Previous Publications

Caribbean Quarterly Volume 64, Nos. 3 & 4 (September - December 2018), Irish-Caribbean Connections (Guest editors: Lee M. Jenkins and Melanie Otto)

This special double issue of Caribbean Quarterly on Irish-Caribbean Connections has developed out of an international interdisciplinary conference held at University College Cork in July 2016, organized by Lee M. Jenkins (UCC) and Melanie Otto (TCD). It contributes to a larger ongoing debate among scholars about the cultural, historical and imaginative connections between Ireland and the Caribbean. In 2012 a conference was held at The University of the West Indies Cave Hill campus in Barbados, followed in 2015 by a volume, Caribbean Irish Connections: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Alison Donnell, Maria McGarrity and Evelyn O’Callaghan. The starting point of this first discussion was the question raised by the Jamaican writer Erna Brodber: “What did the Irish contribute to the Caribbean creole literary mix?” This special issue of Caribbean Quarterly expands on Brodber’s question and explores what Caribbean thought might have to offer contemporary interrogations of Irishness and what Caribbean writing has contributed to representations of Irishness both in the Caribbean and Ireland itself.

Ireland, Reading and Cultural Nationalism, 1790-1930 by Andrew Murphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

The emergence of an Irish 'common reader' in the nineteenth century had significant implications for the evolution of Irish cultural nationalism. The rise of literacy rates prompted a cultural crisis, with nationalists fearing that the beneficiaries of mass education were being drawn to populist publications emanating from London which were having the effect of eroding Irish identity and corrupting Irish morals. This fear prompted an intensification of cultural nationalist activity at the turn of the century. Andrew Murphy’s study, which includes a chapter on W. B. Yeats and the Irish reader, moves freely between historical and literary analysis and demonstrates how a developing sense of cultural crisis served as an engine for the Irish literary revival. Examining responses to Irish reading habits advanced by a wide range of cultural commentators, Murphy provides a nuanced discussion of theories of nationalism and examines attempts finally to control reading habits through the introduction of censorship.