Sex, Violence, and Religion in the Irish-American Domestic Novel

This chapter compares post-war Irish-American domestic novels by male and female authors, examining the influence of politics, assimilation, and ethnic identity on their plots and characters. Focusing on representative novels per decade from the 1940s to the present, the analysis finds that while both male and female writers agree that married life rarely equals domestic bliss, the authors’ gender identity determines their representation of the roles played by marriage, sexuality, and religion. The first part of the chapter examines the preponderance of adultery and gendered abuse; the second discusses attitudes towards women, sex, and sexual preference; and the third traces the movement from immigrant piety to an intellectual, independent view of the Church that acknowledges its ongoing gender hierarchy. The discussion not only reveals the progression of Irish Americans’ fictional lives since the 1940s but also examines the role of Irish-American women writers in expanding that view.

Following the Money: Fenian Bonds, Diasporic Nationalism, and Distant Revolutions in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States*

This article tracks and analyses the history of bonds issued by the Fenian Brotherhood in the 1860s to argue that US Americans could take part in a marketplace in distant revolutions in the mid-nineteenth century. In this period, various, disparate nationalist groups issued bonds, suggesting a commonly understood method of generating funds, sustaining sentimental attachment, and projecting the authority of authentic nation-states. The Civil War-era United States was a particularly fertile environment for the issuance of such bonds because of its traditions of free banking, the ease with which bonds might be floated to a public increasingly au fait with their operation, and a broad rhetorical sympathy with the distant revolutions for which these bonds stood. The debt these bonds represented acted as a sentimental form of ‘special money’ and, for Irish-Americans, as for other immigrant communities in the United States, they allowed participation in a transnational movement without ever leaving their immediate neighbourhood. Tracing their issuance and circulation, then, allows us to write a material, sentimental and social history of everyday transnationalism and anti-imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. For later generations, this sentimental quality could and did devolve into a more immediately financial form, and the article concludes by identifying the redemption of these bonds as a significant step in legitimating the new Irish republic to a US audience.

Pittsburgh and North

A look at the impoverished working-class city of Pittsburgh that Maurice Costello was born into in 1877. Amid devastating economic and social unrest, his Irish immigrant mother struggles to support herself and her infant son after the death of his father in the steel mills. As Maurice reaches adulthood, the rise of Irish Americans in the entertainment world offers a way out. He cuts his professional teeth with the Harry Davis Company inthe heart of the city’s vibrant theatrical district, before striking out on his own as a traveling actor.

The Union as It Was

When the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter, Catholic northerners rallied to save the Union from its greatest threat. Some hoped that immigrant and Catholic bravery and sacrifice on the battlefield would forever end anti-Catholic nativism in America. As conservatives and Democrats, they also strongly resisted attempts to enlarge the purpose of the war, especially on the issue of emancipating southern slaves. Remembering the connections between antislavery politics and anti-Catholic nativism in the antebellum North, they feared Republicans’ attacks on slavery might be followed by assaults on their rights as naturalized citizens and Catholics. The most prominent pro-Union leaders in the North were the Irish Americans Archbishop John Hughes (1797–1864) of New York and the Bostonian Patrick Donahoe (1811–1901), owner of the widely published newspaper the Boston Pilot. Together these two men led Catholic conservatives’ fight to restore the Union as it was before the outbreak of war.

‘Quiet Men’

This chapter examines fictional Returned Yanks – notably in Julia O’Faolain’s No Country for Young Men (1980), Benedict Kiely’s Nothing Happens in Carmincross (1985) and Roddy Doyle’s The Dead Republic (2010) – who become involved in and/or comment on the Northern Irish ‘Troubles.’ This conflict, through its resurgence in the late 1960s, challenged optimistic and prematurely celebratory attitudes towards Irish modernisation that claimed that nationalism and ‘atavistic’ ideological attachments would disappear through the modernisation process. However, an understanding of nationalism that sees insurgency as antithetical to modernity is fallacious for, as Benedict Anderson argued so influentially in Imagined Communities (1983), nationalism is a product of modernity. Many Troubles narratives feature Irish Americans whose parents or grandparents were involved in the nationalist struggle in the 1920s and who retain a recalcitrant commitment to the ideal of a united Ireland. In narratives of the Troubles, then, the Returned Yank is a kind of revenant or ghost from a past which the southern state – whose authority was profoundly undermined in the 1970s and 1980s by Northern republican challenges to its legitimacy – wishes to disavow.