Date:
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NOVEL THEORY
SPEAKERS: Mary Burke, University of Connecticut; Claire Connolly, University College, Cork; Mary Mullen, Villanova University
"Mixed: Race and Language in an Irish Modernist Canon" - Mary Burke
Abstract: Long excluded from Ireland’s internationally recognized modernist canon, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille (“graveyard soil,” 1949) is, Burke will argue, a late modernist western seaboard rejoinder to Ulysses in Irish. Joyce’s “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” implies that the avant-garde was alien to a native language that was increasingly being hitched to the fantasy of a racially and linguistically sealed West by Dublin’s post-independence cultural and educational establishment. However, Cré na Cille’s neologisms, French and English loan words, and mixed-race returned emigrant Connemara residents acknowledge the exchanges that arose from Ireland’s history of emigration and Empire. Altogether, Ó Cadhain continues the debate initiated by Joyce’s creation of a Jewish Irishman, extending it to prophetically ask if Irish culture can create imaginative and linguistic room - in either of its official languages - for Irish citizens of minority identity.
"Slow Combustion? Irish Women’s Writing from Maria Edgeworth to Sally Rooney" - Claire Connolly
Abstract: My paper identifies a tendency to tell the story of Irish women’s writing in terms of singular successes and dramatic moments and asks what it would mean to develop a more capacious literary history that can take in the longer history of an Irish modernity shaped by colonialism. I consider shared ground between discourses of colonial improvement (applied to Edgeworth) and social progress (applied to Rooney) but also admit the constraints and limits that challenge my version of novel history. In doing so I draw support from fictions by Irish women (including Lady Morgan, Belinda McKeon and Anna Burns) that help to script these very difficulties of periodisation. I use Elizabeth Bowen’s distinction between ‘slow combustion’ and ‘flashes’ of meaning to shape my argument.
"The Irish Famine Novel and Public Interest" - Mary Mullen
Abstract: Irish famine novels often begin by addressing a skeptical public fatigued by stories of Irish suffering. Many authors passively “place” or “lay” their novels before the public, insisting that however strange their narrative seems, they depict the truth. The preface to William Carleton’s The Squanders of Castle Squanders (1852) is defensive, suggesting that despite his concern “for the general welfare of my countrymen,” he expects that all parties will be disappointed with the novel’s politics. Considering these prefaces and other public addresses within Irish famine novels, this talk considers how these Irish novels reveal the limits of liberal publics and liberalism’s emphasis on consensus and shared public interest. These novels not only depict multiple publics but irreconcilable understandings of public interest as they demonstrate liberalism’s inability to account for colonial catastrophe.
About the Speakers
Mary Burke, UConn Professor of English, is the author of Race, Politics, and Irish-America: A Gothic History (Oxford UP, 2023).
Claire Connolly is Professor of Modern English at University College Cork and Burns Scholar in Irish Studies at Boston College for 2023-24. She is the author of the prize-winning A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790-1829 (Cambridge UP) and General Editor (with Marjorie Howes) of Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-2020 (Cambridge UP). She has recently written a new introduction to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (Oxford Worlds Classics, 2023) as well as to Somerville and Ross’s The Real Charlotte and Irish R.M Stories (riverrun, 2024).
Mary Mullen is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University. She is the author of Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Edinburgh, 2019), which won the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies. She has published articles on English and Irish writing, settler colonialism, publics, and the politics of time. She is currently writing a book on the colonial politics of public interest.
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