Islandman translated: Tomas O'Crohan, autobiography and the politics of culture
The writings of Tomas O’Crohan in the early twentieth century were celebrated upon publication as icons of Irishness and the voice of the mysterious Gaeltacht expressing itself at last and just in time. Appearing at a sensitive time in Irish history, the reading of these texts as relics of an heroic Irish past nourished hopes of a brave Irish future. Their English translations, though received no less enthusiastically, have often been dismissed as imperfect and undesirable conduits to the author. Informed by the basic theme of dialogue, this thesis examines the politics of culture that brought the Islandman, man and book, into being, and that have surrounded the texts since they first appeared. It considers both the autobiography itself and the translation in terms of cultural process as well as product. It identifies the desire to control the reading of the texts as a legacy of the Gaelic League desire to wall the Irish culture in and examines it from several points of view – most notably from the points of view of translation theory, autobiography theory and, to a lesser extent, post-colonial theory. These modes of enquiry show that the sites of constraint imposed upon the texts reflect a cultural anxiety about what is revealed about this community that was made to represent Ireland. They demonstrate that the conventional reading of the texts, which privileges Tomas’ fisherman identity, has veiled the writer protagonist inscribed in the texts, subordinating his identity as a writer to his identity as a peasant. The thesis contests the reading of Tomas’ work as “representative” and “authentic” with a recognition of the personal aspects of the individual self that Tomas inscribed in his work.
Irish Renaissance annual
Eleven essays are included in this final volume of the Irish Renaissance Annual. The lead essay, "George Shiels: Enigmatic Playwright," by Daniel J. Casey, was originally the Shiels Centenary address given at Belfast's Lyric Theatre in May 1981. Most of the offerings here are devoted to James Joyce. Also in this volume, Gerald Doherty investigates Eastern influences on the work of W. J. Yeats, and Peter Drewniany gives an account of W. J. Lawrence's theater criticism in the Stage.
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited