123 research outputs found
Yeats’s <em>Autobiographies</em> and the Making of the Self
No full textBoth in his prose and poetry William Butler Yeats showed a life- long interest in the shaping of the self, achieved through a careful rearrangement of experience. Autobiographies is a collection of texts written at different times intentionally arranged by the author not according to the order of composition but to the chronological growth of the subject, from early childhood to the Nobel prize award. Until the period when autobiography started to be recognized as a specific genre with its own rules, this work was resorted to as a support for the study of the author’s production or as a key to discovering his life, disregarding the fact that autobiographical writing is not the narration of a life, but rather a narrative of the self as seen from the present moment of writing. Yeats’s Autobiographies is the narrative of how he struggled to shape his own personal identity as well as the identity of the nation. Life stories flourished in the Revival and post-Revival periods in Ireland, thus testifying to a widely shared belief in the correspondence of individual and national destiny. Along with collective drives, personal reasons also compelled him to look back and write his own autobiography. The author managed to provide a text in which everything, from syntactic to linguistic choices, from his treatment of time and places to his presentation of friends and rivals, combines to give a composite portrait of himself from early expectations to final achievement
Displacement, identity and language in Hugo Hamilton
No full textFocusing on the memoir The Speckled People and the novel Sad Bastard, this article investigates Hugo Hamilton’s attitude to some central issues in Irish culture and literature, namely the idea of displacement, the nature of Irish identity and the language question presented in a surprisingly new way. Born into an Irish-German family, brought up speaking German and Irish, forbidden from speaking English at home, Hamilton is interestingly different from other Irish authors. In his writing the traditional confrontation with an external cultural, literary and linguistic authority takes on a new meaning. The Speckled People explores how his father’s language dream of an Irish Ireland was inflexibly enforced on his family. His father’s unflinching pursuit of an abstract model of Irishness shifted the focus of displacement, resulting in the child’s painful condition of ‘dislocatedness’. In Sad Bastard the author looks into the same issues from the exhilarating perspective of a grown-up, mentally fragile, ex Garda who is likewise ‘dislocated’
“History, Memory and Poetry: Richard Murphy's The Battle of Aughrim”
No full textThis essay investigates the relationship of history, memory and poetry in Richard Murphy’s long poem The Battle of Aughrim, published in 1968. The battle, fought in 1691, marked the ultimate defeat of the Irish Catholic forces in the Williamite wars, whose consequence was the rise of the Protestant nation in Ireland. In the long poem the author stages the contrasting voices and points of view of the opposing sides in order to render both the battle and its aftermath. This work represents Richard Murphy’s answer to the need to contribute to create an Irish national epic to imaginatively explore the complexities of Irish history
Taboos, Prohibitions and Secrets in Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People
No full textThe Speckled People, the 2003 memoir by Hugo Hamilton, narrates the growth of little Hanno from childhood in the 1950s in Ireland to early manhood. The family life pivots on the major taboo dominating their home: the absolute prohibition on the use of English, implemented through harsh punishments. This taboo is functional to the reversal of Irish history planned by his nationalist father. The present article aims to analyse the consequences of this taboo for the protagonist. This ban on the use of English has devastating psychological consequences for Hanno: a perennial sense of displacement, constant queries about himself and where he belongs and the impossibility of making friends.
The father’s original taboo, detrimental to his own identity, is his planned oblivion of his own father, because he served in the British Navy during WWW I – a taboo issue in Irish society until at least the 1980s - and spoke English
Recensione a: W.B.Yeats, La scala a chiocciola e altre poesie, introduzione e commento di A.Johnson
No full textRecensione di "Yeats Now – Echoing into Life", di Joseph M. Hassett, Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2020
No full text“Parole per costruire: i sonetti di Richard Murphy”
No full textIl saggio analizza i sonetti di Richard Murphy appartenenti al ciclo “The Price of Stone” e la loro relazione al volume In Search of Poetry, una sorta di avantesto. All’inizio del lavoro questo ciclo viene collocato entro la produzione di Richard Murphy, per procedere poi all’analisi di “The Price of Stone”. La raccolta di sonetti è focalizzata sulla necessità, per il poeta, di costruire da un lato materialmente, e dall’altro verbalmente: case, studi e poesie. Il saggio rende conto di come la costruzione, letterale e metaforica, sia centrale alla poetica dell’autore, e lo dimostra attraverso l’analisi dei testi poetici
Benjamin Black, John Banville, Quirke e l’Irlanda degli anni Cinquanta
No full textIl saggio presenta lo sviluppo del genere giallo in Irlanda, la dicotomia Banville/Black, e analizza i gialli di Benjamin Black che hanno come protagonista il medico legale Quirke. Sono ambientati nella cupa Dublino degli anni Cinquanta, permeati dal senso di oppressione che impregnava la moralistica società irlandese dell’epoca. Quirke è il prodotto di istituzioni coercitive diffuse nel paese, allineate con la narrazione nazionalista del giovane paese: cresciuto in un orfanatrofio, ha sperimentato su di sé la loro capacità di annientamento. Attraverso la dissezione dei cadaveri sul tavolo autoptico e le scoperte delle indagini, Quirke si scontra con fantasmi del proprio passato e i poteri della società contemporanea
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