Articles

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...

Laurence W. Mazzeno (Alvernia University) Sue Norton (Dublin Institute of Technology)   Posterity In his Preface to Due Considerations (2007), John Updike tells us that when he was a very young... Read More...

 Ciarán Kavanagh University College Cork   In “Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,” Susanne Vees-Gulani proffers a systematic analysis of the exp... Read More...

Consuming Beauty: Mass-Market Magazines and Make-up in the 1920s Rachael Alexander University of Strathclyde   Now, it would be an overstatement to insist that the art of living is exclusively un... Read More...

“No such thing as a ‘Canadian’”: Memory, Place, and Identity in Mavis Gallant’s Linnet Muir Stories Kate Smyth Trinity College Dublin   Introduction In Mavis Gallant’s six Linnet Muir storie... Read More...

“To Make For Myself a Person”: Immigrant Identities in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers Katie Ahern University College Cork Anzia Yezierska was a Jewish-American writer, most popular in the 1920s, and be... Read More...

The Poetics of the Sentence: Examining Gordon Lish’s Literary Legacy Tim Groenland Trinity College Dublin In September 2008, Gary Lutz, author of several collections of short fiction, delivered a lectu... Read More...

“She it was to whom ads were dedicated”: Materialism, Materiality and the Feminine in Nabokov’s Lolita. Laura Rose Byrne Trinity College Dublin In a 1967 interview with his former student and future an... Read More...

The WTM Riches Essay Prize was established in 2004 to recognise and reward high-quality work being done by younger scholars in many of the areas that are covered by the term “American Studies,” including histor... Read More...

Last Vegas? Philip McGowan (Queen’s University Belfast) 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... Read More...

ALAN GRAHAM MEMORIAL LECTURE Politics and Principle: Jimmy Carter in the Civil Rights Era Robert A. Strong Washington and Lee University April 25, 2014 To listen to the lecture click here There is a f... Read More...

“This is said on tiptoe”: Stanley Cavell and the Writing of Philosophy Áine Mahon University College Dublin Introduction So we are here, knowing they are “gone to burning hell”, she with a lie on her lips,... Read More...

“E Unibus Pluram”: the short story and the voices of a fragmented nation. Ignite article, IJAS online 2 One of the truisms of American studies seems to be the intrepid historylessness of the United States. De... Read More...

“Emily Grimes is me”: Anxiety, Feminism, and the Masculinity Crisis in Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade Jennifer Daly Trinity College Dublin In 1975, Richard Yates published what was widely considered... Read More...

Real Journeys of the Imagination: Carson McCullers and Ireland Rebecca Pelan University College Dublin American author Carson McCullers visited Ireland three times. The first two visits were to the ancestral... 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