Cornered: Intimate Relations in The Words upon the WIndow-Pane

“Never Some Easy Flashback”

Abstract This paper provides a close reading of Paul Farley’s 160-line poem, “Thorns.” The poem is read in dialogue with William Wordsworth’s celebrated Romantic ballad “The Thorn.” Special attention is given to Farley’s treatment of memory and metaphor: It is shown how the first, exploratory part of the poem elaborates upon the interdependent nature of memory and metaphor, while the second part uses a more regulated form of imagery in its evocation of a generational memory linked to a particular place and time (the working-class Liverpool of the 1960s and 1970s). The tension between the two parts of the poem is reflected in the taut relationship between the poet and a confrontational alter…

Ambivalent Déjà-vu: World War II in the poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles

This article addresses how the poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles enters into a dialogue with the memory of World War II. Poems by Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Sinéad Morrissey are analysed, showing how World War II is a controversial source of comparison for these poets. While World War II provides important ways of framing the suffering and claustrophobia of the Northern Irish conflict, evident differences also mean that such comparisons are handled warily and with some irony. The poems are highly self-conscious utterances that seek to unsettle and develop generic strategies in the light of traumatic suffering. This essay draws on Michael Rothberg’s concept of mult…

Henrik Wergeland's Bouquet: Fredrika Bremer, Sentimentality and Nationalism inJan van Huysum's Flower Piece

Henrik Wergeland's poem Jan van Huysums Blomsterstykke (1840) is often characterized as a key work of Norwegian and Nordic romanticism. Where previous criticism has primarily focused on the poem's ekphrastic dimension, this reading will draw attention to how it employs many forms and genres, at the same time examining neglected thematic strands in the poem. A key lead to the poem's generic placement is provided by its oft-overlooked front-page, paratextual dedication to the Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer. It will be argued that works by Bremer, such as Hemmet, not only provide some precedent for the ekphrastic dimension of Wergeland's poem, but more importantly reveal the latter text's un…

Why Phaedrus? Plato in Virginia Woolf’s novel <i>Jacob’s Room</i>

Recent criticism has addressed the Platonic and ancient Greek influences on Virginia Woolf’s writings generally, and her novel Jacob’s Room specifically, but there has been no accounting of the motivation for the specific use of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus in the latter novel. This essay will address how Jacob’s Room engages closely with this dialogue not only with regard to thematic focal points of love and rhetoric, but also in terms of more encompassing structures of space and literary form. In the process, a less ironic approach to Plato and his philosophy than that argued for in much recent criticism comes to light in Woolf’s complex negotiations with the precedent of Victorian Hellenism.

‘George Mitchell’s Peace’: The Good Friday Agreement in Colum McCann’s Novel TransAtlantic

The impact of the different parties and individuals involved in constructing the Good Friday Agreement has been much discussed. This chapter scrutinizes the role of the American negotiator George Mitchell, as it is presented in Colum McCann’s novel TransAtlantic (2013). It places McCann’s novelistic depiction of Mitchell’s role in the context of both Mitchell’s own autobiographical writings and other external political assessments. Mitchell’s domestic life—including his experience of fatherhood—is shown to play a crucial role in the fictional treatment of the negotiations. McCann’s own position as an Irish-American author with a globalistic bent is taken into account, as is the way in which…

The "intimate enemies": Edward Dowden, W. B. Yeats and the formation of character

Published version of an article in the journal: Nordic Journal of English Studies. Also available from the publisher at: http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/njes/article/view/2917 Open Access Stung by Edward Dowden's reluctance to endorse the Irish Literary Revival, W. B. Yeats distanced himself publicly from the TCD Professor. This act of distancing has largely been accepted by subsequent scholarship as a reflection of Dowden's lack of influence on Yeats. Despite obvious disagreements on some key points, this essay will argue that Yeats is close to Dowden on a number of issues, by tracing their intimate dialogue about the writings of George Eliot, Shakespeare and Goethe. The concept of forma…

Poetic Industry: The Modernity of the Rhyming Weavers

The so-called “Rhyming Weavers” were artisan poets, mainly writing in the 18th and 19th centuries. John Hewitt’s Rhyming Weavers & Other Country Poets of Antrim and Down (1974) has played a crucial role in defining this group of writers, both in terms of who they were – Ulster-Scots poets of a particular region in the North of Ireland – and with respect to their achievement. This paper addresses the modernity of the Weaver poets, countering a tendency to see their work as merely nostalgic or belated manifestations of pre-modernist belonging and harmony. The singular dimension given to the work of the Rhyming Weavers by the combination of the vocations of writer and weaver is scrutinized…

Educational Experiments: Childhood Sympathy, Regulation, and Object-Relations in Maria Edgeworth’s Writings About Education

Charles Armstrong takes as his subject the place of infancy in Romantic-period ideas about education, with particular focus on the educational fiction of Maria Edgeworth, one of the most influential writers for children of the day. Armstrong contextualizes a selection of Edgeworth’s fiction for children in relation to the pedagogic treatise Practical Education (1798) which she co-authored with her father as well as a range of other contemporary debates about the role of literature in infant education. Armstrong reads Edgeworth’s writing for children as engaged in a complex dialogue both with earlier, Enlightenment ideas and with emergent, Romantic paradigms. In so doing, he not only sheds n…