“Addiction is a strange bastard”: Alcohol(ism) in Irish Fiction

Although it is hard to challenge the claim that alcohol can be considered inherent in Irish culture, the common perception of the fact often feeds on clichés. What helps understand this question is Irish literature. On the one hand, it portrays jubilant festivity to be found in many literary works; on the other, it renders the drama behind alcohol dependency, shifting the focus from joviality towards the more murky aspects of drink consumption, mostly thematised in contemporary literature. This article takes a closer look at how Irish literature renders alcohol use and abuse, and how the literary representations offer a broader perspective, allowing to reconsider some of the stereotypical notions of the proverbial Irish propensity for drink.

Farming in Modern Irish Literature

This innovative study analyzes the range of representation of farming in Irish literature in the period since independence/partition in 1922, as Ireland moved from a largely agricultural to a developed urban society. In many different forms, poetry, drama, fiction, and autobiography, writers have made literary capital by looking back at their rural backgrounds, even where those may be a generation back. The first five chapters examine some of the key themes: the impact of inheritance on family, in the patriarchal system where there could only be one male heir; the struggles for survival in the poorest regions of the West of Ireland; the uses of childhood farming memories whether idyllic or traumatic; the representation of communities, challenging the homogeneous idealizing images of the Literary Revival; the impact of modernization on successive generations into the twenty-first century. The final three chapters are devoted to three major writers in whose work farming is central: Patrick Kavanagh, the small farmer who had to find an individual voice to express his own unique experience; John McGahern in whose fiction the life of the farm is always posited as alternative to an arid and rootless urban milieu; Seamus Heaney who re-imagined his farming childhood in so many different modes throughout his career.

How Time Flies in theCath Maige Tuired

The Túatha Dé Danann are seemingly a pre-Christian survival in early medieval Irish literature, where they are portrayed as magicians, druids, or powerfully knowledgeable artisans. Traditionally slotted into the ‘pseudohistorical’ scheme, thus constituting one of the primeval waves of invaders who shaped the land and institutions of Ireland, the Túatha Dé Danann (and their opponents, the Fomoiri) have a narrative space to themselves in the text known as the Cath Maige Tuired ‘(Second) Battle of Mag Tuired’. The characters Lug and the Dagda, ‘Good God’, represent contrasting perspectives on the struggle taking place, which I argue is primarily concerned with the question of whether, after the Battle, the Túatha Dé Danann will continue resisting time and death, or will embrace these quotidian realities.

Myth as a Historical Resource : The Case of Orgain Denna Ríg (The Destruction of Dinn Ríg)

This article examines how mythology and fictional narratives in medieval Irish literature were used to communicate important societal ideas and to encode political messages. It is a commonplace that stories about the past were re-used, re-cycled and re-interpreted in order to justify the present. These sources were utilized by the ruling classes in medieval Ireland to help explain the status quo on the one hand and to justify emerging change on the other. As the preference of the medieval Irish was ‘to take their history in the form of fiction’, many stories like Orgain Denna Ríg (The Destruction of Dinn Ríg) are extant from this period, stories which provide us with an important perspective on the growth and articulation of a significant facet of medieval Irish historiography.