Articles

The Scarlet Letter (1850) opens on the threshold of what is, arguably, the bluntest form of social containment, the prison. From the very beginning, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narrator marks the inextricable relatio... Read More...

Mina Loy, the “rediscovered and reforgotten” poet of the early twentieth-century American avant-garde (Burke v-vi), wrote poetry that was characterized by strangeness and so unevenly received. Natalya Lusty poi... 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 Phineas’s leg during a summer war game where narrator Gene “jo... Read More...

The George W. Bush administration’s intervention in Northern Ireland from 2001 to 2007 was decisive and remains undervalued and misunderstood. Throughout this time the US State Department determined American in... 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 outside the city walls to four manorial jurisdictions. Crucia... 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 Americanist. They happened in adolescence, when we are at our ... 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 mysterious figure for having scolded her young Irish nursemaid. As ... 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 the Present.” I still remember vividly its opening lecture, ... Read More...

In its early iterations, Irish American Studies focused almost exclusively on Irish American writing, on literature produced by Americans of Irish descent (for example, James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy ... 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 in collaboration with the QUB Centre for the Americas, which ... 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 technological orientation. Unlike those who study English in most uni... 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 killing sparked worldwide protests in the middle of a pandemic wit... 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 around the world. A retreat in democracy implies a weakening of ... 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, America’s past was uncontested. In my teens, I read To Kill 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 history as it has intersected with my own academic career to ... 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 American studies more generally. His flight to the United Kingd... 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 Nation of Oklahoma. Then there were the ones I heard from my pat... 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 Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (published two years earlier). In H... 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 foundation stones of most of the American Literature modules taught... 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 already tumbling in slow motion, possibly dragging much of West... 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 historian, and (c) a Nixon scholar. I know I’m not the only o... 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 of my first year exams at UCC. During that year I had develo... 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 Terrace, where UCD was then, and enrolled in a graduate cour... 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 the world became different. The sense that we lived in a tim... 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 colour,” one of whom was a teenager, Hilary Teage. He was ninetee... 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 new routes. Though Star cars could be used by both black an... Read More...

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

“King of the Assholes, drama queen, Red Bull’d 12-year old, Next Chappelle, strangely relatable Megaman,” Black supremacist, hypocrite, poet, social commentator, superstar: the list of titles and labels ascribe... 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 Emotions 49), this essay will examine the methods for constructing ... 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 in a viewer society” (219). This essay seeks to examine the w... 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 motif of the haunted house has assumed an enduring role in the ... 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 comet-like. John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd (123) In The Pres... 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 shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions; Joel 2:28... 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 Gilead (2004). From an organizational perspective, Robinson car... Read More...

The opening lines to Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping famously locate the novel in two literary genealogies. Evoking the opener of Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and invoking the Biblical figure of com... Read More...

We remain unknown to ourselves. Nieztsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 3. Nietzsche places this declaration right at the beginning of his Genealogy of Morals (1887) as an unequivocal statement of fact. It ... 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.  The Pulitzer-prize-winning Gilead (2004) first tells the story... 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 dialogue with, her fiction. Even before her environmentalist p... 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 (1980). Applying psychoanalytic conceptualisations of trauma,... 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 writer so that his ideas might join the “printed material that... Read More...

Winner of the 2015 WTM Riches Essay Prize   In “Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,” Susanne Vees-Gulani proffers a systematic analysis of the explo... 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 social arts—conversation, cookery, dress, manners, the more gr... Read More...

Introduction In Mavis Gallant’s six Linnet Muir stories, identity is continually re-constructed through memory. Paul White states that “shifts in identity are highly complex, sometimes unstable, and often have... 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 achieved fame in the 1910s for her efforts to accurately repr... 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 students of Columbia University’s writing program in which he o... Read More...

In a 1967 interview with his former student and future annotator, Alfred Appel, Vladimir Nabokov announced, “Philosophically, I am an indivisible monist” (Strong Opinions 73). The author was responding to a lin... 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 looking for mothers instead . This needn’t be embarrassing. It’... Read More...

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 it argues that the current manifestation of Las Vegas could w... Read More...

Alan Graham Memorial Lecture, 2014 IAAS Annual Conference   There is a famous story about Lyndon Johnson’s White House.  In some versions, it was the night after Congress had passed the Voting Rights... Read More...

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 Blake has what he calls songs to win them back, to make room ... Read More...

One of the truisms of American studies seems to be the intrepid historylessness of the United States. De Tocqueville observed that democracy tended to “make each man forget his ancestors” (de Tocqueville 6), an... Read More...

In 1975, Richard Yates published what was widely considered to be his worst novel. Disturbing the Peace was dismissed by critics as a career-ending disaster from the writer who had published the acclaimed Revol... Read More...

American author Carson McCullers visited Ireland three times. The first two visits were to the ancestral home of Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Bowen in County Cork in May and July of 195... Read More...

Tributes to Emory Elliott (1942-2009): Compiled and introduced by Louise Walsh

What if the Government Schooling Campaigns to Americanize the Indians and to Anglicize the Irish had never taken place?

Crooning, Catering, and Changing Careers: Anne Tyler’s and Don Cherry’s Bands (and Bonds) of Gold

[R]epeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise: Robert Lowell’s Elegiac Poetry

David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline

“Tierra entre medio”: Borderlands of Knowledge in the Art of Frida Kahlo

DeLillo’s Underworld is one of the most celebrated of all modern American novels, and perhaps the most complex. This complexity is a product of its extraordinarily precise yet oblique chronological structure, which, in its attempt to account for the entire second-half of the twentieth-century, has challenged all its readers, confused many of them, and alienated some.

“I Wish I had Some Indian Blood”: Hemingway’s Primitivism and the Ojibwa Pimadaziwin Paradigm

“Tap Dancing on the Racial Boundary”: Racial Representation and Artistic Experimentation in Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s Stormy Weather Performance

Delmore Schwartz’s Genesis and ‘international consciousness’

Nathanael O'Reilly Critics often describe Walt Whitman as America’s national poet, and many have concerned themselves with how Whitman came to hold such a position in American and global culture; however, fe... Read More...

“If there is such a literature”: Thoughts on Teaching American Literature in Ireland / Irish Literature in America

Invented Irishness: The Americanization of Irish Identity in the Works of Joseph O’Connor

“Irish by descent”? Marianne Moore’s American-Irish Inheritance

Frank O'Connor's Representations of Relations between Ireland and America

Irish republicans in interwar New York

Jazz, Identity and Sexuality in Ireland during the Interwar Years