Academic literature on the topic 'John Montague; Irish poet'

So wrote the Irish American poet John Montague of the great loss of culture under Great Britain's empire, a violent overmapping of identity whose poignant erasure was itself richly preserved in plays, poems, and songs. Nothing of Ireland's past, it seems, was remembered quite so vigorously as its erasure. And because that disappearance has become such a familiar text of loss, in poem, play, and song, I want to evoke that archive of absence for this study of a similar erasure, centuries earlier—not the Irish under English of Brian Friel's Translations, but the Gallic Celts under Rome; not The Dying Gaul whose images of self-slaughter ennobled their extirpation, but those who survived the conquest, the surrendered, widows and children of the slaughtered who grew that grafted tongue, the twice-born who learned to live again as refugees under Roman rule, and adopt foreign ways—to tease out what little remains there are of the theatre's role in that erasure, resistance, and that monumental realignment of identity called “Romanizing.”

With the publication of The Dolmen Miscellany (1962) and the inception of Poetry Ireland the same year, Liam Miller's Dolmen Press came to represent artistically and commercially Irish poets and their works within the Republic of Ireland and abroad. In Miller's publishing practice, the liberal notion of ‘Poetry Ireland’ had come to supplant a narrower one: the idea of the ‘Dolmen Poets.’ As the nineteen fifties drew to a close, the Dolmen Poets were Padraic Colum and Austin Clarke (but not Patrick Kavanagh), Richard Murphy, John Montague, and especially Thomas Kinsella. In Dolmen's earliest years, however, the notion of the ‘Dolmen Poets’ had entailed other figures – David Marcus, Donald Davie, Valentin Iremonger – as well as a “group” editorial method and small, economical print format suited to Dolmen's elementary technical facilities. When, in the ‘Dolmen Poets” format Miller printed the programme for the famous, three-way reading by Murphy, Montague, and Kinsella at the Royal Hibernian Hotel on 3 February 1961, both the occasion and the souvenir programme signalled Miller's embracing of the concept of ‘Poetry Ireland’.

AbstractOliver St John Gogarty – Otolaryngologist to fashionable Edwardian Dublin – was a distinguished poet and a Senator in the fledgling Irish Free State after its establishment in 1922. He numbered amongst his acquaintances the poet William Butler Yeats, the novelist James Joyce and a host of political and literary persona who helped to shape modern Ireland. He was satirised as ‘stately plump Buck Mulligan’ in Joyce's novel Ulysses.

Because late nineteenth-century American sport was connected to both immigrant assimilation and cultural prestige, this essay first describes Boston amateur athletics during the later nineteenth century. Ireland-born poet/lecturer/newspaper editor John Boyle O'Reilly (1844–90) provides an important example of social and intellectual class mobility from the perspective of an immigrant writer. We observe through O'Reilly's sporting experiences and literary career how the development of upper-class amateur athletics in Boston and the popularity of boxing among its Irish working classes gave him exceptional influence among both groups. His history of boxing, Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport (1888), is examined in detail as a key statement on pugilism, masculinity, and American citizenship fame. This view of Boston's intellectual and physical cultures, observed from the standpoint of O'Reilly, a talented writer and a sort of literary counterpart of famed pugilist John L. Sullivan (his friend, occasional sparring partner, and fellow celebrity among the Irish American community), sheds light on newly available pathways to social mobility made possible by simultaneous engagement with literary and athletic cultures.

Maurice James Craig (1919–2011) is widely known as an architectural historian and biographer: those encountering his writing today may not even be aware that he was a poet of repute during his twenties, one expected to become a major figure on the Irish poetry scene. His poetry and reviews appeared regularly in both British and Irish literary periodicals in the nineteen forties, yet he published just one full-length collection, Some Way for Reason, with Heinemann in London in 1948. In 2011 Liberties Press published a new selection of Craig's poetry; this included poems from the Heinemann volume together with work that had previously appeared in journals or anthologies only. Since that publication, other previously uncollected poems have come to light, two of which are printed here. These poems first appeared, along with work by John Hewitt and W.R. Rodgers among others, in a pamphlet printed in Belfast in 1942 – 15 Poems in Aid of the Russian Red Cross. In my introduction to these poems I examine this publication and its contributors, and situate Craig's poems in the context of the Second World War and of his developing themes of personal responsibility and cultural dissolution.

To date, little attention has been given to the songs in Synge's The Aran Islands, items that Tim Robinson imagines are not ‘fully thought into the texture of the work’. They come from a collection of songs in Irish and in English that was created by Synge in Inis Oírr in 1901 in the company of the local poet Mícheál Ó Meachair. This essay investigates Synge's song collection and the local singers and poets whom he met, including Seághan Seoige of Baile an Fhormna, Inis Oírr and Marcuisín Mhichil Siúinéara Ó Flaithbheartaigh of Cill Rónáin, Árainn. It examines how the music of Aran impacted on Synge during his four visits between 1898 and 1901, what his collection tells us about the song tradition of Aran, and what inspired him to collect songs there. Did Douglas Hyde's Love Songs of Connacht prompt him to create his own collection? What parts did Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats play? Considering Synge was a trained musician and composer, why did he not collect the airs that accompanied the songs? Recognising the influence of sean-nós song on Synge's dramatic oeuvre, this essay questions whether or not the songs of Aran affected his work.

This article is on the comparison of two biblical manuscripts of the twelfth century from Plock, namely the so-called Bible of Plock and Evangeliar of Princess Anastasia with two Mosan biblical manuscripts: Evangeliar of Averbode and the Biblia Universa transcribed in the same period. The first three texts: Beatissimo Papae Damaso (Novum opus), Prologus quatuor evangeliorum (Plures fuisse) and Iheronimus Damaso Pape (Sciendum etiam) – the last one is not in the Bible of Plock - and Evangeliar of Princess Anastasia are of St. Jerome. In contrast, the introduction to the Synoptic Gospels: Argumentum secundum Matheum, Prologus in Marco and Prologus sancti Evangelii secundum Lucam are not the texts of St. Jerome, as is sometimes mistakenly repeated by different scholars, but belong to Sedulius Scottus, an Irish monk and poet who lived and worked in a school in Leodium in the ninth century, and the introduction to the Gospel of John: Prephatio in Evangelium secundum Iohannem was written by Bede the Venerable. While the texts of Jerome were quite commonly used in biblical medieval manuscripts, the fact that the introductions to the Synoptic Gospels are written by Sedulius Scottus and are present in both the Bible of Plock as well as partially in Evangeliar of Princess Anastasia is a very strong argument for the Mosan origin of the biblical manuscripts of Plock from the twelfth century. Comparative analysis of the texts themselves clearly leads to several important conclusions. First, the Bible of Plock and Evangeliar of Princess Anastasia are closer to the version of the text preserved in the Biblia Universa, a codex written in the monastery of Sancti Trudonis, than to Evangeliar of Averbode. It follows that the sources for the biblical manuscripts of Plock from the twelfth century should be searched at Mosan Benedictine monasteries, perhaps in the very monastery Sancti Trudonis near Liège. Second, the Gospel of Mark generally follows the version of the text preserved in the Biblia Universa and the Bible of Plock but not all the time. It should therefore be hoped that further comparative studies, especially the version of the biblical text, would confirm this relationship and will help determine whether the codex was written in the Mosan region or is a copy of the Bible of Plock made on the spot. Thirdly, and this is an extremely interesting proposal, Evangeliar of Princess Anastasia, not counting minor copyist changes like the conversion of - tium to - cium, is very much dependent on the Bible of Plock. If, as it is confirmed by records of the miracles, the Bible was already in Plock in 1148 or before that date, it is very likely that Evangeliar of Princess Anastasia, would be a copy of the text made on the spot in a local Plock scriptorium as a foundation of Boleslaw Kedzierzawy and a votive offering for the salvation of his deceased wife Anastasia. The codex would therefore arise after her death, dating back to the year 1158 in Plock in the time of Bishop Werner and would not have been brought by him following his trip to Aachen.These conclusions, for obvious reasons, are only preliminary, as comparsion of the texts are not fully detailed and fuller conclusions will be presented only after benchmarking a version of the biblical text of the four Gospels.

I called your producer on the way here in the car because I was very excited. I found out … I did one of those genetic testing things and I found out that I'm 63 percent Irish … I had no idea. I had no idea! I thought I was Scottish and Welsh. It turns out my parents are just full of shit, I guess. But now I’m Irish and it just makes so much sense! I'm a really good drinker. I love St. Patrick's Day. Potatoes are delicious. I'm looking forward to meeting all my cousins … [to Conan O’Brien] You and I are probably related! … Now I get to say things like, “It’s in me genes! I love that Conan O’Brien; he’s such a nice fella.” You’re kinda like a giant leprechaun. (Reese Witherspoon, Tuesday 21 March 2017)IntroductionAs an Irishman and a football fan, I watched the unfolding 2016 UEFA European Championship in France (hereafter ‘Euro 2016’) with a mixture of trepidation and delight. Although the Republic of Ireland team was eventually knocked out of the competition in defeat to the host nation, the players performed extremely well – most notably in defeating Italy 1:0. It is not the on-field performance of the Irish team that interests me in this short article, however, but rather how Irish fans travelling to the competition were depicted in the surrounding international news coverage. In particular, I focus on the centrality of fan footage – shot on smart phones and uploaded to YouTube (in most cases by fans themselves) – in this news coverage. In doing so, I reflect on how sports fans contribute to wider understandings of nationness in the global imagination and how their behaviour is often interpreted (as in the case here) through long-established tropes about people and places. The Media ManifoldTo “depict” something is to represent it in words and pictures. As the contemporary world is largely shaped by and dependent on mass media – and different forms of media have merged (or “converged”) through digital media platforms – mediated forms of depiction have become increasingly important in our lives. On one hand, the constant connectivity made possible in the digital age has made the representation of people and places less controllable, insofar as the information and knowledge about our world circulating through media devices are partly created by ordinary people. On the other hand, traditional broadcast media arguably remain the dominant narrators of people and places worldwide, and their stories, Gerbner reminds us, are largely formula-driven and dramatically charged, and work to “retribalize” modern society. However, a more important point, I suggest, is that so-called new and old media can no longer be thought of as separate and discrete; rather, our attention should focus on the complex interrelations made possible by deep mediatisation (Couldry and Hepp).As an example, consider that the Youtube video of Reese Witherspoon’s recent appearance on the Conan O’Brien chat show – from which the passage at the start of this article is taken – had already been viewed 54,669 times when I first viewed it, a mere 16 hours after it was originally posted. At that point, the televised interview had already been reported on in a variety of international digital news outlets, including rte.ie, independent.ie., nydailynews.com, msn.com, huffingtonpost.com, cote-ivoire.com – and myriad entertainment news sites. In other words, this short interview was consumed synchronously and asynchronously, over a number of different media platforms; it was viewed and reviewed, and critiqued and commented upon, and in turn found itself the subject of news commentary, which fed the ongoing cycle. And yet, it is important to also note that a multiplicity of media interactions does not automatically give rise to oppositional discourse and ideological contestation, as is sometimes assumed. In fact, how ostensibly ‘different’ kinds of media can work to produce a broadly shared construction of a people and place is particularly relevant here. Just as Reese Witherspoon’s interview on the Conan O’Brien show perpetuates a highly stereotypical version of Irishness across a number of platforms, news coverage of Irish fans at Euro 2016 largely conformed to established tropes about Irish people, but this was also fed – to some extent – by Irish fans themselves.Irish Identity, Sport, and the Global ImaginationThere is insufficient space here to describe in any detail the evolving representation of Irish identity, about which a vast literature has developed (nationally and internationally) over the past several decades. As with other varieties of nationness, Irishness has been constructed across a variety of cultural forms, including advertising, art, film, novels, travel brochures, plays and documentaries. Importantly, Irishness has also to a great extent been constructed outside of Ireland (Arrowsmith; Negra).As is well known, the Irish were historically constructed by their colonial masters as a small uncivilised race – as primitive wayward children, prone to “sentimentality, ineffectuality, nervous excitability and unworldliness” (Fanning 33). When pondering the “Celtic nature,” the renowned English poet and cultural critic Mathew Arnold concluded that “sentimental” was the best single term to use (100). This perception pervaded internationally, with early depictions of Irish-Americans in US cinema centring on varieties of negative excess, such as lawlessness, drunkenness and violence (Rains). Against this prevailing image of negative excess, the intellectuals and artists associated with what became known as the Celtic Revival began a conscious effort to “rebrand” Ireland from the nineteenth century onwards, reversing the negatives of the colonial project and celebrating Irish tradition, language and culture (Fanning).At first, only distinctly Irish sports associated with the amateur Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) were co-opted in this very particular nation-building project. Since then, however, sport more generally has acted as a site for the negotiation of a variety of overlapping Irish identities. Cronin, for example, describes how the GAA successfully repackaged itself in the 1990s to reflect the confidence of Celtic Tiger Irishness while also remaining rooted in the counties and parishes across Ireland. Studies of Irish football and rugby have similarly examined how these sports have functioned as representatives of changed or evolving Irish identities (Arrowsmith; Free). And yet, throughout Ireland’s changing economic fortunes – from boom to bust, to the gradual renewal of late – a touristic image of Irishness has remained hegemonic in the global imagination. In popular culture, and especially American popular culture, Ireland is often depicted as a kind of pre-industrial theme park – a place where the effects of modernity are felt less, or are erased altogether (Negra). The Irish are known for their charm and sociability; in Clancy’s words, they are seen internationally as “simple, clever and friendly folk” (98). We can identify a number of representational tropes within this dominant image, but two in particular are apposite here: ‘smallness’ and ‘happy-go-luckiness’.Sporting NewsBefore we consider Euro 2016, it is worth briefly considering how the news industry approaches such events. “News”, Dahlgren reminds us, is not so much “information” as it is a specific kind of cultural discourse. News, in other words, is a particular kind of discursive composition that constructs and narrates stories in particular ways. Approaching sports coverage from this vantage point, Poulton and Roderick (xviii) suggest that “sport offers everything a good story should have: heroes and villains, triumph and disaster, achievement and despair, tension and drama.” Similarly, Jason Tuck observes that the media have long had a tendency to employ the “vocabulary of war” to “hype up sporting events,” a discursive tactic which, he argues, links “the two areas of life where the nation is a primary signifier” (190-191).In short, sport is abundant in news values, and media professionals strive to produce coverage that is attractive, interesting and exciting for audiences. Stead (340) suggests that there are three key characteristics governing the production of “media sports packages”: spectacularisation, dramatisation, and personalisation. These production characteristics ensure that sports coverage is exciting and interesting for viewers, but that it also in some respects conforms to their expectations. “This ‘emergent’ quality of sport in the media helps meet the perpetual audience need for something new and different alongside what is familiar and known” (Rowe 32). The disproportionate attention to Irish fans at Euro 2016 was perhaps new, but the overall depiction of the Irish was rather old, I would argue. The news discourse surrounding Euro 2016 worked to suggest, in the Irish case at least, that the nation was embodied not only in its on-field athletic representatives but more so, perhaps, in its travelling fans.Euro 2016In June 2016 the Euros kicked off in France, with the home team beating Romania 2-1. Despite widespread fears of potential terrorist attacks and disruption, the event passed successfully, with Portugal eventually lifting the Henri Delaunay Trophy. As the competition progressed, the behaviour of Irish fans quickly became a central news story, fuelled in large part by smart phone footage uploaded to the internet by Irish fans themselves. Amongst the many videos uploaded to the internet, several became the focus of news reports, especially those in which the goodwill and childlike playfulness of the Irish were on show. In one such video, Irish fans are seen singing lullabies to a baby on a Bordeaux train. In another video, Irish fans appear to help a French couple change a flat tire. In yet another video, Irish fans sing cheerfully as they clean up beer cans and bottles. (It is noteworthy that as of July 2017, some of these videos have been viewed several million times.)News providers quickly turned their attention to Irish fans, sometimes using these to draw stark contrasts with the behaviour of other fans, notably English and Russian fans. Buzzfeed, followed by ESPN, followed by Sky News, Le Monde, Fox News, the Washington Post and numerous other providers celebrated the exploits of Irish fans, with some such as Sky News and Aljazeera going so far as to produce video montages of the most “memorable moments” involving “the boys in green.” In an article titled ‘Irish fans win admirers at Euro 2016,’ Fox News reported that “social media is full of examples of Irish kindness” and that “that Irish wit has been a fixture at the tournament.” Aljazeera’s AJ+ news channel produced a video montage titled ‘Are Irish fans the champions of Euro 2016?’ which included spliced footage from some of the aforementioned videos. The Daily Mirror (UK edition) praised their “fun loving approach to watching football.” Similarly, a headline for NPR declared, “And as if they could not be adorable enough, in a quiet moment, Irish fans sang on a French train to help lull a baby to sleep.” It is important to note that viewer comments under many of these articles and videos were also generally effusive in their praise. For example, under the video ‘Irish Fans help French couple change flat tire,’ one viewer (Amsterdam 410) commented, ‘Irish people nicest people in world by far. they always happy just amazing people.’ Another (Juan Ardilla) commented, ‘Irish fans restored my faith in humanity.’As the final stages of the tournament approached, the Mayor of Paris announced that she was awarding the Medal of the City of Paris to Irish fans for their sporting goodwill. Back home in Ireland, the behaviour of Irish fans in France was also celebrated, with President Michael D. Higgins commenting that “Ireland could not wish for better ambassadors abroad.” In all of this news coverage, the humble kindness, helpfulness and friendliness of the Irish are depicted as native qualities and crystallise as a kind of ideal national character. Though laudatory, the tropes of smallness and happy-go-luckiness are again evident here, as is the recurrent depiction of Irishness as an ‘innocent identity’ (Negra). The “boys” in green are spirited in a non-threatening way, as children generally are. Notably, Stephan Reich, journalist with German sports magazine 11Freunde wrote: “the qualification of the Irish is a godsend. The Boys in Green can celebrate like no other nation, always peaceful, always sympathetic and emphatic, with an infectious, childlike joy.” Irishness as Antidote? The centrality of the Irish fan footage in the international news coverage of Euro 2016 is significant, I suggest, but interpreting its meaning is not a simple or straightforward task. Fans (like everyone) make choices about how to present themselves, and these choices are partly conscious and partly unconscious, partly spontaneous and partly conditioned. Pope (2008), for example, draws on Emile Durkheim to explain the behaviour of sports fans sociologically. “Sporting events,” Pope tells us, “exemplify the conditions of religious ritual: high rates of group interaction, focus on sacred symbols, and collective ritual behaviour symbolising group membership and strengthening shared beliefs, values, aspirations and emotions” (Pope 85). Pope reminds us, in other words, that what fans do and say, and wear and sing – in short, how they perform – is partly spontaneous and situated, and partly governed by a long-established fandom pedagogy that implies familiarity with a whole range of international football fan styles and embodied performances (Rowe). To this, we must add that fans of a national sports team generally uphold shared understandings of what constitutes desirable and appropriate patriotic behaviour. Finally, in the case reported here, we must also consider that the behaviour of Irish fans was also partly shaped by their awareness of participating in the developing media sport spectacle and, indeed, of their own position as ‘suppliers’ of news content. In effect, Irish fans at Euro 2016 occupied an interesting hybrid position between passive consumption and active production – ‘produser’ fans, as it were.On one hand, therefore, we can consider fan footage as evidence of spontaneous displays of affective unity, captured by fellow participants. The realism or ‘authenticity’ of these supposedly natural and unscripted performances is conveyed by the grainy images, and amateur, shaky camerawork, which ironically work to create an impression of unmediated reality (see Goldman and Papson). On the other hand, Mike Cronin considers them contrived, staged, and knowingly performative, and suggestive of “hyper-aware” Irish fans playing up to the camera.However, regardless of how we might explain or interpret these fan performances, it is the fact that they play a role in making Irishness public that most interests me here. For my purposes, the most important consideration is how the patriotic performances of Irish fans both fed and harmonized with the developing news coverage; the resulting depiction of the Irish was partly an outcome of journalistic conventions and partly a consequence of the self-essentialising performances of Irish fans. In a sense, these fan-centred videos were ready-made or ‘packaged’ for an international news audience: they are short, dramatic and entertaining, and their ideological content is in keeping with established tropes about Irishness. As a consequence, the media-sport discourse surrounding Euro 2016 – itself a mixture of international news values and home-grown essentialism – valorised a largely touristic understanding of Irishness, albeit one that many Irish people wilfully celebrate.Why such a construction of Irishness is internationally appealing is unclear, but it is certainly not new. John Fanning (26) cites a number of writers in highlighting that Ireland has long nurtured a romantic self-image that presents the country as a kind of balm for the complexities of the modern world. For example, he cites New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who observed in 2001 that “people all over the world are looking to Ireland for its reservoir of spirituality hoping to siphon off what they can feed to their souls which have become hungry for something other than consumption and computers.” Similarly, Diane Negra writes that “virtually every form of popular culture has in one way or another, presented Irishness as a moral antidote to contemporary ills ranging from globalisation to post-modern alienation, from crises over the meaning and practice of family values to environmental destruction” (3). Earlier, I described the Arnoldian image of the Irish as a race governed by ‘negative excess’. Arguably, in a time of profound ideological division and resurgent cultural nationalism – a time of polarisation and populism, of Trumpism and Euroscepticism – this ‘excess’ has once again been positively recoded, and now it is the ‘sentimental excess’ of the Irish that is imagined as a salve for the cultural schisms of our time.ConclusionMuch has been made of new media powers to contest official discourses. Sports fans, too, are now considered much less ‘controllable’ on account of their ability to disrupt official messages online (as well as offline). The case of Irish fans at Euro 2016, however, offers a reminder that we must avoid routine assumptions that the “uses” made of “new” and “old” media are necessarily divergent (Rowe, Ruddock and Hutchins). My interest here was less in what any single news item or fan-produced video tells us, but rather in the aggregate construction of Irishness that emerges in the media-sport discourse surrounding this event. Relatedly, in writing about the London Olympics, Wardle observed that most of what appeared on social media concerning the Games did not depart significantly from the celebratory tone of mainstream news media organisations. “In fact the absence of any story that threatened the hegemonic vision of the Games as nation-builder, shows that while social media provided an additional and new form of newsgathering, it had to fit within the traditional news structures, routines and agenda” (Wardle 12).Obviously, it is important to acknowledge the contestability of all media texts, including the news items and fan footage mentioned here, and to recognise that such texts are open to multiple interpretations based on diverse reading positions. And yet, here I have suggested that there is something of a ‘preferred’ reading in the depiction of Irish fans at Euro 2016. The news coverage, and the footage on which it draws, are important because of what they collectively suggest about Irish national identity: here we witness a shift from identity performance to identity writ large, and one means of analysing their international (and intertextual significance), I have suggested, is to view them through the prism of established tropes about Irishness.Travelling sports fans – for better or worse – are ‘carriers’ of places and cultures, and they remind us that “there is also a cultural economy of sport, where information, images, ideas and rhetorics are exchanged, where symbolic value is added, where metaphorical (and sometimes literal, in the case of publicly listed sports clubs) stocks rise and fall” (Rowe 24). There is no question, to borrow Rowe’s term, that Ireland’s ‘stocks’ rose considerably on account of Euro 2016. In news terms, Irish fans provided entertainment value; they were the ‘human interest’ story of the tournament; they were the ‘feel-good’ factor of the event – and importantly, they were the suppliers of much of this content (albeit unofficially). Ultimately, I suggest that we think of the overall depiction of the Irish at Euro 2016 as a co-construction of international news media practices and the self-presentational practices of Irish fans themselves. The result was not simply a depiction of idealised fandom, but more importantly, an idealisation of a people and a place, in which the plucky little people on tour became the global standard bearers of Irish identity.ReferencesArnold, Mathew. Celtic Literature. Carolina: Lulu Press, 2013.Arrowsmith, Aidan. “Plastic Paddies vs. Master Racers: ‘Soccer’ and Irish Identity.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.4 (2004). 25 Mar. 2017 <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1367877904047864>.Boards and Networked Digital Media Sport Communities.” Convergence 16.3 (2010). 25 Mar. 2017 <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354856510367622>.Clancy, Michael. Brand New Ireland: Tourism, Development and National Identity in the Irish Republic. Surrey and Vermont: Ashgate, 2009.Couldry, Nick, and Andreas Hepp. The Mediated Construction of Reality. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.Cronin, Michael. “Is It for the Glamour? Masculinity, Nationhood and Amateurism in Contemporary Projections of the Gaelic Athletic Association.” Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture. Eds. Wanda Balzano, Anne Mulhall, and Moynagh Sullivan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 39–51.Cronin, Mike. “Serenading Nuns: Irish Soccer Fandom as Performance.” Post-Celtic Tiger Irishness Symposium, Trinity College Dublin, 25 Nov. 2016.Dahlgren, Peter. “Beyond Information: TV News as a Cultural Discourse.” The European Journal of Communication Research 12.2 (1986): 125–36.Fanning, John. “Branding and Begorrah: The Importance of Ireland’s Nation Brand Image.” Irish Marketing Review 21.1-2 (2011). 25 Mar. 2017 <https://www.dit.ie/media/newsdocuments/2011/3%20Fanning.pdf>.Free, Marcus. “Diaspora and Rootedness, Amateurism and Professionalism in Media Discourses of Irish Soccer and Rugby in the 1990s and 2000s.” Éire-Ireland 48.1–2 (2013). 25 Mar. 2017 <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/510693/pdf>.Friedman, Thomas. “Foreign Affairs: The Lexus and the Shamrock.” The Opinion Pages. New York Times 3 Aug. 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/03/opinion/foreign-affairs-the-lexus-and-the-shamrock.html>.Gerbner, George. “The Stories We Tell and the Stories We Sell.” Journal of International Communication 18.2 (2012). 25 Mar. 2017 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13216597.2012.709928>.Goldman, Robert, and Stephen Papson. Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising. New York: Guilford Press, 1996.Negra, Diane. The Irish in Us. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.Pope, Whitney. “Emile Durkheim.” Key Sociological Thinkers. 2nd ed. Ed. Rob Stones. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 76-89.Poulton, Emma, and Martin Roderick. Sport in Films. London: Routledge, 2008.Rains, Stephanie. The Irish-American in Popular Culture 1945-2000. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007.Rowe, David, Andy Ruddock, and Brett Hutchins. “Cultures of Complaint: Online Fan Message Boards and Networked Digital Media Sport Communities.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technology 16.3 (2010). 25 Mar. 2017 <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354856510367622>.Rowe, David. Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity. 2nd ed. Berkshire: Open University Press, 2004.Stead, David. “Sport and the Media.” Sport and Society: A Student Introduction. 2nd ed. Ed. Barrie Houlihan. London: Sage, 2008. 328-347.Wardle, Claire. “Social Media, Newsgathering and the Olympics.” Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies 2 (2012). 25 Mar. 2017 <https://publications.cardiffuniversitypress.org/index.php/JOMEC/article/view/304>.

This thesis explores the achievement of the contemporary Irish poet John Montague, concentrating on his major works published from the fifties to the nineties. Montague’s themes comprise not only Ireland and history, but also love, family, environment, the power and limits of poetry, the addressing of death and boyhood memories. Through close analysis of single poems and main sequences, the study attends to aesthetic, intertextual, psychological, historical and biographical issues. Its particular emphasis is on how Montague's language opens up ways of considering such issues. My readings try, therefore, to re-enact the subtle becoming and shifting that take place in individual poems and in his work as a whole. In order to illuminate the processes at work in Montague’s poetry, the chapters of the thesis are split into some that discuss themes and others that focus on volumes. Chapter one shows how Montague's concern with poetry surfaces in his work. It draws on poems from various stages in his career; the thesis also returns in subsequent chapters to Montague's addressing of poetry. The second chapter outlines Montague’s concern with exile and land in Forms of Exile and Poisoned Lands, and with family and love in A Chosen Light and Tides. Chapter three argues that Montague uses the journey as a structural device throughout The Rough Field. The fourth chapter concentrates on Montague's treatment of his family: the father in The Rough Field, A Slow Dance and The Dead Kingdom and the mother in A Slow Dance and The Dead Kingdom, which is read as the climax of Montague's return to family members. The fifth chapter analyses his main love-sequence. The Great Cloak, examines how his re-contextualisation’s of poems and use of pictorial illustration affect the reading of some love poems, and considers two love poems from Smashing the Piano. The sixth chapter demonstrates how Montague develops old and new themes in Mount Eagle and discusses how a net of crossings constitutes the collection's structural centre. The final chapter explores how in Time in Armagh Montague refines his transformation of autobiographical material into art. The analysis of Border Sick Call locates a concern with poetry itself in the late writing and brings out the sequence's shifting between the mysterious and familiar. "But in what country have we been?" is its final line, helping to define the general concern of the thesis, which is to explore the riches of the "country" mapped by Montague's poetry.

The imperative after the Famine to keep the small farm from being subdivided led to the familist system under which one son, not necessarily the first-born, was to inherit; all the others had to find lives elsewhere, mostly through emigration. Poems by Bernard O’Donoghue and John Montague, a story of George Moore, and a play by T. C. Murray dramatize this situation. In other works by Murray and Eugene McCabe, the focus is on the ageing autocrat without an heir. Plays of Padraic Colum and John Murphy stage the divided impulses of staying home on the land and leaving for America. The small farm, metonym for the nation in the Revival period, becomes the battleground of the family.

Emigration, which had been such a marked feature of Irish history since the nineteenth century, accelerated through the 1950s, creating the sense of an emptying countryside. Leaving the land is represented as alienation in Frank O’Connor’s story ‘Uprooted’, a tragedy to be resisted at all costs in M. J. Molloy’s play The Wood of the Whispering, while the plight of the stay-at-home sibling when all the others have left is the focus of William Trevor’s ‘The Hill Bachelors’. Nostalgia for a pre-modern rural landscape features in the work of Michael McLaverty, John Montague, and Maurice Riordan. In the fully urbanized Ireland of the twenty-first century, there is a sardonic take on modern farming in Kevin Barry, but the remaining connections to the land of contemporary society are still very much present in novels by Belinda McKeon and Anne Enright.

Another personal piece, this chapter traces the artistic beginnings and formation of the poet, Paula Meehan, former Chair of Irish Poetry, seen through the prism of a creative writing workshop delivered by John McGahern at the beginning of Meehan’s career, in Galway of 1979. The chapter brings closer McGahern the teacher and the mentor, contemplating his writing habits, his thoughts on the act of writing and on the accompanying solitude. The chapter considers McGahern’s views on the art of fiction and shows how passionately he emphasised, and tried to convey, the importance of working hard at writing, rewriting and starting again, being ruthless with oneself in order to ‘master the material’.

John McGahern, in his fiction and memoir, follows an ancient bardic tradition exemplified in our time by the poets Seamus Heaney and Sorley MacLean. This chapter takes a more personal approach to make connections between the author’s childhood in a small place on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and the early years of John McGahern, Seamus Heaney and Sorley MacLean, a Scottish poet. The chapter examines the author’s own formation as a journalist and novelist – a journey greatly influenced by McGahern and by the strong Irish and Scottish tradition of Breton Island - alongside that of the three writers. It explores the relationship between growing up on an island and a sense of isolation and inferiority that might go with it, and the impact that this kind of life might have had on McGahern’s, Heaney’s and MacSorley’s work and personality.

John Ruskin’s diaries, letters, lectures and published works are testimonies to his life-long interest in Venetian art and architecture. Lady Augusta Gregory of Coole Park, County Galway, Ireland, was amongst those Victorian genteel women who were influenced by Ruskin’s account of the political and artistic history of Venice, following in Ruskin’s footsteps during her visits to Sir Henry Austen Henry and Lady Enid Layard at Ca’ Capello on the Grand Canal. This article follows Lady Gregory’s footsteps around the maritime city, where she was often found sketching architectural details of churches and palaces. By doing so, it reveals the extent of the influence of Ruskin’s Italian travels on the formation of Lady Gregory’s aesthetic sensibilities during the 1880s and 1890s, before she founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin with the Irish dramatist John Millington Synge and the Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats in 1904. As part of the discussion, it reveals the true subject matter in one of Lady Gregory’s Venetian sketches for the first time, one that is now held in Dublin at the National Library of Ireland.