The Love for Romania of a Northern-Irish Woman: Mabel 'Maria' Farley Nandriș

This article aims to discuss the case study of a Northern-Irish woman, Mabel ‘Maria’ Farley Nandriș, who became a real promoter of Romanian culture. Her intellectual passion for this land started in her youth, when she first came to Romania, in the 1930s, grew through her marriage to the Romanian university professor Grigore Nandriș, her baptism in the Orthodox Church and the Romanian-Northern-Irish heritage left to their son, Professor Jonh Nandriș. Her dual legacy is revealed by her publications, even if away from Romania because of historical circumstances, and she will be seen, in this article, as an informal ambassador of Romania on the British Isles.

Epilogue—How Cathleen Became Mrs. Monihan

The Epilogue follows Sara Allgood’s history of performance and contributions to theatrical texts from her early days in Inghinidhe through her film work until her death in Hollywood in1950. What appears again and again in her American film work is an aging actress from Ireland translating stillness in the face of extremity in ways that strengthen even the smallest, sometimes nameless characters against the stereotype of the emotive Irish immigrant. From her earliest days in Inghinidhe, Allgood was part of a project to provide steadying images of Ireland against British melodrama and cartoons; her film work in America continued this work in nearly one hundred film roles. From her unpublished “Memories” and her surviving films, Sara Allgood emerges as a woman focused on creating theater and film, not simply taking direction. Her contribution to both mediums, a refusal to overact, and a gravity and stillness, educates the audience about what to expect of an Irish woman. Tracing the afterlife of her street theater and Abbey career into her later film work may restore some attention to a performer who developed the Abbey Stare for particular ends, revising established readings of both gender and nation in Ireland and America.

Bowen, The Bell, and the Late-Modernist Short Story

This essay looks at Elizabeth Bowen's presence in The Bell during the war years. She contributed an essay, a short story, two pieces of memoir, two obituaries, and a few other, smaller pieces to the magazine, but also featured in an interview, several reviews, and O'Faoláin's editorials and critical essays. Yet, as a Protestant, Anglo-Irish woman writer living in England, Bowen was in many ways an odd presence in The Bell, which squarely focused on Irish life and Irish writing. While O'Faoláin's mission to present an inclusive view of Ireland may explain his publication of Bowen's autobiographical essays, her prominence as a fiction writer can better be accounted for through her achievements in the modern short story, the genre O'Faoláin sought to promote as a central Irish literary form in The Bell. Indeed, although Bowen's short stories have been classified as ‘modernist’ and O'Faoláin's as ‘realist’, their aesthetics of the short story are remarkably similar. Still, The Bell’s championing of Bowen's short fiction as a model to follow was undermined by its framing of Bowen as an ‘aristocratic’ writer whose literary snapshots of Irish life had a peculiarly dated and blinkered quality.

Deconstructing Stereotypes in the Discourse of the Irish Republic

Recent decades have witnessed in Ireland the advancement and integration of women in the socio-cultural and public spheres. Nonetheless, what does it mean to be Irish and a woman in today's Irish Republic? This period has seen a notable emergence of a generation of new feminine voices that have marked a change in the image offered of the Irish woman until this present moment, an image provided previously almost only by male writers and constructed mainly in terms of religiosity, passivity and motherhood. The short stories written by women at the turn of the 21st century highlight the change in both the perception and position of the Irish woman within her society; however, the Celtic Tiger and Post Celtic Tiger short stories frequently look back into Ireland's past to explore the present to challenge and understand former and contemporary dominant narratives, discourses and stereotypes. This is also the major objective of this chapter.