Irish Emigrant email
newsletter last week.

(My own review of Chrystel's book is in preparation)

P.O'S.


THE IE BOOK REVIEW
_______________________________________________________________________
Editor: Pauline Ferrie March, 1999 Issue No.44
=======================================================================

This monthly supplement to the Irish Emigrant reviews books recently
published in Ireland, and those published overseas which have an Irish
theme. Back issues are on our WWW pages

THE POLITICS OF SEXUAL MORALITY IN IRELAND by CHRYSTEL HUG
- - In an expansion of her doctoral thesis, Chrystel Hug examines the
four areas of Divorce, Contraception, Abortion and Homosexuality,
focusing in particular on the changes which have come about over the
last 20 years. With each topic she draws in the historical
background since the foundation of the State, often a legacy from
British legislation, and traces the gradual change in public
perception and governmental attitudes reached through a series of
bills and referenda. A number of personalities are highlighted as
having been instrumental in this change, not least former President
Mary Robinson, both in her capacity as a lawyer and as Head of State.
Ms Hug quotes Ms Robinson's words on the "X" case, in which a
14-year-old victim of rape was refused leave to travel to Britain for
an abortion; while acknowledging that as President she had no role to
play in the issue, she did exhort the people of Ireland to "face up
to and look squarely and to say this is a problem we have got to
resolve". Ms Robinson was also closely associated with another
personality, Senator David Norris, in his campaign to decriminalise
homosexual acts between consenting adults and to gain equality-based
legislation with regard to both homosexuals and heterosexuals. Ms
Hug has charted a clear path through the labyrinth of referenda,
opinion polls, ecclesiastical pronouncements and legislation
regarding the four categories covered in her work.
(Macmillan, ISBN 0-333-66217-2, pp284, IR16.99)


- --
Patrick O'Sullivan

[The following book review has been brought to our attention.

I know it is considered bad form to defend yourself against book
reviewers. But I happen to think that my essay on 'The Irish joke' is
one of the funniest things I have ever written.

Maybe I don't understand Boston...

Or Boston humour...

P.O'S.]


Book Review of Patrick O'Sullivan, ed., The Creative Migrant, Volume 3
of The Irish World Wide, Leicester University Press, 1994, 1997

Title: A Scholarly Collection Worthy of Any Respectable Library

Summary: This book is volume three in the Irish World Wide Series, a
most scholarly collection dealing with various aspects of Irish
migration, and presents essays by ten scholars examining the connections
between migration and artistic activity. Much of it is heavy reading
indeed, as heavy as the price of the book which all but reserves it for
libraries. Any respectable library should be stocking the entire series.


Source: Boston Irish Reporter; Ethnic News Watch
Date: 01-AUG-1994
Citation Information: V.5; N.8; p. 11
Author(s): Kenny, Herbert A.
Document Type: Book review


A Scholarly Collection Worthy of Any Respectable Library


This book is volume three in the Irish World Wide Series, a most
scholarly collection dealing with various aspects of Irish migration,
and presents essays by ten scholars examining the connections between
migration and artistic activity. Much of it is heavy reading indeed, as
heavy as the price of the book which all but reserves it for libraries.
Any respectable library should be stocking the entire series.
In his introduction, Patrick O'Sullivan writes that he has "not...
relentlessly pursued the obvious." He hasn't and it adds to the charm of
the book which is a treasure trove of information and speculations. At
the beginning of the book we find a study of Henry David Thoreau and the
Irish, while the book closes with an essay on Irish dance and another on
Irish music. Thoreau was a once repelled by the Irish immigrants around
him and attracted to them. The essay will make a reader want to return
to Walden although much of the Irish references are in Thoreau's
Journal.

One of the finest studies in the book is by Owen Dudley Edwards of
Edinburgh University who takes as his title, "The Stage Irish." To tell
the reader at the beginning that his approach will be idiosyncratic,
Edwards writes, "The most successful form of stage Irishry is that which
is taken for what it mimics. Accordingly orthodox academic Hibernian
scholarship as conventionally presented is stage Irishry, and its
camouflage succeeds by becoming also the reader's. Its consumption is
gratifying to all parties. Truth is the casualty." He softens the sting
of that by writing, "Am not I, the writer, the first stage Irish person
under your scrutiny in this investigation?"

He gives us the first display of wit in the book, wit we expect from the
Irish. Patrick O'Sullivan, whose scholarship is immense writes the essay
on "The Irish Joke," with exemplary historical insights and no humor
whatsoever. I would like to read Edwards on the Irish joke.

"We will start," Edwards writes, "with dialogue which seems easier (and
is not, since in Yeat's and Wilde's hands body and soul, mask and face,
are in dialogue). And we are also starting with the assumption that a
playwright in composition is in a condition of stage Irishry, whether
Brendan Behan (1923-64) on the booze in front of his toadies or
television-inquisitors, or Samuel Beckett (1906-91) in his intangibility
and innominability, whether Wilde and Shaw let loose as aesthetic
evangels in Philistine London (`he was Oscar the comic," Shaw
(1856-1950) recalled in 1950, I was G.B.S. the clown.'), or the
secretive consumptive, John Millington Synge (1871-1909) alone in his
Connaught bedroom listening through the crack in the floor to the ebb
and flow of discourse, the complexities of syntax and speech-patterns,
in the innocent gathering of post-Gaelic peasants underneath."

Edwards regards as the first "Irish" playwright, the consumptive George
Farquhar, author of "The Beaux' Stratagem," but brings into discussion
Congreve, Sheridan, Goldsmith, James Joyce and Brian O'Nolan, as well as
Wilde and Shaw. By ridiculing urban sophistication and praising the
provinces, the early Irish playwrights came as close as they could to
ridiculing English society as patently as Shaw and Wilde. The richness
of the essay, like that of so many of these studies, could prompt an
essay of comment.

Indeed, the study of Patrick J. Quinlivan of the state of Fenian history
should prompt a score of studies of neglected area. "Many English
historians," Quinlivan writes from his base at United World College of
Adriatic, Duino, Italy, "have taken their revenge on the fenians by
writing them out of their history books. The editors of the Cambridge
History of English Literature follow the same line in stating that
`fenianism was unconnected with literary effort." The growth of Anglo-
Irish studies and in world-wide Irish history, heritage and identity has
brought new life to the study of fenianism. Local history projects begin
to show the extent of fenianism but there is still a lot to be done and
many mysteries to be investigated."

Quinlivan takes as his point of departure the Clerkenwell Explosion in
which the fenians sought to deliver prisoners from the Clerkenwell
Prison. The history books, he writes, are filled with misinformation on
the subject, or dismiss it in a footnote, yet Gladstone "declared on
more than one occasion that the Clerkenwell Explosion was one cause of
his changing his mind about the `Irish Question.'" Quinlivan then goes
on to list error after error in a variety of publications to an extent
that a reader's faith in English journalism and scholarship would be
shaken. One example: When the name and pseudonym of a British secret
agent were at last made public only one of the nine leading newspapers
had both names right. The good gray Times had both wrong. The fact that
the Fenians were a secret organization with frequent changes of names
and addresses makes the historian's task difficult, to say nothing of
British reluctance to release pertinent papers. He entitles his essay,
"Hunting the Fenians: Problems in the Historiography of a Secret
Organization."

The article on "The Influence of Thomas Moore," concentrates on his
popularity in Australia where Frank Malloy, the author, boasts there is
a better statue of him than the celebrated one of him beside Trinity
College in Dublin. The songs and poems of Moore ere and remain popular
in Australia i the homes of Irish ancestry, rich and poor. His poems
influenced all sorts of verses in Australian newspapers, and helped
Australians hold on to their Irishness.

The essay on Irish dancing is written by John P. Cullinane who is a
plant scientist at University College Cork but also a qualified Irish
Dancing Master who had judged Irish dancing competitions in seven
countries on three continents and has been gathering materials for a
world-wide history of Irish dancing.

Dancing was always one feature of the Irish feis and continues to be
whenever one is held. But Irish dancing, Cullinane writes, has gone
indoors in England and elsewhere because the weather is likely to be too
chancy. "This isolation of the dancing from the other aspects of the
culture is regrettable."

Cullinane has a world view of Irish dancing, and is eloquent on the
effect Irish clog and step dancing had on the American stage through
such stars as George M. Cohan and Jimmy Cagney among others. The extend
of Irish stepdancing worldwide and the intensity of its popularity will
surprise most readers.

Here's an interesting footnote: "The fastest feet in the world belong to
Michael Flatley of Chicago, a qualified Irish dancing teacher and the
first North American to win a World championship in Irish Dancing. He is
recorded in the Guinness Book of Records as performing 28 beats per
second. He is described as the world's fastest tap dancer who retains
his love for Irish dance tradition but giving it a modern day form.

Other essays touch on science, music, film, and story telling, each of
general as well as scholarly interest. A worthy addition to a worthy
series.


Copyright © 1994, Boston Irish Reporter.


- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
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Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England