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Reflected in these writings from twenty-one Irish Americans are the
themes common to all immigrant literature, but from the authors'
own ethnic point of view. The struggle for success forms the
underlying structure in the stories by O'Hara, Curran, and
McCarthy; and the changing values the New World imposes on the
individual are seen in Edwin O'Connor's Grand Day for Mr. Garvey.
Irish wit and black humor pepper all the stories, as represented by
Dunn's bartender-philosopher, Dooley, and Donleavy's Fairy Tale of
New York. Catholicism is omnipresent and is often characterized by
the priest, as in Fitzgerald's Benediction, Power's Bill, and
Flaherty's Fogarty. Themes that have an immense effect on the
characters' relationships are their difficulties in communicating
with one another, which Gill captures succinctly in The Cemetery,
and the repositioning of gender roles, so evident in Cullinan's
Life After Death and in Costello's Murphy's Xmas. Finally, there
are the intense, often contradictory, feelings the characters have
toward their "homeland:" Hamill's Gift illustrates the desire to
rid Ireland of British rule; Gordon's "neighborhood" shows the
immigrants' embarrassment over their origins. Editors Casey and
Rhodes have organized these pieces chronologically, beginning at
the turn of the century. Thus, the selections illustrate the
progression of Irish-American literature and also fulfill the word
of William Kennedy, who said of his own writing: "those who came
before helped to show me how to turn experience into literature."
With this collection of some of English-language short stories of
the past half century, the reader is invited to see Ireland afresh
from the perspective of its women writers. Included are stories by
well-known writers such as Mary Lavin, Edna O'Brien and Julia
O'Faolain. The collection also includes new writers, such as Clare
Boylan, Rita Kelly, and Una Woods. The stories focus on the
inherrent contradictions of provincial Ireland's role as a modern
European state. In the first story, Helen Lucy Burke writes of an
older Irish woman, encountering the shocking realities of Italian
Catholic Rome. Other stories provide interesting revisions of
traditional Irish themes and situations, such as the problems of an
educated, sensitive person stuck in a country town. Anne Devlin
handles the themes of the Irish person in England, this time in an
England edgy about IRA bombings. Some stories deal with the
""Troubles"" in Northern Ireland; others deal with the eternal
troubles of Ireland as a whole too many children, too much
hypocrisy, too little communication between men and women. The
editors have provided an introduction which examines the role of
women, especially women writers, in Irish history and literature.
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