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Shaping Destinies: Women and the Hungarian Refugee Movement to Canada (1956–1958)
Views:147By December 1958, Canada had admitted almost 38,000 Hungarian refugees, forced to flee their country after Soviet forces crushed the October 1956 uprising. A rich historiography has examined this migration from a range of perspectives, but an analysis of women’s actions and attitudes represents an uncharted approach. Archival research reveals that Canadian women expressed opinions and took on a variety of roles related to the refugee movement. Examining those opinions and roles not only offers a novel perspective on Canada’s response to the refugee crisis, but it also provides insights into the evolving roles of women in Canadian society. The weight of intersectionality often muted the voices of women of Hungarian origin, both Canadians and refugees. Yet, refugee women were accorded a symbolic power that played its own role in the movement, and they found ways to exercise their agency to achieve their desired admission and settlement outcomes. (ST)
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A Novel Inquiry into a Strategic Aspect of Irish Women’s Theatre across a Century
Views:106Book review:
Hill, Shonagh. Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 257 pages. ISBN 978-1-108-48533-3. Hb. ₤75.
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Beyond the “Raked Gardens”: Female Identity in American Suburban Poetry
Views:182The article analyzes an overlooked aspect of American suburban poetry—the writing of American women poets who deal with the problem of how to represent female identity. Drawing on the existing criticism of women’s poetry, a comprehensive survey of the suburban poems by American women poets, from the 1940s to the 2000s, is provided. The article documents the various approaches that these poets adopt in order to explore identity while resisting the gender stereotypization in American suburbia. These approaches include either embracing the suburban ideal of domestic conformity or attempting to present women suburbanites who reject the socially prescribed roles forced upon them and develop new identities of their own. (JF)
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The Architecture of the Self
Views:59Book review:
Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. xiii + 246 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-53681-5. Hb. $90.
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What Makes the Genre of Lyric Compelling?
Views:63Book review:
Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015. x + 391 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-74426-4. Hb. $41.
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Women in Contemporary Irish Theatre: Widening the Space
Views:59Book review:
Haughton, Miriam, and Mária Kurdi, eds. Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2015. 251 pages. ISBN 978-1-909325-75-3. Pbk. €20.
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Alternative Readings of J. M. Synge’s Drama Predicated on Archival Material
Views:85Book review:
Collins, Christopher. Theatre and Residual Culture: J. M. Synge and Pre-Christian Ireland. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 301 pages. Hb. ISBN 978-1-349-94871-0. €106.99.
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Geographies of Women
Views:75Book review:
Beebe, Kathryne, and Angela Davis, eds. Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn. London: Routledge, 2015. x + 158 pages. ISBN 978-1-138-83049-3. Hb. £110.
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Experimental Dramaturgy, Intellectual and Art-related Subjects in Irish Theatre
Views:71Book review:
Woodward, Guy, ed. Across the Boundaries: Talking about Thomas Kilroy. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2014. 112 pages. ISBN 978-1-909325-51-7. Pbk. €25.00
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Introduction
Views:116Introduction to the Special Section: Negotiating Aging and Ageism in English-Speaking Fiction and Theatre
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Dramaturgical Roles of Present and Past Teenage Characters in Post-Agreement Northern Irish Drama
Views:117The Good Friday Agreement (1998) has set in motion significant changes in Northern Ireland, generating new conditions which, however, also brought numerous problems to the surface on various levels of society. Sociologists have called attention to how intensely the persistent afterlife of sectarian hostilities affect especially teenagers who are often unable to see their goals clearly. Several contemporary Northern Irish playwrights have relied on young characters to pinpoint timely and pressing social and cultural issues as well as to throw light on the precarity of the post-Troubles environment. This essay discusses three plays from different decades of the post-Agreement period: Gary Mitchell’s Trust (1999), Lucy Caldwell’s Leaves (2007), and Owen McCafferty’s Quietly (2012). Their respective dramaturgies showcase the long-lasting influence of the historical burden of the Northern Irish conflict on young peoples’ subjectivities as well as demonstrate how middle-aged characters are still haunted by memories of the psychic wounds they suffered during the most formative years of their lives. Through their underage protagonists, each playwright suggests that members of this generation might not be able to further strengthen the peace they have formally inherited. (MK)
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Aging and Death in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and Tennessee Williams’s The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
Views:481With focus on the tropes of aging and death in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox (1960) and Tennessee Williams’s The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), the essay investigates the negotiation of the protagonists’ identity through specters of age and the means of encountering death, and it analyzes the representation of the dramas’ senior citizens with special regard to the ways in which these characters challenge mainstream cultural constructions of aging. On their deathbed, both Albee’s and Williams’s protagonists are reconnecting with their pasts in idiosyncratic ways: they build up a conscious “age autobiography” (Margaret Morgenroth Gulette) in an inventory of events and feelings assessing a complete(d) life and achieve an “agewise” (Gulette) identity that comes full circle in the very moment of grace. The characters who escort these two elderly women on their last journey reconceptualize the sense of intimacy between people. The dialogic potential of their empathy, care, and unconditional support during the end-game of the protagonists accommodates difference in various contexts by blurring the boundary between the old and the young as well as the one between men and women, because death has neither age nor gender. Thus, these intergenerational exchanges help elder characters’ agewise enterprises into the unknown gain a cathartic sense of freedom. (RMC)
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“Holding so Much of the Mind of Ireland” and Writing Modernist Drama: Celebratory Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of John Millington Synge
Views:211Celebratory Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of John Millington Synge
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Narrating Motherhood: The Power of Storytelling
Views:251Book review:
Martin, BettyAnn, and Michelann Parr, eds. Writing Mothers: Narrative Acts of Care, Redemption, and Transformation. Bradford, ON: Demeter P, 2020. 258 pages. ISBN 978-1-77258-223-9. Pbk. $34.95.
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Old Age and Aging: Presence and Absence in the Plays of Brian Friel
Views:395Old age and aging may not seem an immediate priority in Brian Friel’s drama, yet several plays feature memorable characters of old, elderly, aging, or declining people, whose presence on stage is occasionally revealed through their absence. The growing cultural visibility of older people contrasts with their invisibility as useless members of society: they are physically present, yet invisible. In Friel’s dramaturgy, this arouses reflection on the role of old age absent from the mimetic space and relegated to the diegetic space offstage; absence as a theatrical device marks offstage characters as potential catalysts for action. If in some plays elderly characters remain in the background, in others they become pivotal to dramatic construction, ranging from dominant figures like Columba in The Enemy Within (1962), to tyrannical ones such as Manus in The Gentle Island (1971) and Father in Aristocrats (1979), to social outcasts in The Loves of Cass McGuire (1967) and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990). This essay considers the variety of ways in which Friel introduces or openly deals with the issues of aging and of old age through stagecraft and varied dramatic choices as well as the manipulation of mimetic and diegetic space in terms of presence and absence in particular. (GT)
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Affect for Mothers and Others
Views:93Book review:
Lane, Julia and Eleonora Joensuu, eds. Everyday World-Making: Toward an Understanding of Affect and Mothering. Bradford, ON: Demeter P, 2018. 340 pages. ISBN 978-1-77258-140-9. Pbk. $34.95.
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Seaside Resort Blues: The English Seaside in the 1930s
Views:202In the interwar period, seaside holidays had become accessible to more people in the United Kingdom than ever before. It was not least the unapologetic hedonism of the working classes that gave places like Blackpool and Scarborough their vibrant energy. However, a notable number of English travelogues in the 1930s depict seaside resorts as overcrowded, vulgar, debilitating, and in fact un-English. During the years in which the UK faced the rising threat of fascism, the seaside became a site where ideas of Englishness, popular culture, and masculinity came under scrutiny. In my paper, I explore these ambivalent constructions of the English seaside resort, from J. B. Priestley’s English Journey to the collection Beside the Seaside, in which women authors, including Yvonne Cloud and Kate O’Brian, celebrate the seaside as a catalyst of female agency. (VR)
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Disruptive Domesticity in Shakespearean Drama
Views:141Book review:
Whipday, Emma. Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 262 pages. ISBN 9781108474030. Pbk. £29.99
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Contemporary and Beyond?
Views:63Book review:
Acheson, James, ed. The Contemporary British Novel Since 2000. Edinburgh UP, 2017. 214 pages. ISBN 978 1 4744 0375 7. epub. £80.00.
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Transgressions and Reterritorializations as Markers of Minor Literature in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick, or Lonesome no More!
Views:194Deterritorialization and reterritorialization are transgressive techniques in literature that characterize subversive literature. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest that questions about marginal literature or other forms of peripheral literatures must all be covered within the designation and definition of minor literature, not only if they are written in the language of the mainstream. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick, or Lonesome no More (1976) is a set of deterritorializations and reterritorializations made possible through creative assemblage, a technique that allows a continuous flow of meaning, that is, meaning is not fixed, as language moves from one territory to another, constructing new assemblages and acquiring new meanings. Meaning changes each time a new assemblage is composed. Through the re-construction of family, love, and human relationships, the novel defies the alienating practices of the American society as presented in Vonnegut’s novel. (MM and WHRM)
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Sensory Data and Performance Practice in Blue Raincoat’s 2015 Production of W. B. Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand (1904)
Views:47From the topography of dolmens, cairns, passage tombs, sea cliffs, holy wells, and lakes of County Sligo, Yeats’s narratives continued to be strongly inspired by “the waters and the wild” of its landscape. In 2015, Sligo’s resident professional theatre company, Blue Raincoat, staged a series of events entitled “A Country Under Wave” honoring the celebration of the poet-playwright’s 150th birthday. This paper examines their production of On Baile’s Strand (1904) on Streedagh Beach in June 2015, which opened “A Country Under Wave,” and explores the ways in which the specific features of the location were key to ensuring that this ritual drama could play effectively because it penetrated its surroundings in different ways. Special attention is paid to examining how we might perceive and understand a performance in the outdoors without a designed stage, lighting, and technologically designed sounds. (RT)
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Experiments with Realism in Irish Language Short Stories by Daithí Ó Muirí
Views:163Relying on Joseph McMinn’s statement that the connection between realist and non-realist fiction is not a hierarchical relationship, this essay maintains that realism in Irish language fiction is, and has always been, an energizing force for experimentation. This is nowhere more evident than in the work of writer Daithí Ó Muirí (1954-), a native English speaker now residing in an Irish speaking area in Ireland. Much of Ó Muirí’s work is experimental due to his use of allegory and fantasy, yet many of the stories remain rooted in the realities of the world, particularly in his representations of masculinities and in works concerning the impact of war, violence, and displacement on men’s lives. The essay examines Ó Muirí’s first three collections, Seacht Lá na Díleann (1998), Cogaí (2002), and Uaigheanna agus Scéalta Eile (2002), in which he explores subjects that are classically realistic: war, death, religion, and relationships between men and women. The essay explores how Ó Muirí’s work often combines realism and magic realism, and shows that Ó Muirí’s fiction provides a fresh if somewhat bleak narrative of 21st century realism in Irish language prose fiction.
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The Female Gentleman and the Myth of Englishness in the Detective Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham
Views:463Golden Age detective fiction by women offers insights into the competing gender ideologies of the 1930s and early 1940s. The female protagonist these novels delineate is called “the female gentleman” by Melissa Schaub, who describes her as the detective’s equal based on her intellectual abilities and independence. Although the female gentleman seems a revolutionary figure as she is forward-looking in gender politics, her strong belief in class hierarchy, her Victorian morals and relationship with the gentleman detective relocate her in the heritage of the English pastoral. This essay focuses on the female gentleman as a bridge figure whose marriage to the detective not only restores him to his masculinity but also portrays the woman embedded in the pastoral idyll of the English landscape. Her decision to accept traditional femininity reinforces the female gentleman’s role in the recreation of the stability and security of pre-war England. (RZs)
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Nature, the Picturesque and the Sublime in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Travel Narratives
Views:240The article explores Mary Shelley’s approach to the sublime and the picturesque in her two travel narratives, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour and Rambles in Germany and Italy. These two accounts of her travels through France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany reveal her debt to a variety of contemporary sources aimed at exploring the nature of a sublime or picturesque experience. The analysis illustrates the complexity of Mary Shelley’s approach: while moving beyond the “egotistical sublime” typified by some key passages from William Wordsworth’s Prelude, her travel narratives reveal a variety of approaches to nature and the landscape, aimed at bridging present and past, personal experience and recent historical events. Thus, while in History, the experience of the landscape offers a way out of the suffering caused by the Napoleonic Wars, in Rambles, Mary Shelley turns to poetry and painting, this way transforming the eighteenth-century aesthetic appreciation of landscape based on the pictorial categories of the sublime and the beautiful, and embracing a modern, cultivated sensibility nourished by guidebooks and art history manuals. (AB)
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Reframing the New Mestiza: Identity Politics and Social Commitment in Chicana Art
Views:205This article offers an interdisciplinary approach to some of the most iconic pieces of Chicana Art using Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Parallels between the textual and visual representations of identity politics and social commitment in Chicana feminist art and Anzaldúa’s work, respectively, will be established through the concepts of “Borderlands” and “New Mestiza” as interpretation keys. The article begins by addressing representations of geographical borders as a unifying theme; then, it establishes a correlation between the concepts “Borderlands” and “New Mestiza,” and the reformulation of female identity represented in Chicana visual art. Finally, it will explore the purpose of the social commitment of the author/artists and how it is represented in their literary/artistic productions. The visual art of the selected Chicana visual artists, including Ester Hernández, Yolanda M. López, Alma López, Santa Barraza, and Judith Baca, accurately portray the experience of Chicana women theorized in Borderlands/La Frontera. (PAL)