From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

At the CAIS Conference I note a number of papers of special interest to
the Ir-D list...

Jason King (University College Cork) continues his interesting
construction/discovery of counter-narratives: "Prefiguring the
'Peaceable Kingdom': The Construction of Counter-Revolutionary Sentiment
in Narratives of Return to Ireland from British North America in the
early Nineteenth Century"

Katia Grubisic (University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada):
"Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of a 'few acres of bog around the house
at home': Representations of America in Tom Murphy's Conversations on a
Homecoming"

An interesting section on Teaching Ireland includes
John Donahue (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada): "Teaching Irish
to the World"
Brian Rainey (University of Regina, Canada): "Reading Ireland in
Saskatchewan"

Good stuff.

Our good wishes to CAIS for a happy and prosperous conference.

P.O'S.

Forwarded on behalf of Jean Talman...

- -----Original Message-----
From: Jean Talman
jean.talman[at]utoronto.ca
Subject: CAIS Conference 2003


Dear CAIS members and friends

The programme for the 2003 conference at the University of New
Brunswick, Fredericton, May 21-24 is now available at:

http://www.wlu.ca/~wwweng/faculty/jwright/cais-2003.htm

Looking forward to seeing you there.
Jean

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Over the past month I have put a lot of time into understanding and
solving problems created for the Irish-Diaspora list by various Spam
Prevention schemes. I felt that it was worth a bit of my time, just so
that I could understand the problems. I don't think I am going to do
this again.

Examples... In one place a government organisation put in place Spam
Prevention which, left to its own devices, blacklisted everything coming
from bradford.ac.uk. In another place - repeating David Rose's
experience - a university blocked all messages coming from Blueyonder,
the commercial Internet Service Provider I use. Because Spam had once
come from another Blueyonder user. And so on...

So... Time was used... understanding the specific problem, finding a
way of contacting the originators of the problem (see above, blocked
emails...), negotiating with them. And persuading them to provide a
solution. I have to say that I have been a bit annoyed by the
complacency of those who have caused the problems. They do not seem to
realise that they are simply one of many, causing many problems.

I don't think I can be expected to go through this process with every
government organisation, university and ISP on the planet. It has to be
a task for individual Irish-Diaspora list members - please check your
organisation's Spam Protection system and plans, and make sure that the
messages you want to receive can get through.

Paddy



From: D.C. Rose
oscholars[at]netscape.net
Subject: Spam cure as disease


Dear Paddy,

A heartfelt hear hear to your message to the list. Every month my
encyclical to subscribers to The Oscholars has been bounced by some
postmasters and I have to send postcards! This included one system at
an American university that bounced anything sent through eircom (no
Irish need apply, how are ye?)

The trouble is, the offenders won't read your note because that too will
have bounced.

Yours in solidarity.

David

THE OSCHOLARS
http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/oscholars

From: Carmel McCaffrey
Subject: Re: Ir-D A New Hazard: Spam Prevention 3

Paddy,
I have something to do add to this discussion which might be of help to
others on the list. I am one of the 'culprits' or at least I am at one
of the Unversites you mentioned in your e-mail. Hopkins is blocking all

kings of incoming mail - I just learned that e-mail sent to me from a
friend at a German University has been blocked for the past month and I
did not know. So I would suggest that others check with their
institutions to find out what is being blocked because of the fear of
Spam - and it's not the Monty Python type!

Granted the Spam situation is getting out of control - AOL reckons that
now 80% of mail going through their system is now spam - but wholescale
blocking does not seem be a sensible solution either.


Carmel

irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk wrote:

>>From Email Patrick O'Sullivan
>
>Over the past month I have put a lot of time into understanding and
>solving problems created for the Irish-Diaspora list by various Spam
>Prevention schemes. I felt that it was worth a bit of my time, just so

>that I could understand the problems. I don't think I am going to do
>this again.
>
>Examples... In one place a government organisation put in place Spam
>Prevention which, left to its own devices, blacklisted everything
>coming from bradford.ac.uk. In another place - repeating David Rose's
>experience - a university blocked all messages coming from Blueyonder,
>the commercial Internet Service Provider I use. Because Spam had once
>come from another Blueyonder user. And so on...
>
>So... Time was used... understanding the specific problem, finding a
>way of contacting the originators of the problem (see above, blocked
>emails...), negotiating with them. And persuading them to provide a
>solution. I have to say that I have been a bit annoyed by the
>complacency of those who have caused the problems. They do not seem to

>realise that they are simply one of many, causing many problems.
>
>I don't think I can be expected to go through this process with every
>government organisation, university and ISP on the planet. It has to
>be a task for individual Irish-Diaspora list members - please check
>your organisation's Spam Protection system and plans, and make sure
>that the messages you want to receive can get through.
>
>Paddy
>

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

This Call for Papers will chime with the interests of a number of Ir-D
members. Please distribute widely.

P.O'S.


CALL FOR PAPERS - Spring 2004 Issue

The Spring 2004 issue of Éire-Ireland, a journal of the Irish American
Cultural Institute, will be devoted to a broad consideration of Unionist
identities in modern Ireland from 1780 to the present. The Guest Editor
for this special issue is Professor Sean Farrell of the College of St.
Rose. His approach to the subject is wide, extending from the Peep o'
Day Boys and the Orangemen of the late eighteenth century through the
loyalist and Unionist groups and parties of the present time, and
embracing both southern and northern Unionism as well as nationalist and
British reactions to them.

The Irish American Cultural Institute encourages submissions
representing literary or visual, as well as historical responses to the
topic of Unionism. The deadline for the receipt of contributions to
this issue is October 15, 2003, but Professor Farrell would like to hear
from potential contributors as soon as possible. His mailing address
is:

Professor Sean Farrell
Department of History and Political Science
College of St. Rose
432 Western Ave
Albany, NY 12203
Email
farrells[at]strose.edu

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

It has been brought to our attention that Eire-Ireland has added the TOC
for its Spring/Summer 2003 issue to its website:
http://www.iaci-usa.org/ei_sp03.html

I have pasted in, below, the TOC. There is further information on the
web site - including a Call for Papers for the next volume, which I will
pass on as a separate email.

P.O'S.


Éire-Ireland Volume 38 Issue 1/2
2003 Spring/Summer Issue to be released in May

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Language and Identity in Twentieth-Century Ireland
by Maria Tymoczko and Colin Ireland

?We Must Learn Where We Live?: Language, Identity, and the Colonial
Condition in Brian Friel?s Translations
by Maureen S.G. Hawkins

An Béal Bocht: Mouthing Off at National Identity
by Sarah E. McKibben

The Shock of the Old: Translating Early Irish Poetry into Modern Irish
by Kaarina Hollo

One Language, Two Tongues: George Fitzmaurice?s Use of Hiberno-English
Dialect
by Donald McNamara

Regional Roots: The BBC and Poetry in Northern Ireland
by Heather Clark

Translating Ireland Back into Éire: Gael Linn and Film Making in Irish
by Jerry White

Portrait of a Mythographer: Discourses of Identity in the Work of Father
James McDyer
by E. Moore Quinn

Language, Monuments, and the Politics of Memory in Quebec and Ireland
by Kathleen O?Brien

Faultlines, Limits, Transgressions: A Theme-Cluster in Late
Twentieth-Century Irish Poetry
by Robert Welch

Seal sa Domhan Thoir: Sojourn in the Eastern World
by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

One of the free items currently at the London Review of Books web site
is this review of Ciaran Carson's version of Dante... Hybridity, a
translator's life for me...

P.O'S.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n09/reyn03_.html

Jamming up the Flax Machine
Matthew Reynolds

The 'Inferno' of Dante Alighieri: A New Translation by Ciaran Carson |
Granta, 296 pp, £14.99

From: "William Mulligan Jr."
To:
Subject: Irish Diaspora Course

In our Spring 2004 term I'll be teaching a course on the Irish
Diaspora for the first time. I plan to do a lot of the preparation this
summer. I intend to use Andy Bienberg's anthology as a text and Paddy's
"The Irish World Wide: as a library reserve reading. I would like to put
together a dozen or so articles or book chapters as additional reading
and ask the list for suggestions. A number Of people have already been
helpful in pointing me towards useful items, for which I am grateful.

Bill Mulligan

William H. Mulligan, Jr.
Professor of History
Murray State University

From: "Thomas J. Archdeacon"
To:
Subject: Irish Diaspora

Prof. Malcolm:

I think many of us would love simply to see your syllabus. Would you be
willing to share it with the list, perhaps through the Ir-D website?

Tom Archdeacon

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

For information.

P.O'S.


Places of transformation: building monuments from water and stone in the
Neolithic of the Irish Sea

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, March 2003, vol.
9, no. 1, pp. 1-20(20)

Fowler C. [1]; Cummings V. [2]

[1] University of Manchester email: Chris.Fowler[at]Man.ac.uk [2] Cardiff
University email: CummingsVM[at]Cardiff.ac.uk

Abstract:

Using the Irish Sea area as a case-study, we argue that both sites and
landscapes can be understood as containing a series of components
procured from the landscape and from human, animal, and object bodies.
These components were organized in a way that commented on and related
to specific cultural relationships between these different locations and
through the substances found within them. This idea is explored by
examining Neolithic monuments, material culture, and natural materials
in southwest Wales, northwest Wales, the Isle of Man, and southwest
Scotland. We trace some metaphorical schemes which were integral to
Neolithic activity in this part of the Irish Sea. In particular, we
highlight the metaphorical connections between water and stone in places
associated with transformation, particularly the repeated transformation
of human bodies. We suggest that the series of associations present in
the Neolithic were not invested with a uniform meaning but, instead,
were polyvalent, subject to conflicting interpretations, contextually
specific and variable through both space and time. The relationship
between these elements was therefore dependent on the contexts of their
association. Nevertheless, the association of water and stone can be
found repeatedly throughout the Neolithic world and may have been the
medium of a powerful trope within broader conceptions of the world. This
article is intended as a preliminary consideration of these issues
(particularly the links between stone, mountains, water, quartz, shell,
and human remains) and is offered as a thinking-point for ongoing
research in this area.



Language: English Document Type: Research article ISSN: 1359-0987

SICI (online): 1359-098791120




Publisher: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Royal
Anthropological Institute

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

For information.

P.O'S.


Journal of Youth Studies
Publisher: Carfax Publishing Company, part of the Taylor & Francis
Group
Issue: Volume 5, Number 4/December 01, 2002
Pages: 375 - 389

The Road to Fame and Fortune: Insights on the Career Paths of Young
Irish Professional Footballers in England

Ann Bourke

Abstract:

In the minds of many Irish youngsters, a career in professional football
with one of the leading teams in England (Arsenal, Manchester United,
Liverpool or Leeds United) is a dream that may never be realized. The
present paper (drawing on a recently completed study) details the career
paths of those who have spent time with an English club during the
15-year period 1984-1999. The aims of the research endeavour were to
identify the reasons why many Irish youngsters opt for a career in
professional football, and do so in England. While the theory of career
decision making and development is pertinent to the topic, there is
little evidence of its application among the participants in the study.
Study findings reveal that the majority of players surveyed decided on a
career in football because they loved the game, and sought a move to an
English club for career enhancement reasons and possible financial
rewards. Less than one-half of the study participants sought career
guidance while attending secondary school, and aspiring professional
footballers do not undertake any preparation prior to making the move to
England. Given the lack of preparedness, it is not surprising that many
encounter difficulties during their first year in England--should the
'information gap' be bridged, perhaps some players might seek
alternative routes to a professional football career, and those who do
might have a better chance of 'success'.

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

For information.

P.O'S.


Social Science & Medicine
Volume 56, Issue 9 , May 2003, Pages 1973-1986

Reproduction Gone Awry

Antiabortion positions and young women's life plans in contemporary
Ireland

Laury Oaks,

Women's Studies Program, University of California, 4701 South Hall,
Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA

Accepted 30 May 2002. ; Available online 1 October 2002.

Abstract
At a critical time when Ireland's abortion ban faces legal challenges
and the number of women obtaining abortions abroad each year continues
to climb, some antiabortion advocates have turned their attention toward
the social factors that influence women's abortion decision-making.
Through an analysis of articles carried in the Irish mainstream and
Catholic presses, this article examines how antiabortion advocates since
the late 1990s have promoted an "antiabortion, pro-motherhood" message
in response to trends that they identify as indicating that Irish
reproduction has "gone awry". Antiabortion activists have focused in
particular on the life plans of young, middle-class, career-oriented
women, many of whom have benefited from increased employment
opportunities within Ireland. These women are more likely than young
women in past generations to postpone childbearing or opt for abortion
in the face of an unwanted pregnancy, and thus, symbolize for
antiabortion advocates the devaluation of a "traditional" Irish culture
centered on the privileging of motherhood and married family life. This
article examines antiabortion ideologies deployed around motherhood,
work, and childcare, and argues that antiabortion advocates'
"pro-motherhood" campaign fails to adequately respond to the changing
realities of young, middle-class Irish women's life opportunities and
expectations.

Author Keywords: Abortion; Motherhood; Reproductive decision-making;
Women's workforce participation; Ireland

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan


The International Journal of English Studies is based at the University
of Murcia, Spain. Basic information at...

http://www.um.es/engphil/nueva/id22.htm

The recently published IJES, Volume 2, Number 2, 2002 was a special
issue on 'Irish Studies Today', edited by Keith Gregor of the University
of Murcia. I have pasted in, below, the Table of Contents.

I am not able to analyse this collection in great detail. But Keith
Gregor is to be congratulated on a nice piece of work - very much within
mainland Europe's 'philologia' tradition, a reasonable number of
well-known names, plus some very able scholars whose names are new to
me. The specialists - on for example The Bell, Friel, Lavin - will find
items that spark interest. Some of the titles do hide their themes from
the casual observer - Aida Diaz Bild is, of course, writing about
Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (and how very quickly this text has
become much analysed....). Moynagh Sullivan writes about Eavan Boland.
And Rosa Gonzalez Casademont's article is a very confident study of the
place of Ford's The Quiet Man in world understanding of 'the Irish'.

This may be an over-reading of Keith Gregor's collection, but... It
sems to me that the collectiuon can cumulatively be read as revealing
mainland Europe's vision of 'Irish Studies Today'. On that note I do
have to draw attention to the point made in the Editor's Preface - how
very much that vision is shaped by the decades of conflict in Northern
Ireland.

P.O'S.

IJES, Volume 2, Number 2, 2002
Irish Studies Today
Issue Editor: Keith Gregor

Table of Contents


PREFACE
KEITH GREGOR


ARTICLES:

DAVID PIERCE
«Cultural Nationalism and the Irish Literary Revival

MALCOLM BALLIN
«Transitions in Irish Miscellanies between 1923 and 1940:
The Irish Statesman and The Bell

TAMARA BENITO DE LA IGLESIA
«Born into the Troubles: Deirdre Madden?s Hidden Symptoms

AÍDA DÍAZ BILD
«Reading in the Dark: the Transcendence of Political Reality through
Art

ROSA GONZÁLEZ CASADEMONT
«Ireland on Screen. A View from Spain

MIREIA ARAGAY
«Ireland, Nostalgia and Globalisation: Brian Friel?s Dancing at Lughnasa

on Stage and Screen

SPURGEON THOMPSON
«Returning the Gaze: Culture and the Politics of Surveillance in
Ireland

MARIE ARNDT
«Narratives of Internal Exile in Mary Lavin?s Short Stories

MOYNAGH SULLIVAN
«I am, therefore I?m not (Woman)


BOOK REVIEWS

Elizabeth Butler Cullingford (2001). Ireland?s Others: Gender and
Ethnicity in Irish
Literature and Popular Culture. Cork: Cork University Press in
association with Field Day.
Reviewed by SPURGEON THOMPSON.

Inés Praga Terente (Ed.)(2002). Irlanda ante un nuevo milenio. Burgos:
Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses. Reviewed by KEITH GREGOR


ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Subject: RE: Ir-D Irish Diaspora Course
From: "Murray, Edmundo"

Dear Bill,

- - McKenna, Patrick, 'Irish Migration to Argentina', in: Patrick
O'Sullivan (ed.) 'Patterns of Migration', Vol. 1 of The Irish World
Wide, History, Heritage & Identity (London: Leicester University Press,
1997).

As an introduction to the Irish in Argentina, Pat McKenna's article in
The Irish Worldwide may be complemented with his more recent IRISH
EMIGRATION TO ARGENTINA: A DIFFERENT MODEL, which is available online in
the web site of the Irish Centre for Migration Studies
(http://migration.ucc.ie/).

In the Irish Diaspora Studies in Argentina web site
(http://mypage.bluewin.ch/emurray/) there is an updated bibliography on
this subject.

Regards,

Edmundo Murray
Université de Genève
Maison Rouge
1261 Burtigny Switzerland
+41 22 739 5049
edmundo_murray[at]hotmail.com
Irish Diaspora Studies in Argentina: http://mypage.bluewin.ch/emurray

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

The text of this book is freely available on the University of
California Press web site.

P.O'S.


The Forgotten Hermitage of Skellig Michael

Walter W. Horn, Jenny White Marshall, and Grellan D. Rourke

Suggested citation:
Horn, Walter, Jenny White Marshall, and Grellan D. Rourke The Forgotten
Hermitage of Skellig Michael. Berkeley : University of California Press,
1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1d5nb0gb/

Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
I- The Occupancy and Abandonment of the Island
II- Pilgrims and Explorers
III- The Ascent of the South Peak
IV- The Enigma of the Hermit's Dwelling
V- The Date of the Hermitage
VI- The Forgotten Hermitage
Appendix- On the Origin of the Celtic Cross: A New Interpretation
Bibliography

From: Elizabeth Malcolm
Subject: Re: Ir-D Irish Diaspora Course

Dear Bill,

I teach a course here on the Irish abroad, covering USA, Britain and
Australia, at 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate level. For students
doing the course I've prepared a pack of major articles and book
chapters, plus reading lists, that runs to nearly 350 pages. If you'd
like a copy of that, please give me your full postal address and I'll
send it snail mail - which will take weeks probably, but hopefully
will arrive before your spring 2004!

Elizabeth Malcolm
Melbourne


>From: "William Mulligan Jr."
>To:
>Subject: Irish Diaspora Course
>
> In our Spring 2004 term I'll be teaching a course on the Irish
>Diaspora for the first time. I plan to do a lot of the preparation this

>summer. I intend to use Andy Bienberg's anthology as a text and Paddy's

>"The Irish World Wide: as a library reserve reading. I would like to
>put together a dozen or so articles or book chapters as additional
>reading and ask the list for suggestions. A number Of people have
>already been helpful in pointing me towards useful items, for which I
>am grateful.
>
>Bill Mulligan

Professor Elizabeth Malcolm Tel: +61-3-8344 3924
Department of History Fax: +61-3-8344 7894
University of Melbourne email: e.malcolm[at]unimelb.edu.au
Parkville, Victoria
Australia 3010

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

This is forwarded to the Irish-Diaspora list as a 'News of Ir-D Members'
item...

P.O'S.




From: "Maureen E Mulvihill"
Subject: The 'Ephelia' Ashgate, published April, 2003


14 May 2003 (apologies for cross-listing)


NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT,
of Interest to Scholars of Attribution, Book History, Rare Books,
Early-modern Englishwomen Writers, & l7thC English Poetry.


'EPHELIA'
Introduced & Selected by Maureen E. Mulvihill
Ashgate Publishing Ltd. - April, 2003
Hants, England - Burlington, Vermont
ISBN 0 7546 0839 5 - Format: 10" x 7 1/2"
Navy Blue boards with embossed device; gold stamp
Cloth. 40 pounds. US$70.


This handsome new edition of the rare 'Ephelia' texts gathers all of the
poet's significant writings, and discusses her poetry, songs, and
"damn'd" play against the standing attribution -- Mary Villiers, later
Stuart, Duchess of Richmond & Lennox (1622-1684).

The Villiers attribution (Mulvihill, 1995 -) is now canonical record in
several authoritative sources: the ESTC, the forthcoming New CBEL, and
the online Library of Congress Authorities database. The ESTC 'Ephelia'
records are conveniently cited in the apparatus of the Lady Mary Howard
nee Villiers article in the forthcoming New DNB series.

Lady Mary Villiers, the so-called 'Butterfly' of the Stuart court, was a
celebrated beauty, wit, and outrageous prankster. Forging the King's
horoscope, dueling a romantic rival, and dedicating her poetry-book to
herself were but a few of Lady Mary's amusements. The Dartmouth Hall Van
Dyck of Mary Villiers, presently at Mould's Historical Portraits
gallery, 31 Dover St., London, is valued at 1.6 million pounds
(Telegraph, 25 Nov 2002;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/11/25/ndyck25.
xml)
.

This edition contributes to the 'Ephelia' canon a new broadsheet poem
(1679), addressed to Charles II on the Popish Plot. The poem's woodcut
initial, figuring Lady Mary and the King, is the 'smoking gun' of the
Villiers attribution.

The Ashgate 'Ephelia' presents some attractive visual matter: an
enlarged armorial watermark and woodcut device, as well as two portraits
of Mary Villiers by Van Dyck. With an extended introduction, textual
notes, bibliography, and three appendices.

For a multimedia archive on the 'Ephelia' subject (2001), visit:
http://www.millersville.edu/~resound/ephelia/. See also
'Seventeenth-Century News' (Spring, 2003), pp. 181-183; and Chawton
House's 'Female Spectator' (Summer, 2002; cover feature, with 3 images).
______

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

On the Irish Emigrant newsletter web site there is a report on the
"Re-imagining Ireland" Conference, Charlottesville, Virginia...

P.O'S.


http://www.emigrant.ie/article.asp?iCategoryID=173&iArticleID=16737


EXTRACT BEGINS>>>

"Re-imagining Ireland" Conference in Virginia

"Irish people are always fascinated by Ireland, and we find ourselves
terribly interesting", said journalist Fintan O'Toole at one of the
opening sessions of "Re-imagining Ireland", as more than 100 scholars,
poets, musicians, politicians and other thinkers gathered in
Charlottesville, Virginia last week.

O'Toole's remarks were borne out as conference speakers were joined by
nearly 200 registered participants from Ireland and across the US, as
well as more from the Northern Virginia area, for four days of lively
debate and discussion, punctuated by several energetic musical, dramatic
and literary performances.

Perhaps the most frequently asked question early in the week was why the
proceedings were taking place in Charlottesville, a locale not usually
considered a hotbed of Irish activity. The answer lies in the fact that
the conference was in part the brainchild of Andrew Wyndham at the
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, who initiated the project in
2000 with Martin McCloone, Media Studies lecturer at the University of
Ulster.

EXTRACT ENDS>>>

From: "jamesam"
To:
Subject: Re: Ir-D Irish Diaspora Course 4

I will second that motion. Please.

Slainte',

Patricia Jameson-Sammartano

- ----- Original Message -----

> From: "Thomas J. Archdeacon"
> To:
> Subject: Irish Diaspora
>
> Prof. Malcolm:
>
> I think many of us would love simply to see your syllabus. Would you
> be willing to share it with the list, perhaps through the Ir-D
> website?
>
> Tom Archdeacon
>
>
>

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

I think that Heathorn's review, which is being circulated on H-Albion,
will be of interest. Romani's book has a section on British perceptions
of the Irish. (And that there is such a section may be an indication
that historians of Ireland have suceeded in changing the agenda...)
With the reviews, we have here much material on the ways in which
'national character' was constructed at key points, plus much background
on current debates.

There is a sample chapter on the CUP web site...
http://titles.cambridge.org/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521810000

Or straight to the pdf file...
http://assets.cambridge.org/0521810000/sample/0521810000WS.pdf

The book was also reviewed on H-France...
http://www3.uakron.edu/hfrance/reviews/popkin3.html

P.O'S.

- -----Original Message-----
H-NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by H-Albion[at]h-net.msu.edu (May 2003)

Roberto Romani. _National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and
France 1750-1914_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ix + 348
pp. Notes, and index. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-81000-0.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Stephen Heathorn , McMaster
University

This is both an ambitious and a disappointing book. The ambitiousness
of its sweep through more than 150 years of Anglo-French intellectual
history is easily apparent (and boldly proclaimed on the dust jacket).
But it is disappointing because the argument is neither as iconoclastic
nor as revisionist as the author apparently believes. This dense,
complicated book is based on an impressively broad array of primary
materials, but not a wide reading of secondary studies beyond the works
of a few, admittedly influential, traditional intellectual historians.
Romani's approach is neither experimental nor innovative. Indeed, the
explicit (and very nearly condescending) dismissal of studies of the
broader cultural manifestations and uses of constructed ideas about
national characteristics underlines the degree to which the narrowly
conceived and intellectually elitist focus adopted by Romani barely
disturbs our understanding of the hold ideas about nationality have had
on modern consciousness. This book rounds-out and clarifies high
intellectual traditions, but is not a sweeping new interpretation.

The rationale for the book is well laid out in the introduction where
Romani questions the essentialist use of terms like national character
and national identity in both popular and academic discourse. Indeed,
he discards the term national identity entirely, arguing it is a more
modern-sounding, but in reality just as allusive, synonym for national
character. Romani has no time for what he evidently sees as the faddish
concern in recent scholarship with the expression of national
identity/characteristics. He dismisses such recent work--without citing
a single example--by stating his disinterest in tracing "successive
portraits" of national character in Britain or France, or elsewhere.

Instead, the book's main concern is the "variation in the discussion of
national dispositions conveying the issue of peoples' suitability for
liberty" (p. 3). Here his obvious, and acknowledged, debt to the ideas
of J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner is made clear.

Romani explains that the book's main argument stems from two
contentions.

The first is that "the viewpoint of citizens' aptness for liberty should
be distinguished from the specific idioms in which it was expressed" (p.
3), and hence deliberations on the making of civic virtues have a
history larger than any one particular strand of thought. The second
contention is that "the pervasiveness of the issue of citizens'
dispositions" dominated the period between the Enlightenment and the
early twentieth century. The issue of the relationship between
government and its citizens was at the core of social and political
thought, and over the course of the nineteenth century institutions
changed to accommodate this relationship. Later in the century the
focus shifted to the "adequacy of the human material to the demands of
mass society" (p. 4). The book compares Britain and France because of
their two divergent idioms: British Whiggism (both pre- and post-Burke)
and the French Enlightenment (and later British) concern with "public
spirit." Romani sees the latter as based in social discipline,
responsibility in electoral choices, a sense of interdependence and
belonging along with the willingness to operate and develop the
institutions of self-government. Despite its long antecedents, Romani
regards the civic thinking running through the nineteenth century as an
"original intellectual phenomenon, motivated by the political and social
problems of the day" (p. 4). In short, the book examines the emergence
of a civic standpoint (what he calls "civism") from within two different
national character discourses. The political and social problems that
amount to the key context for each idiom, however, remain largely in the
background.

The book's argument is divided chronologically into two periods,
1750-1850 and 1850-1914, which are then further divided into a number of
discrete discussions of French and British thought. Romani argues that
the period 1750 to 1914 saw the working-out of the problem of the
"relationship between a free government (and/or market economy) and the
quality of citizens" (p.3). However, the division at 1850, marked by
the rise of evolutionary social science, makes rather more sense than
the end point of the study in 1914. This is particularly so given the
references to thinkers such as Ernest Barker whose writings and
influence were in the interwar and post-World War II period, and to the
numerous social-scientific attempts to come to define national character
in the twentieth century (p. 333). How or why 1914 was chosen as a
concluding date for the study is never discussed: World War I clearly
did not end the kind of thought analysed, nor is it clear that it
significantly altered or shifted the intellectual terrain of discussions
about national character.[1] If a break is being posited, it needs to be
demonstrated rather than assumed; if the end date is one of convenience,
then this should at least be acknowledged if not justified.

Moreover, despite the title and the claims of the introduction, the book
is not particularly comparative. French thought is given more space in
this book than British: two-thirds of the first section of the book is
devoted to the _philosophes_ and their heirs. And although both the
French and British thinkers discussed in the first section make
references to the others' presumed national characteristics, more often
than not Romani chooses to explore connections within national
intellectual traditions (staying true to the two idioms rather than
comparing and contrasting between them). Similarly, of the three
chapters in the second chronological section, two are explicitly
nationally focused: one dealing with the rise of social scientific
thought in Britain, the other devoted almost exclusively to Durkheim and
his influence in France. The penultimate chapter returns the author to
British thought and the idea of public spirit, with a coda on Italian
thinkers in the post-_Risorgimento_ period. The conclusion glances
cursorily across incidents of national character discussion in the later
twentieth century.

Unsurprisingly, well-known Enlightenment thinkers dominate the attention
given to the French portion of the first section of the book. Until
1789, French thinkers concentrated on criticism of their own national
characteristics. Although it should be noted that the nation they
criticised was a narrow one, largely embodied in the leisured
intelligentsia of which they were a part. For thinkers like
Montesquieu, Rousseau, Raynal, Voltaire and others, national character
was something molded by climate and/or by governing institutions. The
concentration on institutions fed clearly into the political project of
the _philosophes_: if the institutions could be reformed, then a
virtuous citizenry might be developed, absolutism done away with, and
national greatness returned to a free France. Clearly, the French
Revolution was thus the apex and crux of change, both for thinkers in
France, but also for Britain where there was no similar radical break,
but rather a gradual change in views due to the rise of political
economy. In the aftermath of the Revolution, the causal connection
between institutions and national character in France was reversed (and
references to environmental determinism increasingly dropped). Romani
shows this development by exploring first the thought of novelist and
essayist Madame de Stael, then political economists like Dupin and
moderate liberal journalists like Chateaubriand, with his analysis
reaching its apogee in the thought of Tocqueville. His basic argument
is that as current events made it necessary to extend the demographic
boundaries of the nation, national character was perceived increasingly
as the origin of national institutions rather than as an effect.
Montesquieu and Tocqueville are the book-end figures in this first part
of the book because both concerned themselves with their nation's
failure to establish free political institutions, albeit in quite
different contexts: Montesquieu challenged the civic norms of
Absolutist France by comparison with the British, while Tocqueville
underscored the limitations of Restoration France by comparison with the
Americans. The thinkers that are discussed along with these two
comprise a "who's who" of the major _philosophes_, along with an
eclectic mix of lesser-known writers. Strangely, given the vitality of
ideas about the nation during the events of the Revolution, Stael is the
only significant thinker of that generation discussed. Rather it is the
Restoration liberals (with a few cursory nods to conservatives like
Bonald and de Maistre) whose thought is pored over, probably because of
their influence on Tocqueville.

Liberal thought, both "vulgar" Whiggism and more refined variants, also
constitute the core of the discussion of Britain from 1750 and 1850. The
great difference was that in Britain there were fewer limits to free
expression than in France, and more self-satisfaction with the
prevailing constitutional arrangements. As he notes, "Whiggism is a
statement about the English in comparison with the French, but the
criteria for judgement were universal in nature" (p. 163). Of course,
ideas of national character in eighteenth-century Britain, rooted in
Whiggism and notions of English liberty, could also appeal to
conservatives and radicals as well as liberals. Nevertheless, over the
course of the period discussed, British thinkers increasingly dismissed
ideas that universal criteria such as civic virtue might be reproduced
everywhere. They too shifted to a perspective that viewed nations based
on cultural distinctiveness. While the pillars of the mostly Scottish
Enlightenment--Smith, Millar, Ferguson--receive due attention, little
space is provided for the philosophic radicals or for more conservative
thinkers of the period. The exceptions to the latter omission are Burke
and Hume, both of whom are given significant space. But Romani's
concentration on the influence of the Whig tradition is clearly evident,
and here Romani's argument builds on rather than overturns the work of
Stefan Collini, J.W. Burrow, D.

Winch, and other prominent intellectual historians working on the
Victorian age. Romani caps his account of British discussions of
national character with a single concrete example of how the concept
came to be used in a largely negative way in the early part of the
nineteenth century: an examination of British thought on Irish character
from the Act of Union in 1801 to the Great Famine in the 1840s. Here
the ideas of liberals like the historian Thomas Macaulay and of
conservatives like Carlyle are viewed cheek by jowl. This chapter, in
my opinion one of the best in the book, fits somewhat awkwardly with the
others precisely because of one of its virtues. Romani delves into the
realm of ideas employed by less-than-elite intellectuals: by some
common-and-garden political propagandists. Of course, after admitting
this, he immediately apologises for referring to this less "refined
literature" even though "it may serve to place the more upmarket texts
in their proper perspective" (p. 215). However, such a comparison might
have been a more fruitful approach to the whole book: the ideas
expressed by other thinkers were similarly not formulated in a political
or cultural vacuum nor immune from adoption and adaptation by the less
intellectually-gifted. Indeed, given Romani's recognition of the
emptiness of essentialist ideas about national character, it is a wonder
he did not seek to further analyze why apparently more "upmarket"
thinkers did not question the essentialism and determinism of national
character. I would suggest more exploration of the cultural and
political context, which might help provide answers to this conundrum.

In the second section of the book, Romani assesses the changing shape
and use of national character descriptions from 1850 to 1914. For
Britain he stresses the rise of the Darwinian and Spencerian
intellectual framework of the social sciences and of the changing
economic and social concerns in the age of imperialism. He starts with
British thinkers and their need to find a social dimension to
citizenship in a mature, mass, industrial society. Spencer and Mill
loom large here, but he also finds space to analyse social psychologist
William McDougall (and to a lesser degree the "herd instincts" theories
of Wilfred Trotter) as well as the economic thought of J.A. Hobson and
Alfred Marshall. To many writing in the shadow of T.H. Green's
idealism, the development of altruistic character traits and a
re-affirmation of reciprocal relations within society seemed necessary.
Romani travels confidently through these well-established contours of
later-Victorian liberal thought. In his focus on national character and
civic virtues in the thought of Hobson and L.T. Hobhouse, and their
arguments for the demotic and communal basis of social reform, he
illuminates but does not significantly revise existing analyses of the
Fabians and New Liberals. He implicitly compares the new liberalism in
Britain with the situation in France in his chapter on Durkheim. There
the focus was much more on how to generate social cohesion and political
stability.

Across the second chronological section, as in the first, the figures
discussed are almost all from the liberal canon. Nearly all the British
thinkers fit within a general Whiggish perspective, as he himself admits
(p. 335). The lack of concern with more conservative thought is
perplexing. Perhaps Romani does not see any conservative thinkers in
nineteenth-century Britain or France sophisticated enough to discuss?
But the rise of the conservative racialist thought associated with
Gobineau in France and Robert Knox in Britain seems a strange omission.
Even more liberal racialists like Charles Dilke are passed-over with
little comment.

Moreover, there is a lack of interest in explicitly religious modes of
thought about the idea of national characteristics, even though such
thought was quite highly developed in the Victorian era.[2] Similarly,
radical and explicitly socialist thought (and not just that of the
Fabians in Britain) also had to deal with the relationship between
citizenship and national community; and not infrequently, leftists in
Britain used national character as a tool for their own ideological
work.[3] Lastly, in a book so keen to make fine analytical distinctions,
I was surprised to see no attempt, beyond the case of Ireland, to come
to grips with the thorny problem of British national character as
opposed to the various component national groups of the British Isles
(English, Scottish, Welsh).

Romani ignores the issue and merely refers to his use of terminology in
a footnote (p. 14).

I began this review with an explicit criticism of the narrowness of this
book's approach, let me conclude by elaborating on that criticism.
Roberto Romani is surely right to question the essentialism of national
character descriptions, as he does in this book, but this is hardly a
novel observation. He is also right to be critical of the use of
national identity as an explanation for current or historical social and
political developments, which again is hardly new. Romani's implicit
dismissal of recent scholarship on national identity in the British
context is more puzzling. The implication of Romani's introductory and
concluding remarks is that the large amount of scholarship over the last
fifteen years attempting to unpack the hitherto neglected presence of
national rhetoric, contemplation and self-identification in the British
past has remained embedded in an essentialist framework or is irrelevant
to serious intellectual history. I think this view, if it is actually
what Romani means to imply, is simply wrong. There is some unevenness
in more recent work conducted on national identity, and some works do
lapse into naïve description and essentialism, yet Romani uses the
intellectual historian's conceit of referring to "the Anglo-French mind"
(p. 343), itself a lapse into a form of essentialism. Most of the
recent scholarship, however, starts from the assumption that the
national is an imaginative fabrication.[4] Indeed, many of these works
take as their starting point Benedict Anderson's formulation of the
national as an "imagined community"
and/or Eric Hobsbawm and Terry Rangers' notion of "invented traditions"
(both approaches now twenty years old, although neither is cited by
Romani).[5] For instance, the recent scholarship focusing on
eighteenth-century nationalism in Britain has invariably sought to
understand how national character/identity was ideologically used:
whether it attempts to explore how the English identified national
characteristics as a means to contest the power of their own
cosmopolitan elites [6]; or how contemporary foreigners understood and
helped to reinforce domestic English stereotypes [7]; or how national
character was used to shape and mobilize a largely-conservative,
multi-national political community.[8] This work has not been just about
defining national self-identification: exploring how contemporaries
understood their own Britishness or Englishness is the starting point
for understanding wider political or social questions.

Moreover, Romani's deliberate disregard of gendered and racial
characterizations in his study (p. 6), especially for the nineteenth
century, allows him to ignore recent work by Catherine Hall, who has
demonstrated the intersection of ideas concerning gender, race,
ethnicity and citizenship in a number of important works on the
mid-Victorian period.[9] Her perspective permits the reader to see how
the intellectuals of the age worked within, rather than above, society,
and how they were influenced by, and helped to influence, the flow of
culture. One does not have to accept post-colonialism _tout court_ to
see that the development of the world's two largest colonial empires by
Britain and France during the period 1750-1914, might have had at least
a contextual impact on the intellectuals of the respective societies.
Furthermore, gender characterizations are not just about the absence of
women in political discourse; they are equally important in discussions
of the same sex. I stopped counting the use of "effeminate" by thinkers
in Romani's text after I had reached a dozen instances. There is a rich
vein of gendered language requiring analysis in these thinkers' output
on national characteristics.

Ultimately, however, my disappointment with Romani's analysis is that it
mirrors rather than disturbs Hall's analytical trajectory without ever
providing answers to the questions that she addresses: for example, how
did some of the most respected intellectuals of their age came to share
the prejudices and essentialist beliefs of their time? Of course,
Hall's conclusions and approach have not gone unchallenged, but the most
serious challengers, like Peter Mandler, have presented a much different
view of national character discussions in nineteenth-century Britain
than have Hall or Romani.[10] Moreover, Mandler like Hall, takes culture
seriously as the context of his intellectual history. I would argue
that, unlike Romani's concentration on the "high-brow" intellectuals,
we need to see more cultural histories that pay attention to "high-brow"
intellectualism, and intellectual histories that pay more attention to
the broader cultural context.


Notes

[1]. Roland N. Stromberg, _Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and
1914_

(Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1982).

[2]. John Wolffe, _God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life
in Britain and Ireland, 1843-1945_ (London and New York: Routledge,
1994).

[3]. Margot Finn, _After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical
Politics, 1848-1874_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See
also, Paul Ward, _Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism and
the British Left, 1881-1924_ (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998).

[4]. Even if one disputes his chronology, there is no disputing Elie
Kedourie's recognition of this point made in his 1960 intellectual
history, _Nationalism_ (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1960).

[5]. Benedict Anderson, _Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism_ (London: Verso, 1983); and, Eric Hobsbawm and
Terence Ranger, _The Invention of Tradition_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983). Cynthia Herrup made this point in 1992, see
her "Introduction" to the Special Issue on National Identity, _Journal
of British Studies_, 31:1 (1992): p. 307.

[6]. Gerald Newman, _The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural
History, 1740-1830_ (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987).

[7]. Paul Langford, _Englishness Identified: Manners and Character,
1650-1850_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[8]. Linda Colley, _Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837_ (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1992).

[9]. Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall, _Defining the
Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of
1867_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also Hall's
numerous articles and chapters published over the course of the 1990s,
which have now been brought together and expanded in her most recent
book, _Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English
Imagination, 1830-1867_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

[10]. Peter Mandler, "Against 'Englishness': English Culture and the
Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850-1940," _Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society_, 7 (1997): pp. 155-175; idem., "'Race' and 'Nation'
in mid-Victorian Thought", in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian
Young, eds., _History, Religion and Culture: British Intellectual
History 1750-1950_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.
224-244; idem., "The Consciousness of Modernity? Liberalism and the
English National Character, 1870-1940," in Martin Daunton and Bernhard
Rieger, eds., _Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian
Era to World War II_ (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), pp. 119-144.

Copyright (c) 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks[at]mail.h-net.msu.edu.

From: Elizabeth Malcolm
Subject: Irish Diaspora Course

Dear Paddy,

I've had a number of responses to my email yesterday about the course
I teach here on the Irish Abroad. I compiled the reading pack for the
course nearly 2 years ago now. I only have a couple of copies left
and, looking at it again today, I realise that it is a little out of
date. There are several important new books that I don't have on my
reading lists and I think I want to change some of the readings in
the pack.

The course will be on again in our 2nd semester which starts at the
end of July. About 45 students have already enrolled and hopefully
that number will go up.

So next month I'll be updating the teaching pack and getting copies
run off for all the students.

I'd be happy then to send you my programme and up-dated reading lists
to put on the Irish Diaspora web site. Also, I can arrange to have
extra copies of the reader made in June and I'm certainly willing to
send copies to those who have asked me for one. I presume that people
can wait a month or two for it.

I might just add, for information, that it is the practice in my
Department to produce large readers often running to hundreds of
pages for all courses. It's a lot of work compiling them, but they
are then very useful resources. So I also have reading packs for my
other three Irish courses on 16th-century Ireland, Ireland 1798-1998
and Irish historiography. Next year I'm starting a new course on the
Troubles 1968-98 and will certainly produce a reader for that as
well. Not that I'm volunteering to send all these out as well!!

Elizabeth


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Elizabeth Malcolm
Gerry Higgins Professor of Irish Studies
Deputy Head
Department of History
University of Melbourne
Parkville, Victoria, 3010
AUSTRALIA

Telephone: +61-3-8344 3924
FAX: +61-3-8344 7894
Email: e.malcolm[at]unimelb.edu.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------