Editors' introduction - Editorial

One of the pleasures of editing an interdisciplinary journal is the rediscovery of how disparate contributions can enrich and support each other. This issue of Eire-Ireland begins with Gerry Smyth's examination of relationships between the literary form of the musical novel and aspects of the Irish postcolonial condition. In our second essay, Timothy White describes modern Ireland's reluctance to abandon fully its nationalistic and ethnic conceptions of identity, even in the face of its commitment to liberal principles. In very different ways both articles--one written by a literary critic, the other by a social scientist--grapple with the country's attachment to an older identity within the context of growing liberal imperatives since the 1960s. Smyth summarizes the problem aptly in his reference to musical practitioners, who want "to `quote' their Irishness without being implicated in any form of essentialist politics."

The tension between an identity defined by de Valera's vision of a Gaelic, Catholic, and rural country and later revisions of that national self-definition has much troubled Irish life for decades. Timothy McMahon's research on Gaelic League membership establishes that hundreds of thousands of citizens from a broad range of social and religious backgrounds joined the league early in the twentieth century, but often without the exacting commitment to "the duty of the Irish language" that revivalist ideologues preached. Such an analysis suggests that the failure of de Valera's cultural ideology was implicit in Irish society far before the advent of an openly avowed cultural revisionism after World War II. Another essayist reads Brendan Behan's literary career in the context of such emerging revisionism--but also as deeply indebted to formative nationalist influences on the writer. John Brannigan recounts how Behan's contentious mid-twentieth-century voice criticized, for example, the exclusion of urban Dubliners from a "Gaelic League-sanctioned culture." Half a century ago, Behan already reminded Ireland of its "variety, its hybridity, and its modernity."

Surveying this issue in its entirety, we are struck by the crossover value of these and other articles, both for scholars in a range of disciplines and for general readers interested in Ireland. In an interdisciplinary contribution, Katherine O'Donnell reveals how Edmund Burke's Gaelic Catholic background and exposure to an Irish-language poetic tradition provided him not just with one impetus for his parliamentary attack on the East India Company in the 1780s and early 1790s, but also with the rhetorical modes of expression for that assault. Essays emerging from more traditional disciplinary methods also serve a variety of readers. For example, William Lowe's investigation of the successful I.R.A. campaign against members of the Royal Irish Constabulary between 1919 and 1921 provides an extensive new empirical analysis of a violent revolutionary period. But Lowe also examines the tragically ambiguous position that many Irishmen occupied, trapped as they were by their employment and professional obligations into the role of community pariahs. Theatergoers who have seen Sebastian Barry's prize-winning The Steward of Christendom (1995), about the descent into madness of the ex-chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, will find in Lowe's research a crucial historical context for understanding the experiences of such anomalous figures in Irish history.

Another group of essays examines cultural attitudes toward Irish women, a group marginalized in the male power structures of the country for centuries. By teasing out the implications of a 1745 theatrical performance benefiting Dublin's Lying-In Hospital, Susan Harris demonstrates how Anglo-Irish society constructed the suffering maternal woman--dependent on male protection and rescue--as a figure for colonial identity. However, Natasha Tessone writing about Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) in the early-nineteenth century, suggests how that novelist's career as an auto-ethnographic performer and recorder of Irish culture implied significant, if ambiguous, resistance to colonialist representations of Ireland. And Eileen Morgan, considering the career of Mairead Ni Ghrada, the first female radio announcer in the British Isles, suggests how postindependence Irish women negotiated successfully within a society hostile to their advancement, while at the same time formulating significant critiques of oppressive power structures.

Our final contribution, Joyce Flynn's essay reporting on the varied and abundant recent writing about Irish drama, evidences the format that we have chosen to investigate and review Irish Studies publications. We welcome proposals suggesting new subjects for review essays, both within and across disciplines. The spring 2003 issue of Eire-Ireland, to be edited by Maria Tymoczko and Colin Ireland, will be a special issue focusing on the themes of language, tradition, cultural change, and identity in twentieth-century Ireland.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Irish American Cultural Institute
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