Edna O’Brien and the Politics of Belatedness

2020 ◽  
pp. 287-304
Author(s):  
Jane Elizabeth Dougherty
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Edna O'brien ◽  
Female Maturation ◽  
Female Subjects

This chapter explores the politics and poetics of Irish female belatedness in Edna O’Brien’s work, career, and critical reception, examining in particular her representation of Irish female maturation, her place in Irish literary history, and her frequent use of intertextuality. It explains that, although O’Brien is in many ways a literary pioneer, not least in being the first postcolonial female writer of rural Irish Catholic background to achieve international prominence, in other ways her work and career are emblematic of a kind of belatedness. Her first novel was among the last to be banned in Ireland, she writes about female subjects struggling to be included in the Irish social and symbolic orders, and her work has been criticized for being derivative of earlier writers, particular James Joyce. Only in recent years, as Irish society has itself radically changed, has O’Brien come, belatedly, to be seen as a major author.

Wieland; or, The Transformation of American Literary History

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
Duncan Faherty
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Early American ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Early American Novel

By considering the centrality of Wieland in the development of American literary history, this chapter moves to reaffirm its importance for students of US literature. The chapter begins by surveying the major editions of Wieland, from the first modern edition in 1926 through the scholarly editions in the early twenty-first century. In so doing, the chapter charts how scholars have often recursively positioned Wieland as a bellwether text in the formation of narratives about the development of American literary history, a practice that is often predicated on positioning the text as either the first or the first noteworthy early American novel. In tracing the evolution of the critical reception of the text, the chapter moves to underscore how Wieland’s enduring contribution to our understanding of the development of American literature and culture remains Brown’s insistence on the fallibility of isolationist narratives to register accurate genealogies or histories.

Text and Document in Dante’s Vita nova

2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-23
Author(s):  
Dario Del Puppo
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Giovanni Boccaccio ◽  
Textual Interpretation ◽  
Cultural Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Print Edition ◽  
Textual Meaning

Abstract This article considers the importance of material philological features of the early manuscripts of Dante’s Vita nova for the work’s critical reception. Over the centuries, editors (most notably Giovanni Boccaccio) have recast textual meaning in the work mainly by marginalizing the poet’s glosses and by reformatting the poems. Attention to the material features of the earliest extant manuscript of the Vita nova (MS Martelli 12) with respect to later copies, however, prompts us to consider the creative interplay between Dante’s prosimetrum and the material features of the manuscript. To interpret a text critically is to acknowledge and to examine also how a manuscript or print edition orients textual interpretation. The editorial history of the Vita nova teaches us about the cultural processes and discourses of literary culture and about Italian literary history.

‘Two men, so dissimilar’: Class, Marriage and Masculinity in George Moore’s Albert Nobbs (1918) and Simone Benmussa’s The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (1977)

2018 ◽  
pp. 37-63
Author(s):  
Rachel Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Feminist Theatre ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Fantasy ◽  
Second Wave

This chapter examines a critically overlooked literary fiction by an Irish writer whose legacy has tended to be overshadowed by the modernist generation which succeeded him. George Moore’s Albert Nobbs depicts the lives of not one but two female-bodied men working in a Dublin hotel in the 1860s. It provides an alternative origin for a literary history of transgender representation, with an emphasis on lived experience and social reality rather than the historical fantasy of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, published ten years later. This chapter aims to articulate the ‘transgender capacity’ (David Getsy, 2014) of Moore’s novella, exploring the insights it offers into the social and economic functions of gender. Simone Benmussa’s 1977 stage adaptation, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, has been canonised as a classic of feminist theatre; reflection on its critical reception reveals the ways in which transgender motifs have been interpreted in Second Wave feminist contexts.

The Land of Spices, the Enigmatic Signifier, and the Stylistic Invention of Lesbian (In)Visibility

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margot Backus ◽  
Joseph Valente
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Clear Case ◽  
Sexual Representation ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Autobiographical Fiction ◽  
Kate O'brien

The context in which Kate O'Brien came of age created both the necessity and the opportunity for her to fashion her self-image out of indefinite, radically interpretable cues of taboo sexual identity, a process reflected in her coming of age, autobiographical fiction, The Land of Spices. In following the path of her literary hero, James Joyce, whose iconic Bildungsroman her own Land of Spices closely tracks, O'Brien would have recognized how the increased self-reflexivity of the modernist novel was geared to the narrative deployment of indefinite or enigmatic signifiers. O'Brien thus drew upon and developed the modernist style that Joyce pioneered, which constituted the text as a space about as well as of interpretation, a hermeneutical field that interrogates its own limits and possibilities. In Irish society, with its legacy of Jansenist Catholicism, a structure of vigorously buttressed ignorance, undergirded by a strict knowledge of what and where to overlook, has persisted through much of the twentieth century, making it easy to mis-or underinterpret the more subtle literary strategies of cryptic sexual representation. As regards lesbian visibility, the critical reception of The Land of Spices affords a clear case in point

Irish Literary Cinema

2020 ◽  
pp. 441-458
Author(s):  
Kevin Rockett
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
The Past ◽  
Edna O'brien ◽  
William Trevor ◽  
Literary Output

This chapter examines the adaptation of Irish literary fiction for the screen over the past century. The discussion addresses three main aspects of this theme, beginning with the influence of the cinema and cinema-going on authors as recorded in their memoirs and literary output, and the influence of cinematic form on narrative structure, the latter being most evident in the later work of James Joyce. A second strand examines notions of female agency as they are refracted through the lens of the migrant experience in the novels of Edna O’Brien, Maeve Binchy, and Colm Tóibín. Finally, the post-independence legacy, as depicted in adaptations of the novels and short stories of John McGahern and William Trevor in particular, is discussed as a means of revealing the predicament of those psychically frozen during a time of economic, social, and cultural stagnation.

Convergent-beam thickness determination: The advantages of digital imaging

1994 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 420-421
Author(s):  
Stuart McKernan ◽  
C. Barry Carter
Keyword(s):  
Intensity Variation ◽  
Convergent Beam Electron Diffraction ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Thickness Determination ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Automated Processing ◽  
Beam Thickness ◽  
Convergent Beam ◽  
Remarkable Agreement

Convergent-beam electron diffraction (CBED) patterns contain an immense amount of information relating to the structure of the material from which they are obtained. The analysis of these patterns has progressed to the point that under appropriate, well specified conditions, the intensity variation within the CBED discs may be understood in a quantitative sense. Rossouw et al for example, have produced numerical simulations of zone-axis CBED patterns which show remarkable agreement with experimental patterns. Spence and co-workers have obtained the structure factor parameters for lowindex reflections using the intensity variation in 2-beam CBED patterns. Both of these examples involve the use of digital data. Perhaps the most frequent use for quantitative CBED analysis is the thickness determination described by Kelly et al. This analysis has been implemented in a variety of different ways; from real-time, in-situ analysis using the microscope controls, to measurements of photographic prints with a ruler, to automated processing of digitally acquired images. The potential advantages of this latter process will be presented.

A Tape Striation Counting Method for Determining Fundamental Frequency

1979 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 246-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter B. Mueller ◽  
Marla Adams ◽  
Jean Baehr-Rouse ◽  
Debbie Boos
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Frequency ◽  
Counting Method ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Fundamental Frequencies ◽  
Counting Procedure ◽  
Female Subjects

Mean fundamental frequencies of male and female subjects obtained with FLORIDA I and a tape striation counting procedure were compared. The fundamental frequencies obtained with these two methods were similar and it appears that the tape striation counting procedure is a viable, simple, and inexpensive alternative to more costly and complicated procedures and instrumentation.

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