Celtic Studies Commons^™

Navigating The Anglo-Irish Landscape: Imaginative Geographies In Bram Stoker And Elizabeth Bowen's Novels, Natalie Pearson

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

There has been great work done by scholars of Anglo-Irish Gothic tradition to assess the place of classic fictional characters within that tradition. Could a character’s identity contain an Irish dimension? Could they be, perhaps, an allegorical embodiment of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy or native Irish peasantry? All excellent questions; however, this present study looks to explore a different perspective by considering “place” itself across four Anglo-Irish Gothic novels: that of Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass (1890) and Dracula (1897) and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) and Bowen’s Court (1942). I seek to highlight the physical landscape in each …

Championing Food Studies Within The Field Of Irish Studies: A Serendipitous Autoethnographic Journey, Mairtin Macconiomaire

Doctoral

Food permeates every aspect of life and society, from birth to death—from the new-born’s first suckle to the food traditions associated with Irish wakes and funerals. Essential for survival, it has historically proven academically elusive, hidden in plain sight. Entangled with the domestic and the feminine, it was traditionally regarded as too mundane and too quotidian for consideration. Depending on how you define it, Irish Studies has somewhere between 50 and 100 years of history as an academic discipline. Food Studies is a more recent academic phenomenon, which has been steadily growing internationally since last decade of the twentieth century. …

Storytelling As A Cultural Context For London-Irish Writing In Donall Macamhlaigh’S Schnitzer O’Shea, Jimmy Murphy’S Kings Of The Kilburn High Road And Enda Walsh’S The Walworth Farce, Niamh Macgloin

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

The oral tradition of storytelling is culturally significant to Irish literature and important for immigrant communities as a way to connect with their home culture and share stories without the necessity of literacy. This essay considers the motif of storytelling and the importance of voicing the community in much London-Irish literature. In Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, a play within a play, the main character obsesses over retelling the story of their emigration from Ireland but corrupts its purity as he pushes his narrative of innocence too far, and the cycle of storytelling begins again. Similarly, in Murphy’s Kings of the …

Crime On The Periphery: Tana French’S Criminal Geography, Deirdre Flynn

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

This article will analyze how Tana French conceptualizes spatiality, focusing on her use of liminal spaces, edgelands and peripheries, as the settings for her crime scenes. Instead of more traditional Irish literary urban-rural binaries, French exploits the interface of both places, reflecting a contemporary post-industrial, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. In particular, in In the Woods (2007) the untamed woodland behind the housing estate in Knocknaree becomes an interfacial zone between the rural and urban, past and present. In The Likeness (2009), Whitethorn House sits at the edge of the village geographically, politically, and historically. In French’s first two novels peripheral spaces …

Marine Melodies: Traditional Scottish And Irish Mermaid And Selkie Songs As Performed By Top Female Vocalists In Contemporary Celtic Music, Olivia H. Phillips

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Mermaids and human-seal hybrids, called selkies, are a vibrant part of Celtic folklore, including ballad and song traditions. Though some of these songs have been studied in-depth, there is a lack of research comparing them to each other or to their contemporary renditions. This research compares traditional melodies and texts of the songs “The Mermaid,” “The Grey Selchie of Sule Skerry,” and “Hó i Hó i” to contemporary recordings by top female vocalists in Scottish and Irish music.

The texts and melodies I have identified as “source” material are those most thoroughly examined by early ballad and folklore scholars. The …

Wearin' O' The Green: St. Patrick's Day In New Haven, Connecticut 1842-1992, Neil Hogan, Connecticut Irish-American Historical Society

Connecticut Irish-American Historical Society Monographs (CTIAHS)

The story of St. Patrick's Day as celebrated in New Haven. The book conveys the pride, joy, patriotism, conviviality, devotion and even homesickness for Ireland that have inspired New Haven's Irish Americans to make this day an important community folk festival.