New Hibernia Review's autumn issue now available online

New Hibernia Review’s autumn issue available online

New Hibernia Review, the quarterly journal published by the University of St. Thomas Center for Irish Studies, is available online.

The journal’s most recent issue ( Autumn 2007, Vol. 11, No. 3) can be found at the Project Muse Web site. All issues of New Hibernia Review since 2000 are available on the Project Muse site, which offers searchable, full-text issues of the St. Thomas-based journal.

Here’s a brief look at the contents of the new issue, courtesy of NHR editor Jim Rogers:

  • The issue opens with the and article by sociologist Kieran Bonner of the University of Waterloo, who examines the paradox of   Dublin’s   famous Bewley’s coffee shops. The shops recently reinvented themselves in new, upscale ways – which Bonner thinks speaks volumes about the new global Ireland.   
  • Next, Sara Brady of Trinity College Dublin looks at the complicated status of “authentic” Irish of such sports like hurling, Gaelic football and camogie when they’re played in the United States, or in the new women's leagues that have grown up in recent decades.  
  • Then, poet Joseph Lennon – a New Englander raised in the Midwest – offers a suite new sonnets and other work, opening   with "1981," in which a boy feels common cause with "strikers starving a world away" in Ireland.  
  • Martin Dowling of Queens University Belfast, who is both an historian and a skilled traditional musician himself,    provides an up-close look at the sudden rise of Ulster Scots  culture in Northern Ireland – with no little skepticism about its dubious claims to be genuine.
  • Next, 16th-century Ireland enters the pages, as Margaret Rose Jaster of Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, examines the 400 years of legend and fantasy that have built up around the story of prince Shane O’Neill (1530-67) – usually cast as proud, oversexed and uniquely savage.    
  • From St. Ambrose University in Iowa, Ryan Dye looks at the ways that Irish American of 100 years ago registered deep uneasiness about the Spanish-American War’s imperialist subtexts – and voiced their misgivings in the very heart of anti-Catholic nativism, the American Midwest.
  • Eugene O’Brien of Mary Immaculate College in Limerick offers a timely reflection on how state community-sanctioned violence (in war, in racism) can turn guests into ghosts and hospitality into hostility – in modern Ireland and elsewhere.   
  • The rock group Black 47 then comes to our attention, in a biographical survey of songwriter, novelist, and playwright Larry Kirwan – a restless, creative and iconoclastic Irish writer. The author is Brian Leahy Doyle of Lehman College, CUNY.
  • Finally, Sheila McCormick of the National University of Ireland Galway presents the journal's annual review of Irish dramatic developments in “Back on Stage: Irish Theater in 2006,” discussing the trends and events that, for good or bad, shaped the Irish theater world last year.

For more information, including subscription information, please contact the Center for Irish Studies, (651) 962-5662, or Mail #5008, or e-mail Jim Rogers. Visit the center's Web site for additional information.