Articles

“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 imagination as a lost golden era. In what is just the latest i... Read More...

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

Articles, Reviews

Peter Kivisto. The Trump Phenomenon: How the Politics of Populism Won in 2016. Emerald Publishing, 2017. It is a truism of recent political discourse that the United States has become a more polarized nation... Read More...

On Becoming an Americanist

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...

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

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...

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

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...

Some Comments on Irish American Studies

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...

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 in collaboration with the QUB Centre for the Americas, which ... Read More...

Two Roads Diverged

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...

But It Is Your Problem

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...

Reading Transatlantically in the Era of Trump

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...

(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, America’s past was uncontested. In my teens, I read To Kill a... Read More...

A Backward Glance: My Quarter Century in the IAAS

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...

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

Fionnghuala Sweeney and Bruce Baker

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...

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 Nation of Oklahoma. Then there were the ones I heard from my pat... Read More...

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

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...

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 foundation stones of most of the American Literature modules taught... Read More...

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

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...

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

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...

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

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...

A Transatlantic Conversation: Poetry, Politics, and Violence

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”: Reflections on American Studies in a Year of Crisis

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...

The Long Civil Rights Narrative of Show Me a Hero

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 of 1968), residential segregation remains a fact of life in... 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 greater than ever before. From healthcare to environmental policy... Read More...

The Underground Frontier: Norman Mailer’s An American Dream

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 under it. He therefore who has learned rightly to be in drea... Read More...

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

“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, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT. Ch... 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 past and articulate new and empowering perspectives on the pr... Read More...

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

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...

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

Hilary McLaughlin-Stonham

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...

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

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...

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

“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...

“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 Emotions 49), this essay will examine the methods for constructing ... Read More...

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

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...

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

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...

“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 comet-like. John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd (123) In The Pres... 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 shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions; Joel 2:28... Read More...

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

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...

Unaffected: Marilynne Robinson’s Postmodern Sentimentalism

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...

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

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...

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

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...

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

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...

(Sub)merged Worlds in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

Kelsie Donnelly

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...

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

Sue Norton and Laurence W. Mazzeno

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...

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

Ciarán Kavanagh

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...

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 social arts—conversation, cookery, dress, manners, the more gr... Read More...

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

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...

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

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...

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

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...

“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 monist” (Strong Opinions 73). The author was responding to a lin... Read More...

The Search for a Mother in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

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...

Fig. 1, Paris, Vegas

Last Vegas?

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

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

“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...

David Foster Wallace and the Voices of a Fragmented Nation

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

Clare Hayes-Brady

“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

“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

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...

emory elliot

Tributes to Emory Elliott (1942-2009)

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

school

What if the Government Schooling Campaigns (1820s-1920s) to Americanize the Indians and to Anglicize the Irish had never taken place?

Michael C. Coleman

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

Anne Tyler

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

Cecilia Donohue

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

robert lowell

[R]epeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise

Gillian Groszewski

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

David Foster Wallace

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

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

Frida Kahlo

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

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

Don DeLillo

Rubbish: Don DeLillo’s Wastelands

Margaret Robson

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.

Ernest Hemminway

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

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

bill bojangles robinson

Tap Dancing on the Racial Boundary

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

Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz’s Genesis and ‘international consciousness’

Delmore Schwartz’s Genesis and ‘international consciousness’

Imagined America: Walt Whitman’s Nationalism in the First Edition of Leaves of Grass

Nathanael O'Reilly

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

“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

Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh

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

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

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

“Why Don’t You Write About America?”

Victoria Kennefick

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

Irish republicans in interwar New York

Irish republicans in interwar New York

Jazz, Identity and Sexuality in Ireland during the Interwar Years

Jazz, Identity and Sexuality in Ireland during the Interwar Years