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Kelleher, Margaret
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Kelleher, Margaret
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Kelleher, Margaret
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- Publication'Tá mé ag imeacht': The Execution of Myles Joyce and Its AfterlivesOn 15 December 1882, three men—Myles Joyce, Patrick Joyce, and Patrick Casey—were executed in Galway Jail having been found guilty of the infamous Maamtrasna Murders. The previous August, five members of the Joyce family—John Joyce, his wife Bridget Casey, his mother Margaret, his daughter Peggy, and his son Michael Joyce—were brutally murdered in their home in the isolated Maamtrasna townland, on the borders of Counties Galway and Mayo. Ten men were accused, two of whom later turned ‘queen’s evidence’ against their fellow accused; as a result of the week-long trials held in Dublin in November, three men were sentenced to be hanged and five given prison sentences of life.
161Scopus© Citations 1 - PublicationFamine and Commemoration, 1909–2017: Sites and Dynamics of MemoryIn September 2006 I began a semester at Concordia University as Peter O’Brien Visiting Scholar, thanks to the warm hospitality of Michael Kenneally and Rhona Richman Kenneally. Soon after my arrival, Michael arranged for me to visit Grosse Île and with a very special tour guide, Marianna O’Gallagher. At the end of my visit she presented me with a copy of her publication Grosse Île: Gateway to Canada (1984) inscribed as follows: “souvenir d’une belle journée dans la presence de nos ancêtres.” And with characteristic thoughtfulness, she sent a copy to my mother, the late Jo Kelleher, in Mallow, County Cork, who shared Marianna’s love of history and commitment to the significance of histories of place. When I was invited to give this memorial lecture, I looked again at Marianna’s inscription and decided to respond to its invitation to consider the significance of ancestors, and, as a scholar of the Great Irish Famine since the early 1990s, to reflect in a more explicitly personal register than hitherto on the familial dynamics of Famine commemoration and social memory.
212 - PublicationAn Illustrious Past: Victorian Prosopography and Irish Women WritersIn her 2004 work, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present, Alison Booth has illustrated the popularity, during the Victorian period, of collected life narratives of women writers: ‘It is an old girl network that long precedes second-wave feminist commitments, and that exposes the limitations of the obligatory memorialization and recovery of “our” role models.’ The term ‘prosopography’ means literally the ‘writing of masks’, and has emerged as an accepted term for collective biography or multibiography: Lawrence Stone, writing in 1971, offers a useful definition of prosopography as ‘the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of their lives’. Booth’s work uncovers 930 examples of all-female collections published in English between 1830 and 1940 (not including biographical collections of male and female subjects) and suggests that ‘in form and function, the hundreds of collections of female biographies might be the lost ancestors of late twentieth-century women’s studies’. Popular examples include works by Anna Jameson whose Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical (later published as Shakespeare’s Heroines) first published in 1832, had numerous reprintings and editions in Britain and the United States throughout the nineteenth century.
97 - PublicationThe Field Day Anthology and Irish Women's Literary StudiesThe recent publication of volumes 4 and 5 of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing presents a timely occasion for a review of women’s literary studies and an assessment of their influence in Irish studies. Indeed the contested status of these volumes from their very inception – objected to by some as wrongly separate in their focus on female representations, and by others as not separate enough, given their placement under the Field Day ‘umbrella’ – should, at the very least, have brought increased attention to the issue of women’s studies more generally. Yet, with the exception of some individual critics, Irish studies as a discipline remains singularly ill informed of (and by) the debates and concerns that have occupied Irish feminist criticism in the past decade. Meanwhile feminist critics, and those working in the field of women’s writings more generally, have themselves moved slowly to a more public airing of these preoccupations and to their articulation in a more self-questioning mode.
214 - PublicationThe Cabinet of Irish Literature: A Historical Perspective on Irish AnthologiesTHE CABINET OF IRISH LITERATURE: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON IRISH ANTHOLOGIES* MARGARET KELLEHER I. THE “CULTURE OF THE EXCERPT” among the flurry of reviews and commentaries that followed the publication of volumes I to III of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991, those of most enduring interest moved beyond the heat of the moment to a more general reflection on the role of anthologies themselves. Francis Mulhern’s 1993 essay, “A Nation, Yet Again” began, for example, with the cautionary pronouncement, by then all too evident, that “[a]nthologies are strategic weapons in literary politics.”1 Mulhern acknowledged that “authored texts of all kinds—poems, novels, plays, reviews, analyses—play more or less telling parts in a theatre of shifting alliances and antagonisms ,” but he argued for the special rhetorical force of anthologies in their “simulation of self evidence.THE CABINET OF IRISH LITERATURE: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON IRISH ANTHOLOGIES* MARGARET KELLEHER I. THE “CULTURE OF THE EXCERPT” among the flurry of reviews and commentaries that followed the publication of volumes I to III of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991, those of most enduring interest moved beyond the heat of the moment to a more general reflection on the role of anthologies themselves. Francis Mulhern’s 1993 essay, “A Nation, Yet Again” began, for example, with the cautionary pronouncement, by then all too evident, that “[a]nthologies are strategic weapons in literary politics.”1 Mulhern acknowledged that “authored texts of all kinds—poems, novels, plays, reviews, analyses—play more or less telling parts in a theatre of shifting alliances and antagonisms ,” but he argued for the special rhetorical force of anthologies in their “simulation of self evidence.THE CABINET OF IRISH LITERATURE: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON IRISH ANTHOLOGIES* MARGARET KELLEHER I. THE “CULTURE OF THE EXCERPT” among the flurry of reviews and commentaries that followed the publication of volumes I to III of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991, those of most enduring interest moved beyond the heat of the moment to a more general reflection on the role of anthologies themselves. Francis Mulhern’s 1993 essay, “A Nation, Yet Again” began, for example, with the cautionary pronouncement, by then all too evident, that “[a]nthologies are strategic weapons in literary politics.”1 Mulhern acknowledged that “authored texts of all kinds—poems, novels, plays, reviews, analyses—play more or less telling parts in a theatre of shifting alliances and antagonisms ,” but he argued for the special rhetorical force of anthologies in their “simulation of self evidence.
136Scopus© Citations 4 - Publication"Factual Fictions": Representations of the Land Agitation in Nineteenth-Century Irish Women's FictionWriting in 1997, critic Siobhán Kilfeather observed: ‘Although the narrative of nineteenth-century fiction is often traced from Edgeworth to Somerville and Ross, I would argue that in this debate there is an exclusion of a certain kind of women’s writing and a demotion of the melodramatic and sensationalist aspects of nineteenth-century fiction that in Britain were associated with an appeal to woman readers.’ In spite of the best efforts of the editors of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, volumes IV and V, few signs yet exist of any significant change in this condition of exclusion. In this essay, I wish to highlight another demotion, that of domestic or sentimental fiction, with specific reference to Irish women’s fiction from the late nineteenth century. This body of writing is especially interesting since it sought the incorporation of contemporaneous and often highly charged political subject matter into the existing modes of sentimental fiction, a notable example being the representation of contemporary land agitation by female novelists.
219 - PublicationIrish Literary Culture in EnglishFor much of the twentieth century, the reputation of Irish literary writers (beyond the acknowledged ‘greats’ of Yeats, Joyce or Beckett) suffered from their treatment by critics as failed or partly-successful imitators of literary forms successfully realized in the mainstream English tradition. In the past decade, a contrasting critical tendency has tended towards the celebration, and at times the valorization, of Irish writers’ innovations in genre, theme and form. Such reappraisals, supported by significant literary and cultural retrieval projects, in turn have enlivened older debates as to what are the distinctive, common and enduring features of an ‘Irish’ literary tradition.
207 - PublicationRepresentations of IrelandIn 1883, the Bentley firm published A Struggle for Fame, the autobiographical novel by Irish-born Charlotte Riddell (née Cowan, 1832–1906). The three-decker work features vivid pen-portraits of Newby, Tinsley, Bentley and other publishers, and details a young Irish woman’s struggles for success in mid-century literary London, against contemporary views that ‘Irish stories are quite gone out’. More than once, its acerbic narrator diagnoses astutely the forces constraining women‘s literary fame.
212 - Publication'An Irish Problem': Bilingual Manoeuvres in the Work of Somerville and RossIn August 1901, Edith Somerville and Violet Martin attended a Petty Sessions court in Carna, Co. Galway, by invitation from the Resident Magistrate, W. MacDermot and, fellow magistrate, local hotelier J. O’Loghlen. According to Martin Ross’s diary for 15 August, ‘Johnny O’Loghlen drove Edith and me, with three other female visitors, over to Carna, for the Petty Sessions there. There was only one case, of the drowning of a sheep, but J. O’Loghlen and W. McDermot worked it for an hour and a half for all it was worth.’ Edith Somerville’s diary entry for that day records going ‘with three other women’, driven in a wagonette, to Carna Petty Sessions: ‘They are held in a sort of converted cowhouse. Only 1 case about a sheep, maliciously drowned. Our host and the R.M. the only magistrates, they stage managed the case to perfection.’ 1 Over the following month, the two cousins worked their recollections of the encounter into an article entitled ‘An Irish Problem’, published, for a fee of twenty pounds, in the conservative journal National Reviewand soon after included in their 1903 essay collection All of the Irish Shore.2 Writing of the collection in a letter to their literary agent James Pinker in 1903, Martin Ross described it as ‘one of the best’ stories included.
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