Claire Nally

Advertising, literature and print culture in Ireland, 1891-1922

This is the first study of the cultural meanings of advertising in the Irish Revival period. John Strachan and Claire Nally shed new light on advanced nationalism in Ireland before and immediately after the Easter Rising of 1916, while also addressing how the wider politics of Ireland, from the Irish Parliamentary Party to anti-Home Rule unionism, resonated through contemporary advertising copy. The book examines the manner in which some of the key authors of the Revival, notably Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats, reacted to advertising and to the consumer culture around them. Illustrated with over 60 fascinating contemporary advertising images, this book addresses a diverse and intriguing range of Irish advertising: the pages of An Claidheamh Soluis under Patrick Pearses editorship, the selling of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the advertising columns of The Lady of the House, the marketing of the sports of the Gaelic Athletic Association, the use of Irish Party politicians in First World War recruitment campaigns, the commemorative paraphernalia surrounding the centenary of the 1798 United Irishmen uprising, and the relationship of Murphys stout with the British military, Sinn Fein and the Irish Free State.

Commodity culture and social class in Dublin 1850-1916

‘Landlordism’. Chapter 12 highlights what it calls ‘Key personalities’, serving as a basic biographical introduction to key figures such as Paul Cullen and Asenath Nicholson. This volume’s particular strengths lie in its attempts to bring together original sources and scholarly analysis, as well as to unite important and interrelated events and themes in nineteenth-century history. The authors and editors manage to synthesise a huge amount of information in a relatively small text. It is particularly refreshing to see Ireland 1815– 1870 give attention to the 1850 Synod of Thurles, which was key to establishing modern Irish Catholic culture but remains curiously under-researched. Indeed, by placing the Catholic ‘devotional revolution’ alongside the Great Famine and Catholic Emancipation, the editors make an important statement about the power of religion alongside politics and the economy in nineteenth-century Ireland. The format and organisation of the volume is a bit unorthodox and can take a while to become familiar with. Each chapter is divided into subsections and then into numbered paragraphs. The result is that the volume often seems disjointed and the multitude of topics can appear unrelated. Because of this, the book itself works better as a reference volume rather than a comprehensive and focused narrative. In addition, the beginning student may find the way in which the book moves frequently between primary sources and secondary analysis confusing. The entirety of Ireland 1815–1870 is reproduced on the companion website to the series at multitext.ucc.ie. The organisation on the main page of the website is clear and user-friendly; indeed, the website is more effective than the text in this respect. Students who use the book and the website together, however, should be quite successful in learning about some of nineteenth-century Ireland’s most important developments. The volume also would be improved with a comprehensive bibliography or at least detailed notes – only chapter 11 includes brief bibliographies. The lack of a bibliography or notes might make it difficult for students to pursue additional research or locate some of the original sources in the text. Overall, however, Ireland 1815–1870 is a welcome contribution to Irish history, filling a void for the nineteenth century. The editors of the volume have managed to synthesise a great amount of material in a concise and easily accessed format. The book would be particularly useful to students or beginning scholars.

Transvestic Voices and Gendered Performance in Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto

Who or what are you?’ (McCabe 1998: 193) is one of the most definitive statements from Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto, which presents the transgendered subject as a significatory body who not only interrogates the nature of sexuality but the very stability of gendered identity. This chapter focuses on the effect of fragmentation and postmodern style in McCabe’s novel: given the variety of competing voices in the text as well as the frequently fanciful and downright duplicitous narration which is a hallmark of Breakfast on Pluto, what emerges is a polyvocal text which provides incisive commentary on the instability of gendered personae, and the ideological discourses which inform them. As a peripatetic figure, Patrick ‘Pussy’ Braden, the protagonist, transgresses sexual borders through female impersonation, and this is specifically enacted in the stylistic form of the novel and in everyday life, underscoring the multivalent theatricality of his/her identity. Narrated in the first- person, with shifts to omniscient narration via self- consciously fictional scenes embedded in the text, as well as sections of dreamy prose inserted at the request of Terence, Pussy’s psychiatrist, the elaborate and exuberantly verbose story of Pussy is presented as fluid, multiple and unstable, in ‘feminine’ voices which disrupt the dominant ideology of Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s even while it conforms to various stereotypes of femininity. The issue of border crossing is seen as intensely traumatic in the novel. McCabe’s Preface identifies ‘1922; a geographical border drawn by a drunken man, every bit as tremulous and deceptive as the one which borders life and death’ (x). The arbitrary nature of the border between the North and the South is obvious and clearly delineated here, relating as it does to Braden’s own negotiation of gender categories: ‘Dysfunctional doublebind of border- fever, mapping out the universe into which Mr. Patrick Braden, now some years later found himself tumbled’ (x).

Impure thoughts: sexuality, Catholicism and literature in twentieth-century Ireland

Michael Cronins Impure Thoughts: Sexuality, Catholicism and Literature in Twentieth-century Ireland offers a concertedly thoughtful account of the ways in which literature has engaged with religio...

Yeats and European drama

apparently indicating that many local populations were either quite pragmatic or perhaps just disappointingly uncertain about their allegiance. Particular attention is given to the Upper Silesian case, in which the secretary of the Irish commission, Francis Bourdillon, had earlier been involved, and which had also attracted the attention of Kevin O’Shiel, head of the Southern research and propaganda agency, the North-eastern Boundary Bureau. A particular feature of this book is that it reports such a wide range of nationalist perspectives. An extensive literature, especially secondary works, has been consulted, and the author offers his own opinions and analysis freely. His own assessments sometimes (it seems to me) become too prominent and on occasion he may be over-reliant on secondary works from decades later. An opportunity probably existed to explore official British and perhaps also Northern records to a greater extent – British cabinet papers appear to get little attention, for example. As a geographer, I am also conscious that the map record has had a very limited treatment. The contrast between the final map produced by the commission and that produced earlier by O’Shiel and the boundary bureau is striking. The former colours space according to which side had a majority, and so shows Derry as a small green spot surrounded by red. The latter is more detailed, using a proportional symbol for each of several hundred district electoral divisions. As a result the large green population in that small Derry area is immediately apparent, dwarfing the small rural orange populations that occupy the more extensive environs. Detailed scrutiny of this and other maps (including those in manuscript in the British National Archives) might have revealed the complexity of the task involved in any definition of a border based on religious or supposedly national affiliations. The red/orange and green areas interweave and it becomes clear that the transfers of any large areas of territory (except perhaps south Armagh and part of south Down) would have created a new series of minority populations. Maps seem to demonstrate a near-intractable situation, particularly when the maps are based on large numbers of small spatial units (parishes, district electoral divisions, or the ultimate micro-unit, the townland). Fortunately, perhaps, Ireland never faced, at least as far as the twentieth century and large populations were concerned, another of the gruesome solutions that was an outcome of strident ethnic nationalism, namely the uprooting and transfer of large masses of long-established inhabitants, the kind of brutal homogenisation that prevailed elsewhere in Europe two decades later. This book provides an important, extensive assessment. As well as offering well-studied and exhaustive perspectives, it succeeds also as a reminder that that there are further aspects of this controversial episode yet to be explored.

Coda — From the Armistice to the Saorstát

‘Two Murphy’s Please!’ That was the order as the Republican and the Free Stater finished their argument. Finishing the order, they both agreed that, Free State or Republic, Murphy’s (Cork) Extra Stout was the best for either.

Consumerism and Anti-Commercialism: The Yeatses, Print Culture and Home Industry

W. B. Yeats’s stated position regarding consumerism and commercial culture often differed quite discernibly from his practice.

The Sinn Féin Depot and the Selling of Irish Sport

Irish Studies have become a flourishing field of research, owing to the rapid political and social developments of Ireland in recent decades, with Ireland successively being transformed from a country of emigration and political trouble to a booming tiger state, before succumbing to the recent worldwide economic crisis. The articles collected in this volume examine representations of Ireland and ‘Irishness’ in drama, film, and popular culture, which have been significant and broadly influential in shaping the national identity of a wide audience, with regard to the creation of both auto- and hetero-stereotypes and their deconstruction. The twenty contributions by notable international scholars in the field of Irish Studies cover hitherto unexplored images of Ireland and the Irish in a diverse range of cultural practices. These include contemporary Irish drama, its contribution to identity formation and its engagement with continental models, film makers’ responses to articularly ‘Irish’ themes such as the recovery of the Gaelic inheritance, or e-migration to the United States. Aspects of popular culture addressed in this volume are sports, popular entertainment, advertising and propaganda, Irish myth, as well as different forms of cross-cultural exchange, with Ireland both as a source and target culture.

Oscar Wilde as Editor and Writer: Aesthetic Interventions in Fashion and Material Culture

Indeed, properly speaking, there is no such thing as Style; there are merely styles, that is all.

Prologue — The Irish Advertising Scene from the 1850s to the 1880s

In 1853, a contributor to the Irish Quarterly Review declared that ‘the woeful famine years were the epochs from which much social good, and many, very many, great advantages to the prosperity and to the well being of the country, and of the people, may be dated’.