Irish Children’s Literature and the Poetics of Memory

203 Pages·2021·1.798 MB·English

by  Rebecca Long

IRISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND

THE POETICS OF MEMORY
Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children’s Literature
Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children’s Literature seeks to expand the range
and quality of research in children’s literature through publishing innovative
monographs by leading and rising scholars in the field. With an emphasis on
cross and interdisciplinary studies, this series takes literary approaches as a
starting point, drawing on the particular capacity for children’s literature to open
out into other disciplines.
Series Editor:
Dr Lisa Sainsbury, Director of the National Centre for Research in Children’s
Literature, Roehampton University, UK
Editorial Board:
Professor M. O. Grenby (Newcastle University, UK), Dr Marah Gubar
(University of Pittsburgh, USA), Dr Vanessa Joosen (Tilburg University, The
Netherlands)
Titles in the Series:
Adulthood in Children’s Literature, Vanessa Joosen
The Courage to Imagine: The Child Hero in Children’s Literature, Roni Natov
Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life, Lisa Sainsbury
Fashioning Alice: The Career of Lewis Carroll’s Icon, 1860–1901, Kiera Vaclavik
From Tongue to Text: A New Reading of Children’s Poetry, Debbie Pullinger
Literature’s Children: The Critical Child and the Art of Idealisation, Louise Joy
Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics, Alison Waller
Metaphysics of Children’s Literature, Lisa Fitzgerald
Forthcoming Titles:
Children’s Literature and Material Culture, Jane Suzanne Carroll
Activist Authors and British Child Readers of Colour, Karen Sands-O’Connor
The Dark Matter of Children’s “Fantastika” Literature, Chloé Germaine Buckley
British Children’s Literature in Japanese Culture, Catherine Butler
IRISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND

THE POETICS OF MEMORY
Rebecca Long
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published in Great Britain 2021
Copyright © Rebecca Long, 2021
Rebecca Long has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
Cover design by Namkwan Cho
Photograph © DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI / Getty Images
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-6725-4
ePDF: 978-1-3501-6726-1
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To Fergal Keyes, my best friend in all the world. He always knew the right
questions to ask.
vi
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
Chapter 1
RETRIEVING: STANDISH O’GRADY, ELEANOR HULL, AUGUSTA GREGORY 17
Chapter 2
RETELLING: ALICE DEASE, ELLA YOUNG, VIOLET RUSSELL, PADRAIC
COLUM, JAMES STEPHENS 43
Chapter 3
REMEMBERING: PATRICIA LYNCH, UNA KELLY, EILÍS DILLON,
J. S. ANDREWS 75
Chapter 4
REIMAGINING: PAT O’SHEA, ORLA MELLING, JIM O’LEARY,
KATE THOMPSON, SIOBHAN DOWD 117
CONCLUSION: DARRAGH MARTIN, PEADAR Ó’GUILIN 157
Notes 169
Works Cited 179
Index 191
viii
INTRODUCTION
Irish children’s literature is shaped by a pattern of recurring mythological and

folkloric narratives.1 The narratives in this pattern carry and communicate images
of cultural heritage that remain essentially the same, though their manifestations
are continuously changing, with archetypes and stereotypes alike available to be
reimagined by succeeding generations of authors and readers. This reimagination
is discernible in texts that engage with mythological narratives, and with domestic
narratives of childhood experience. This book investigates the presence and
significance of cultural and mythological heritage in Irish children’s literature
between 1892 and 2016. It analyses representative works by Standish O’Grady
(1894), Eleanor Hull (1898), Augusta Gregory (1906), Alice Dease (1907), Ella
Young (1910), Violet Russell (1913), Padraic Colum (1916), James Stephens (1920),
Patricia Lynch (1934), Una Kelly (1945), Eilís Dillon (1952), J. S. Andrews (1969),
Pat O’Shea (1985), Orla Melling (1986), Jim O’Leary (1993), Kate Thompson
(2005), Siobhan Dowd (2008), Darragh Martin (2013) and Peader Ó’Guilín
(2016). These texts function as examples of the ways in which Irish children’s
literature uses myth to engage with issues of landscape, time and identity across
the decades of the late nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The
texts are explored within a chronological timeline beginning with the publication
of Standish O’Grady’s The Coming of Cuculain in 1894 and concluding with Peader
Ó’Guilín’s The Call in 2016. The former stands as one of the first retellings of the
Cuchulainn myth to both engage with Cuchulainn’s childhood experiences and
to establish a foundation for the repurposing of that material for reading by
contemporary child readers. The latter, published in 2016, the centenary year of
the 1916 Easter Rising, stands as another new departure in the treatment of myth
in Irish children’s literature. Its subversive reimagination of mythological figures
offers an appropriate endpoint for this literary timeline, which aims to chart the
development of that treatment in the aftermath of the Celtic Revival.
Cultures across the globe are influenced by stories, and Irish culture is markedly
shaped by the power of narrative and by the necessity of remembering. The texts
analysed here operate at the intersection between Irish children’s literature and
culture and Irish mythology; this book explores the meaning produced at that
intersection and how it evolves from the late nineteenth into the early twenty-
first century. While each of the chosen core texts functions within specific social
and cultural contexts, to examine them together is to illuminate the thematic
reciprocity that exists between them. They share a fundamental concern with