William Carleton, Irish song, and the art of keening

William Carleton was evidently familiar with wide traditions of Irish-language song, particularly through the singing in Irish of his mother. and this experience is evident throughout his writings. In addition to the explicit citation and celebrations of song in his work are less immediately recognised ways in which Carleton absorbed traditions of Irish singing into his fiction, particularly the form of caoineadh, or laments for the dead. Relatively few examples of early caointe (keens) have survived from the province of Ulster. However, this chapter argues that the practices of early nineteenth-century keening, as performed in Ulster, can be glimpsed in the novels and short stories of William Carleton. Close comparison of an extended fictional prose description in Valentine M’Clutchy (1845) with various accounts of caointe (Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire by Eibhlín Dhubh and a declamation recorded in 1828 by the County Kilkenny schoolmaster Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin) indicates Carleton’s evident knowledge of Irish traditions of lament. Irish song is shown to be typified by its lyric, non-narrative form and to be marked with particular emotional intensity, elements still visible within the prose recreations in English of Carleton’s fiction.

The Great Famine in Fiction, 1901–2015

This chapter considers Irish writers’ continual reimagining of the Great Famine and the way it has shaped understandings of the past and present. In doing so, it addresses novels and short stories from nineteenth-century writers such as William Carleton, Mary Anne Hoare, and Margaret Brew, who sought to explain or reinterpret the catastrophe while it was still a living memory. The return of the Famine in later historical and neo-Victorian fiction by writers such as Liam O’Flaherty, John Banville, and Joseph O’Connor is considered in light of the association between Famine fiction and various crises in the post-independence era. The discussion also extends to the resurgence in literary interest in the Famine in the 1990s and early 2000s, which, the chapter suggests, was due not only to the greater exposure of the Famine in public discourse but also to a revival of insecurities that seemed to belong to the past.

William Carleton’s and Charles Kickham’s Ethnographic Realism

This chapter focuses on William Carleton and Charles Joseph Kickham, two Irish writers who received critical and popular acclaim for their truthful portrayals of Irish life in the nineteenth century but are understood as ethnographic rather than realist writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Questioning this distinction between realism and ethnography by studying narrative metalepsis within their novels, the chapter argues that both Carleton and Kickham demonstrate how institutions imagine a future that depends upon forgetting. Remembering what institutions work to forget, the politically conservative Carleton legitimates traditional practices that institutions seek to root out while Kickham, a Fenian who advocated revolution, cultivates an anti-institutional and anti-English political stance.