Losing Ireland, Inventing America: O'Neill and After

Abstract

O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night has had a palpable influence on subsequent Irish plays by artists as different as Tom Murphy (A Whistle in the Dark) and Brian Friel (Faith Healer). Its obsession with fog and foghorns is a leitmotif through Behan's The Quare Fellow. But the prevailing metaphor of a fog people, doomed to stammer a broken poetry ever since they lost their lives in the Unconscious of the underwater world and were cast up gasping on land, has also powerfully inspired Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's poetic sequence The Fifty-Minute Mermaid. In a similar way, the depiction of a property-hungry, frustrated paterfamilias in the Moran of McGahern's Amongst Women is hugely indebted to the figure of James Tyrone. The various phases of Irish history, Anglo-Irish and mere Irish, are condensed into the story of the Tyrone family—and the influence of the famous play extends across all literary genres of recent Irish writing, not drama alone.

“He Meddled with or Molested Me”: #MeToo Protests in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Poetry

“…In her discussion of mermaids in Western literature and culture, Juliette Wood maintains that Ní Dhomhnaill "uses the mermaid to explore themes of femininity, sexuality and culture identity." 1 In addition, according to Kiberd (2018), the shift from water-life to land-life in The Fifty Minute Mermaid is accountable for "a separation anxiety" that plagues people who are forced to change their language, or, more specifically, from Irish to English (2018, p. 9). In her review of The Fifty Minute Mermaid, Carmine Starnino contends that " [l]ike The Decameron, The Fifty Minute Mermaid explores the way ourselves are constructed of fictions-fictions that both shelter us from painful facts and allow us to face up to them" (2008, p. 159).…”

“…This study is expected to fill the research gap. Acclaimed by Kiberd (2018) as "the foremost contemporary poet," Ní Dhomhnaill has been committed to speaking up for the underprivileged, including women in patriarchal societies and Irish speakers in Englishspeaking Ireland (2018, p. 9). According to Dillon (2018), Ní Dhomhnaill "has carved out space for female poets in a highly gendered tradition" (2018, p. 409).…”