New Voices

A long-standing feature of Irish Studies conferences conducted under the aegis of organisations such as IASIL and ACIS—respectively the international and the American associations in the subject area—has long been the high proportion of doctoral students presenting papers. A more recent though obviously related trend has been the rapidity with which many who  rst came to notice under such circumstances have gone on to make their mark as authors of distinguished monographs. The tradition of the young began when A. N. Jeffares and others established the International Association for the Study of AngloIrish Literature (IASIL) in 1970. It was perpetuated by such organisations as the American Conference for Irish Studies and the Canadian Association for Irish Studies in the following decades, while in Europe SOFEIR and EFACIS have cultivated younger members in much the same spirit. Yet not until the inaugural of the New Voices Conference at the Irish Film Centre in February 1999 has an Irish literary conference been devoted exclusively to the work of younger scholars. Taken as a whole the resultant collection constitutes a valuable resource for contemporary Irish scholarship as marking out the tendencies at work both in Ireland and wherever else ‘green is read’—since contributions from Boston, Oxford, Canterbury, York, Miami and Los Angeles, Princeton and Cornell weigh in equally with those from universities in Dublin, Galway and Belfast. The thirty-one papers are gathered into sections covering the politics of the Irish Literary Revival, Women and Fiction, Poetry/Nation/Language, Literary Journalism, Children’s Literature and Challenges for Irish Studies. What confers unity on a collection is a common relation to the standards of ‘original research’ and ‘signi cant contribution’ that examiners rightly seek to  nd in doctoral dissertations. An added interest lies in the fact that many of the ‘new voices’ expound methodologically aware approaches to texts and contexts while several are professedly attached to one theoretical school or another. That this has not always been the dominant note in Irish Studies can be judged from the account of matters proffered by Eamon Hughes writing editorially in a recent issue of the Irish Review (Spring/Summer 2000). There he takes the second New Voices conference held in Belfast last February as his point d’appui, arguing that the tardy advance of theory among older hands in Irish Studies is compensated for by a rapid pace among the young. In practice, a fairly conventional principle of selection has recommended itself to the organisers of the  rst New Voices conference. Hence, out of eighty proposals received, those selected are said to re ect ‘research areas enjoying the sustained attention of emerging critics’. On such a showing, the focus of attention now rests on writers such as Yeats, Wilde and Shaw, on the one hand, and Edna O’Brien, John Banville and Jennifer Johnston, on the other—nothing very innovative there—while topical dissertations engaged with such subject as the memory of 1798 and the Famine, the post-colonial similitudes between Ireland and the Caribbean and the politics of literature in Northern Ireland. Issues of gender and race are widely represented in this collection while ontological questions arising from ‘the construction of the subject’ explicitly inform several contributions. Providing more conventionally literary ballast is a series of closely calibrated accounts of Irish journals such as the Irish Statesman or the mid-century Dublin Magazine. In these and other sections there emerges a clear conception of the historical itinerary of modern Ireland from revolution to reaction and onwards towards critical self-awareness at the moment represented by these papers. Selina Guinness gives a scintillating account of the montage effects involved in the centenary revisitation of the 1798 Rebellion as viewed from the standpoint of cultural and political nationalists in 1898. Her paper shares fully in the deepening awareness of Yeats’s  uctuating and often Janus-like negotiations with Fenianism that forms such a central strand in the narrative emerging from Roy Foster’s authorised biography and Terence Brown’s critical life along with the remarkable symposium of scholarship that surrounds the new edition of the Letters. Geároid O’Flaherty neatly maps out points of contact and divergence between Bernard Shaw and the contemporary Irish nationalists who so often disparaged him in Ireland, while Noreen Doody uncovers the Irish component in Oscar Wilde’s sensibility which his English audience failed to