English Language and Literature Commons^™

Revised Emblems Of Erin In Novels By John Mcgahern And Colum Mccann (2015), Shaun O’Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

In “Cathal’s Lake,” a 1996 story by Colum McCann, “a big [Irish] farmer with a thick chest” lives by a lake, “which in itself is a miniature countryside—ringed with chestnut trees and brambles, banked ten feet high on the northern side, with another mound of dirt on the eastern side, where frogsong can often be heard.” In By the Lake, a 2002 novel by John McGahern, an aging Irishman also lives by a lake, another enclosed space of tranquility, as is suggested in the opening lines: “The morning was clear. There was no wind on the lake. There was …

Home And Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America (2013), Shaun O’Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

From the 2013 Editor's Note by Padraig O'Malley: Shaun O’Connell has lost none of his touch. In “Home and Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America,” O’Connell juxtaposes two novels: Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy (1998) and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009) and reveals the parallels and contrasts that enrich the discussion of Irish and Irish American identities. Toibin, an Irish writer, would have us see an America, land of the free, as an open, inviting place but exacting in redeeming promises made; McDermott, an American writer, portrays an Ireland that is magical, a little bit of heaven, but finally a closed and bitter …

Revised Emblems Of Erin In Novels By John Mcgahern And Colum Mccann, Shaun O’Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

In “Cathal’s Lake,” a 1996 story by Colum McCann, “a big [Irish] farmer with a thick chest” lives by a lake, “which in itself is a miniature countryside—ringed with chestnut trees and brambles, banked ten feet high on the northern side, with another mound of dirt on the eastern side, where frogsong can often be heard.” In By the Lake, a 2002 novel by John McGahern, an aging Irishman also lives by a lake, another enclosed space of tranquility, as is suggested in the opening lines: “The morning was clear. There was no wind on the lake. There was …

Home And Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

From the Editor's Note by Padraig O'Malley: Shaun O’Connell has lost none of his touch. In “Home and Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America,” O’Connell juxtaposes two novels: Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy (1998) and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009) and reveals the parallels and contrasts that enrich the discussion of Irish and Irish American identities. Toibin, an Irish writer, would have us see an America, land of the free, as an open, inviting place but exacting in redeeming promises made; McDermott, an American writer, portrays an Ireland that is magical, a little bit of heaven, but finally a closed and bitter place. …

Of Milton’S First Disobedience And The Fruit Of The Tree: “Ad Patrem” As Prologue To Paradise Lost, C. Macaulay Ward Jr

Interdisciplinary Perspectives: a Graduate Student Research Showcase

In Paradise Lost, first published in 1667, John Milton assumes the role of God’s advocate to make the case that God’s decrees are beyond reproach; humankind’s eternal death sentence and the banishment from Eden, issued as a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, are not excessive punishments. Twelve books and nearly ten thousand lines later, however, Milton’s argument seems to contradict itself. The Archangel Michael tells Adam that in the fullness of time, a new Paradise will be established as a place of joy and wonder far superior to the original Eden; and ironically, this wondrous ending is an …

Playing For His Side: Kipling’S ‘Regulus,’ Corporal Punishment, And Classical Education, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics Faculty Publication Series

Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “Regulus,” revolves around the flogging of a student who has let loose a mouse in the drawing classroom of a turn-of-the-century British public school. The first part of the story is devoted to a fifth-form Latin class’s line-by-line explication of Horace’s fifth Roman ode, in which the story’s title character is presented as a paradigm of manly virtue; the remainder is given over to narration of the mouse-miscreant’s progress toward punishment, in thematic counterpoint to the Regulus exemplum. Within that idiosyncratic framework, the story tackles as ambitious a topic as the purposes of education, with particular …

Thinking Of England, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

Shaun O'Connell, in "Thinking of England," examines the current state of "purely English" literature and concludes that "there will be worthy books on the critical, if not terminal, condition of England."

The works discussed in this article include: Latecomers, by Anita Brookner; A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers, by Hugh Kenner; Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin; The Russia House, by John le Carre; The Fifth Child, by Doris Lessing; Nice Work, by David Lodge; and Out of the Shelter, by David Lodge.