Irish Journal of American Studies – Journal of the Irish Association for American Studies

Schmidt, Christian. Postblack Aesthetics: The Freedom to be Black in Contemporary African American Fiction. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017 (Volume 25... Read More...

‘The Ethics of Quantum Colonialism’: Navigating American Racial Anxiety in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became

Carolann North

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...

Review: Wickham Clayton, ed, Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film

Noel O'Shea

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...

“‘Normal People’ Indeed!”: Anne Tyler, Sally Rooney, and the Narrative of Youthful Quirk

Cecilia Donohue

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...

Depictions of Shame: White Identity and Cultural Blackness in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner

Beatrice Melodia Festa

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...

Satire, Symbolism, and the “Working Through” of Historical Ghosts in The Confidence-Man

Alex McDonnell

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...

Review: Leopold Lippert, Performing America Abroad

Ciarán Leinster

Leopold Lippert, Performing America Abroad: Transnational Cultural Politics in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018. L... Read More...

“The Product of a Spoiled America”: Divorce as Collective Crisis in U.S. Popular Culture of the 1990s

Olga Thierbach-McLean

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...

Review: Kloeckner, Knewitz, and Sielke, eds., Knowledge Landscapes North America

Natalia Kovalyova

Kloeckner, Christian, Simone Knewitz, and Sabine Sielke, editors. Knowledge Landscapes North America. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016. Data explosi... Read More...

Review: T. H. Breen, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America

Michael J. Griffin

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...

The Populist Turn in American Politics: A Review-Essay of Kivisto’s The Trump Phenomenon

Julie Sheridan

Articles, Issue 10 2020-21, Reviews

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...

Review: Andy Connolly, Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition

Dolores Resano

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...

Review: Ernst, Matter-Siebel, and Schmidt, eds., Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism

Alan Gibbs

Jutta Ernst, Sabina Matter-Siebel, and Klaus H. Schmidt, editors. Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism. Universitätsverlag Winter... Read More...

Review: Bernice M. Murphy, Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction

Yves Laberge

Bernice M. Murphy. Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Students and academics always need keywords and ... Read More...

IAAS 50th Anniversary Special Issue on Irish American Studies

Tim Groenland

Editorials, Issue 9 2020

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...

On Becoming an Americanist

Kevin Power

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...

From Dangerous Outsiders to Beloved Innocents: Irish Servant Figures in American Gothic

Dara Downey

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...

The Shock of Recognition: Reading American Fiction in Celtic Tiger Ireland

Adam Kelly

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...

Some Comments on Irish American Studies

Lee M. Jenkins

In its early iterations, Irish American Studies focused almost exclusively on Irish American writing, on literature produced by Americans of Irish des... Read More...

Lonely, But Not Alone: Studying America in Ireland in the Time of COVID-19

Kelsie Donnelly

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...

Two Roads Diverged

Sue Norton

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...

But It Is Your Problem

Kimberly Reyes

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...

Reading Transatlantically in the Era of Trump

Dolores Resano

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...

(Dis)Connections: Civil Rights and Discrimination in America and Northern Ireland

Melissa L. Baird

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...

A Backward Glance: My Quarter Century in the IAAS

Philip McGowan

Fionnghuala Sweeney and Bruce Baker

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...

Moses Roper, The First Fugitive Slave Lecturer in Ireland, 1838

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...

Kindred Spirits: Solidarity Between the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and Ireland

Jessica Militante

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...

“[N]ow There Ought to Be a Watchman”: Curfews and Race in U.S. Literature

Sarah Cullen

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...

What a Difference a Word Makes: Reconsidering Language in Huckleberry Finn

Clair A. Sheehan

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...

American Wakes and the Global Troubles: U.S. Collapse Fiction and the Irish Future

Dorothea Gail

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...

Undecided: Nixon, Trump, and the Risks of Counting on the Silent Majority

Sarah Thelen

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...

“The Conviviality of Thinking Together”: Personal Notes & Recollections for IAAS@50

Philip Coleman

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...

A Transatlantic Conversation: Poetry, Politics, and Violence

Peggy O'Brien

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”: Reflections on American Studies in a Year of Crisis

Andrew Clarke

Caroline Schroeter and Sarah McCreedy

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...

The IAAS’s Americanista: An Interview with Catherine Gander (IAAS Chair)

Interviews, Issue 9 2020

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...

Issue 8 Editorial

David Coughlan

Editorials, Issue 8 2018-19

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...

The Long Civil Rights Narrative of Show Me a Hero

Mikkel Jensen

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...

A Conflict-Laden Consensus: Is the U.S. a One-Party System in Disguise?

Olga Thierbach-McLean

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...

The Underground Frontier: Norman Mailer’s An American Dream

Kevin Power

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...

“To Be Murdered”: Simulations of Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Violence in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood

Steffen Wöll

“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...

Liminal Spaces and Contested Narratives in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo

Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh

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...

Review: Michael J. Lewis, City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning

Jan Frohburg

Lewis, Michael J. City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning. Princeton UP, 2016. There are rare instances when historical scholarship g... Read More...

Review: Jesús Blanco Hidalga, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community: Narratives of Salvation

Hidalga, Jesús Blanco. Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community: Narratives of Salvation. Bloomsbury, 2017. Jonathan Franzen has written five ... Read More...

Review: Eileen T. Lundy and Edward J. Lundy, eds., Practicing Transnationalism: American Studies in the Middle East

Marcus Walsh-Führing

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...

Review: Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism

Tomás Dodds

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera. After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. Routledge, 2018. On the 1st of October 2018,... Read More...

Review: Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton, eds., European Perspectives on John Updike

Daniel Picker

Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton, eds. European Perspectives on John Updike. Camden House, 2018. European Perspectives on John Updike presents tw... Read More...

Review: Joe B. Fulton, Mark Twain Under Fire

Clair A. Sheehan

Joe B. Fulton. Mark Twain Under Fire: Reception and Reputation, Criticism and Controversy 1851-2015. Camden House, 2018. With his latest publicatio... Read More...

Review: Samuele F. S. Pardini, In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans and Modernity

Christian O'Connell

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...

Issue 7 Editorial: Special Postgraduate Issue

Rosemary Gallagher

Editorials, Issue 7 2018

Taking its inspiration from the Great Seal of the United States, the November 2015 Irish Association for American Studies Postgraduate Symposium consi... Read More...

“The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here”: Writing American Identity in Liberia, 1830–1850

Carmel Lambert

Hilary McLaughlin-Stonham

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...

Race and Protest in New Orleans: Streetcar Integration in the Nineteenth Century

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...

Hawthorne’s “Dangerous Soul” and Jacksonian Individualism: Artistic Isolation in Fanshawe and “The Artist of the Beautiful”

James Hussey

In his seminal American Renaissance, Frances Otto Matthiessen points to the development by Nathaniel Hawthorne of tragic elements of character, noting... Read More...

Ego Pluribus Unum: How One Man, Speaking for Many, Changed Hip-Hop

Andrew Duncan

“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...

“Before You Come Alive, Life Is Nothing; It’s Up to You to Give It a Meaning”: Making Meaning in James Sallis’ Death Will Have Your Eyes

Kelsie Donnelly

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...

The Viewer Society: ‘New Panopticism’, Surveillance, and the Body in Dave Eggers’ The Circle

Jennifer Gouck

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...

Empty Constructs: The Postmodern Haunted House in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

Seán Travers

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...

Review: Marc Leeds, The Vonnegut Encyclopedia

Miranda Corcoran

Issue 7 2018, Reviews

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...

Review: Catrin Gersdorf and Juliane Braun, eds., America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment

Sarah Cullen

Issue 7 2018, Reviews

Gersdorf, Catrin, and Juliane Braun, eds. America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016. American Studies 270... Read More...

Review: Jon C. Teaford, The Twentieth-Century American City: Problem, Promise and Reality

Lucy Cheseldine

Issue 7 2018, Reviews

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...

Issue 6 Editorial: Special Issue on Marilynne Robinson

Editorials, Issue 6 2017

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...

“His soul is marching on”: Suppressing John Brown in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

Elizabeth Abele

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...

Vision as Creation and Alternative: The Role of the Author Function in Marilynne Robinson’s Plural Text Gospels of Gilead

Daniel Muhlestein

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 Nature of the Horizon: Genealogy in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

Adrianna Smith

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...

Unaffected: Marilynne Robinson’s Postmodern Sentimentalism

Lisa Mendelman

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...

“The Empty Mirror”: Selfhood and the Utility of Language in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

Andrew Cunning

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...

Those Same Trees: Narrative Sequence and Simultaneity in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Novels

Rachel Sykes

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...

Democracy, and Other Fictions: On the Politics of Robinson’s Non-Fiction

Tim Jelfs

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...

(Sub)merged Worlds in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

Kelsie Donnelly

Sue Norton and Laurence W. Mazzeno

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...

Review: Stephen Burt, the poem is you: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them

Philip McGowan

Issue 6 2017, Reviews

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...

Issue 5 Editorial

David Coughlan

Editorials, Issue 5 2016

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...

Thirty-Six-Point Perpetua: John Updike’s Personal Essays in the Later Years

Articles, Issue 5 2016

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...

Diagnosing Kurt Vonnegut: A Response to Susanne Vees-Gulani on the Subject of Slaughterhouse-Five

Ciarán Kavanagh

Articles, Issue 5 2016

Winner of the 2015 WTM Riches Essay Prize In “Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,” Sus... Read More...

Review: Kevin Mac Donnell and R. Kent Rasmussen, eds., Mark Twain and Youth: Studies in His Life and Writings

Clair A. Sheehan

Issue 5 2016, Reviews

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...

Review: Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut

Miranda Corcoran

Issue 5 2016, Reviews

Ellerhoff, Steve Gronert. Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. Routledge, 2016. Steve Gronert Ellerhoff... Read More...

Review: Stephen Matterson, Melville: Fashioning in Modernity

Johanna Hoorenman

Issue 5 2016, Reviews

Matterson, Stephen. Melville: Fashioning in Modernity. Bloomsbury, 2014. Melville: Fashioning in Modernity is an exploration of Melville’s represen... Read More...

Issue 4 Editorial: Special Postgraduate Issue

Editorials, Issue 4 2015

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...

Consuming Beauty: Mass-Market Magazines and Make-up in the 1920s

Rachael Alexander

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...

“No such thing as a ‘Canadian'”: Memory, Place, and Identity in Mavis Gallant’s Linnet Muir Stories

Kate Smyth

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...

“To Make For Myself a Person”: Immigrant Identities in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers

Katie Ahern

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...

The Poetics of the Sentence: Examining Gordon Lish’s Literary Legacy

Tim Groenland

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...

“She it was to whom ads were dedicated”: Materialism, Materiality and the Feminine in Nabokov’s Lolita

Laura Rose Byrne

In a 1967 interview with his former student and future annotator, Alfred Appel, Vladimir Nabokov announced, “Philosophically, I am an indivisible moni... Read More...

The Search for a Mother in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Sarah Cullen

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...

Review: Edward Clarke, The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens

Karolina Vancurová

Issue 4 2015, Reviews

Clarke, Edward. The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens Edward Clarke’s The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens offe... Read More...

Review: Dara Downey, American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age

Ann Patten

Issue 4 2015, Reviews

Downey, Dara. American Women's Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Critics of American gothic fiction often have noted somet... Read More...

Review: Lee M. Jenkins, The American Lawrence

Gillian Groszewski

Issue 4 2015, Reviews

Jenkins, Lee M. The American Lawrence. University Press of Florida, 2015. Lee M. Jenkins’s The American Lawrence is an arresting book. The title is... Read More...

IJASOnline Issue Three

Clare Hayes-Brady

Editorials, Issue 3 2014

We are very excited to announce that the next issue of the journal goes live on Saturday 22 November 2014, coinciding with our Postgraduate and Early ... Read More...

Issue 3 Editorial

Alex Runchman

Editorials, Issue 3 2014

We apologize for the belatedness of this issue of IJAS Online. This is in part due to circumstances within our control, but mainly to do with the time... Read More...

Last Vegas?

Philip McGowan

This article, and the research out of which it springs, has a number of points of origin; it may also have more than one point of conclusion even as i... Read More...

Politics and Principle: Jimmy Carter in the Civil Rights Era

Robert A. Strong

Alan Graham Memorial Lecture, 2014 IAAS Annual Conference There is a famous story about Lyndon Johnson’s White House. In some versions, ... Read More...

“This is said on tiptoe”: Stanley Cavell and the Writing of Philosophy

Áine Mahon

Introduction So we are here, knowing they are “gone to burning hell”, she with a lie on her lips, protecting him, he with her blood on him. Perhaps B... Read More...

“E Unibus Pluram”: David Foster Wallace and the Voices of a Fragmented Nation

Clare Hayes-Brady

One of the truisms of American studies seems to be the intrepid historylessness of the United States. De Tocqueville observed that democracy tended to... Read More...

“Emily Grimes is me”: Anxiety, Feminism, and the Masculinity Crisis in Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade