Winner of the 2021 Irish Association for American Studies Postgraduate Writing Prize
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) and Foxy Brown (19... Read More...
Chavis, Charles L. Jr. The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Unive... Read More...
Welcome to Issue 11 of IJAS Online, the official journal of the Irish Association for American Studies.
The articles and reviews in this issue were... Read More...
The Scarlet Letter (1850) opens on the threshold of what is, arguably, the bluntest form of social containment, the prison. From the very beginning, N... Read More...
Milteer, Warren Eugene, Jr. Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. ISBN 97... Read More...
Mina Loy, the “rediscovered and reforgotten” poet of the early twentieth-century American avant-garde (Burke v-vi), wrote poetry that was characterize... Read More...
Both John Knowles’s short story “Phineas” and his novel A Separate Peace are bisected by the same incident: the shattering of the schoolboy athlete Ph... Read More...
Baumgartner, Alice L. South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 2020. ISBN 9781541617773. $32. ... Read More...
Manthorne, Katherine. Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex. University of California Press, 2021. ISBN 9780520355507, £27 (h... Read More...
The George W. Bush administration’s intervention in Northern Ireland from 2001 to 2007 was decisive and remains undervalued and misunderstood. Through... Read More...
The Liberties and The Liberties (1980)
The Liberties in central Dublin has been so called since the 12th century when King Henry II bequeathed land o... Read More...
Welcome to Issue 10 of the Irish Journal for American Studies, which covers two years of publication, 2020-’21. It has been a complex time, but noneth... Read More...
Austenfeld, Thomas (Ed.). Robert Lowell in a New Century: European and American Perspectives. Suffolk: Camden House, 2019. ISBN 978164014028... Read More...
Wills, John. Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019. ISBN 9781421428703. $34.95 (paperback). 296pp.
Published on t... Read More...
Schmidt, Christian. Postblack Aesthetics: The Freedom to be Black in Contemporary African American Fiction. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017 (Volume 25... Read More...
The conflict between racial equality and white anxiety is the central point of interrogation of N.K Jemisin’s 2020 novel, The City We Became, an Ameri... Read More...
Wickham Clayton, editor. Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ISBN 978-1-137-49646-1. €48 (paperback). 254pp
It ... Read More...
With the critical and popular success of her two millennial novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), Irish author Sally Ro... Read More...
It would be easy to argue that any critical discourse concerning the metaphor of “shame” in the South has to be interpreted in terms of race. As recen... Read More...
Although there have been powerful attacks on what Hershel Parker nominates as the “standard line of interpretation” (x) regarding Herman Melville’s Th... Read More...
Leopold Lippert, Performing America Abroad: Transnational Cultural Politics in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018.
L... Read More...
The new millennium has entered its third decade, but the 1990s have never quite left us. For twenty years, they have been haunting the pop-cultural im... Read More...
T. H. Breen, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019.
That ... Read More...
Peter Kivisto. The Trump Phenomenon: How the Politics of Populism Won in 2016. Emerald Publishing, 2017.
It is a truism of recent political discour... Read More...
Andy Connolly. Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition. Lexington Books, 2017.
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United State... Read More...
Jutta Ernst, Sabina Matter-Siebel, and Klaus H. Schmidt, editors. Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism. Universitätsverlag Winter... Read More...
Bernice M. Murphy. Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction. Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Students and academics always need keywords and ... Read More...
In October 1970, Richard Nixon—then approaching the end of his second year as US President—landed in Shannon Airport to commence a three-day visit to ... Read More...
The private roots of scholarship are seldom very respectable. I bring this up because I’ve been thinking about the two small events that made me an Am... Read More...
In Georgia Wood Pangborn’s 1911 short story “Broken Glass,” the narrator, a fussy mother living somewhere in rural America, is reproached by a mysteri... Read More...
In the spring of 2002, as a second-year undergraduate at University College Dublin, I took a course called “Contemporary Irish Literature: Excavating ... Read More...
In its early iterations, Irish American Studies focused almost exclusively on Irish American writing, on literature produced by Americans of Irish des... Read More...
This is not the article I had intended to write. I had planned to write about a conference I co-organised with friends in Irish and American studies i... Read More...
For a little over two decades, I have been teaching American literature and other subject matter in an institution of higher learning with a technolog... Read More...
George Floyd was the latest in a long line of Black Americans killed by white police officers in the United States. The horrifying video of his killin... Read More...
According to a comprehensive study of the year 2018 published in the journal Democratization (“State of the World 2018”), democracy is in decline arou... Read More...
My early interest in American history originated in what I now realise was my woefully incorrect and naïve impression that, unlike Northern Ireland, A... Read More...
Rather than inflict another piece of my torturous critical prose on anyone, I have opted for a more personal reflection on some of the Association’s h... Read More...
Born into slavery in North Carolina around 1815, Moses Roper is a significant if understudied figure in Irish studies, Black Atlantic studies, and Ame... Read More...
Growing up in California, I often heard stories of my ancestry. There were the ones I heard from my maternal grandmother, a member of the Choctaw Nati... Read More...
Caroline Lee Hentz’s 1854 pro-slavery novel The Planter’s Northern Bride was one of the many responses to the sensational success of Harriet Beecher S... Read More...
As a lifelong lover of Mark Twain’s writing and his ironic humour, I came to American studies abroad assuming Twain’s work would be one of the foundat... Read More...
Arnold Toynbee reminds us that all civilizations fall (cf. also Diamond). We are arguably at a cliff edge, over which the U.S. is by many accounts alr... Read More...
In the midst of what might well be the most significant election in US history, it’s more than a little surreal to be (a) an American abroad, (b) an h... Read More...
1. From Academy Street to Academia
On the thirtieth of June, 1993, I took a bus to Cork from Cahir, my hometown in Tipperary, to collect the results ... Read More...
In September of 1967, I boarded a ship in New York and sailed to Cobh in County Cork. I somehow found my way up to Dublin and eventually to Earlsfort ... Read More...
The fire is not in the future, so don’t ask when it will be. The fire is not yet to come, for it has happened already.
The pandemic took hold, and ... Read More...
Editor’s note: Catherine Gander is the Chair of the all-island Irish Association for American Studies and Associate Professor of American Literature a... Read More...
Welcome to the eighth issue of IJAS Online, the official journal of the Irish Association for American Studies. After two special issues in 2017 and 2... Read More...
Despite the important civil rights legal victories of the 1960s (the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act... Read More...
With Donald Trump as U.S. President and leader of the Republican Party, the ideological divide between American conservatives and liberals seems great... Read More...
earning to know dread is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known dread or by sinking ... Read More...
“This is the Real World”: Introduction
We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says,
... Read More...
The IAAS W. A. Emmerson Lecture 2019
Both Juan Rulfo and George Saunders evoke the power of a literary text to challenge received narratives of the p... Read More...
Lewis, Michael J. City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning. Princeton UP, 2016.
There are rare instances when historical scholarship g... Read More...
Hidalga, Jesús Blanco. Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community: Narratives of Salvation. Bloomsbury, 2017.
Jonathan Franzen has written five ... Read More...
Lundy, Eileen T., and Edward J. Lundy, editors. Practicing Transnationalism: American Studies in the Middle East. U of Texas P, 2016.
Practicing T... Read More...
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera. After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. Routledge, 2018.
On the 1st of October 2018,... Read More...
Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton, eds. European Perspectives on John Updike. Camden House, 2018.
European Perspectives on John Updike presents tw... Read More...
Joe B. Fulton. Mark Twain Under Fire: Reception and Reputation, Criticism and Controversy 1851-2015. Camden House, 2018.
With his latest publicatio... Read More...
Samuele F. S. Pardini. In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen. D... Read More...
Taking its inspiration from the Great Seal of the United States, the November 2015 Irish Association for American Studies Postgraduate Symposium consi... Read More...
In the early winter of 1821, a ship called the Nautilus sailed from Richmond, Virginia, to West Africa. Aboard were thirty-three “free people of colou... Read More...
At the outbreak of the Civil War, New Orleans expanded the city’s streetcar service and, for the use of black patrons, incorporated Star cars into the... Read More...
In his seminal American Renaissance, Frances Otto Matthiessen points to the development by Nathaniel Hawthorne of tragic elements of character, noting... Read More...
“King of the Assholes, drama queen, Red Bull’d 12-year old, Next Chappelle, strangely relatable Megaman,” Black supremacist, hypocrite, poet, social c... Read More...
Following Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that “efore you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning” (Existentialism and Human Emotion... Read More...
Winner of the 2016 WTM Riches Essay Prize
According to Thomas Mathiesen, “In a two-way and significant double sense of the word, we live i... Read More...
Special Mention in the 2016 WTM Riches Essay Prize
According to Dale Bailey, “since Poe first described the House of Usher in 1839, the mot... Read More...
Leeds, Marc. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia. Revised and updated ed., Delacorte, 2016.
The novels, plays and short stories of Kurt Vonnegut can be said ... Read More...
Gersdorf, Catrin, and Juliane Braun, eds. America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016. American Studies 270... Read More...
Teaford, Jon C. The Twentieth-Century American City: Problem, Promise and Reality. 3rd ed. John Hopkins UP, 2016.
The title of the third edition of... Read More...
With the publication of Housekeeping in 1980, Marilynne Robinson announced herself on the literary stage as a writer of singular fiction – and then pr... Read More...
The trail across the sky retraces periodically, for as a universal force, outside of history, Brown is an archetype or prototype, a meteor that recurs... Read More...
And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shal... Read More...
The structural and literary symbolism of the horizon/horizontality is one of the most powerful and versatile devices in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gil... Read More...
The opening lines to Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping famously locate the novel in two literary genealogies. Evoking the opener of Melvill... Read More...
We remain unknown to ourselves.
Nieztsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 3.
Nietzsche places this declaration right at the beginning of his Genealo... Read More...
In 2014, the publication of Marilynne Robinson’s fourth novel, Lila, completed a trilogy of books set in the small fictional town of Gilead, Iowa. Th... Read More...
Since the publication of her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), Marilynne Robinson has built up a large body of non-fiction that sits beside, and in di... Read More...
Special Mention in the 2016 W.T.M Riches Essay Prize
This essay explores the (sub)merged worlds depicted in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping (... Read More...
Burt, Stephen. the poem is you: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2016. 432 pages. ISBN 9780674737... Read More...
Welcome to the fifth issue of IJAS Online, the official journal of the Irish Association for American Studies. Our contributions this issue include ar... Read More...
Posterity
In his Preface to Due Considerations (2007), John Updike tells us that when he was a very young man, he yearned to become a professional wr... Read More...
Winner of the 2015 WTM Riches Essay Prize
In “Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,” Sus... Read More...
Mac Donnell, Kevin, and R. Kent Rasmussen, eds. Mark Twain and Youth: Studies in His Life and Writings. Bloomsbury, 2016.
The recent emergence of M... Read More...
Ellerhoff, Steve Gronert. Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. Routledge, 2016.
Steve Gronert Ellerhoff... Read More...
Matterson, Stephen. Melville: Fashioning in Modernity. Bloomsbury, 2014.
Melville: Fashioning in Modernity is an exploration of Melville’s represen... Read More...
In November 2014, the IAAS welcomed postgraduate and early-career scholars from across Ireland and the UK to Trinity College Dublin for the annual pos... Read More...
Now, it would be an overstatement to insist that the art of living is exclusively under the control of women, yet it is approximately true that the so... Read More...
Introduction
In Mavis Gallant’s six Linnet Muir stories, identity is continually re-constructed through memory. Paul White states that “shifts in ide... Read More...
Anzia Yezierska was a Jewish-American writer, most popular in the 1920s, and best known for her texts on the struggles of immigrants in America. She a... Read More...
In September 2008, Gary Lutz, author of several collections of short fiction, delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to the stu... Read More...
In a 1967 interview with his former student and future annotator, Alfred Appel, Vladimir Nabokov announced, “Philosophically, I am an indivisible moni... Read More...
Winner of the 2013 WTM Riches Essay Prize
“It seems to me that really truthful American novels would have the heroes and heroines alike loo... Read More...