Séance du séminaire de l'aire Irlande (axe 5)

Séance du séminaire de l'aire Irlande le jeudi 23 janvier 2025 de 17h à 18h30 en mode hybride (Bât B - salle B0.619):  Marguérite Corporaal ((Radboud University, Nijmegen (Hollande)) pour une conférence intitulée:

"‘One Emigrant More’: The Transnational Dimensions of Irish Local Colour Fiction, 1885-1910."

Generally, local colour fiction from the nineteenth and early twentieth century has been interpreted through the lens of nation building. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have argued that the genre contributed to the configuration of national identity through a crystallisation of regional ways of life that were viewed as representative for national character (2003), and Josephine Donovan (2010) has read the genre as voicing resistance towards processes of nationalisation and standardisation. In similar vein, the heyday of regional fiction in Ireland from the 1880s till the 1910s, has primarily been viewed as part of a nation building project. Running synchronically to the cultural nationalism of the Irish Revival, rural, regional communities, especially those in the West, were seen as repositories from which a precolonial, traditional Irishness could be retrieved that could form the basis of postcolonial identities (Castle 2001; Snell 1998: 30).

While the past and present scholarly recognition of regional literature and culture in connection to issues of imperialism and nationalism is certainly legitimate, the hitherto rather insulary approach to Ireland’s local colour of the long nineteenth century has blinded us towards its strong transnational dimensions. This lecture suggests such a transnational perspective on the basis of three phenomena. The first is the role of transnationalism as a theme in Irish local colour narratives, in the form of regional sites that are spaces of transcultural encounter, and travelling characters (tourists, gypsies, emigrants). The second is the circulation of Irish local colour fiction in translation across Europe, and in republications, mainly in North America. For example, Rosa Mulholland’s The Wild Birds of Killeevy and The Fair Emigrant were both translated into German. Shan Bullock’s Ring o’Rushes was reissued in American and Australian editions: by Melbourne and New York publishers Ward, Lock & Co. and by Chicago publisher Stone & Kimball, all in 1896. These republications were marketed in specific ways (through covers, illustrations, prefaces) to make geographically distant Irish regions accessible to foreign readerships.

The third phenomenon is the transnational reception of Irish local colour writers and their works. Reviews of Irish local colour fiction in the press beyond Ireland situated authors, their novels and short story collections in specific (trans)national historical, social and literary traditions. The ways in which Irish local colour fiction was thus framed sheds light on how Irish contributions to regional literature were viewed in an increasingly global literary marketplace.

MARGUÉRITE CORPORAAL is a Full Professor of Irish Literature in Transnational Contexts at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands. She was the recipient of an ERC grant for consolidators for a project which investigated early literature of Ireland’s Great Famine (2010-15). She is currently the principal investigator and supervisor of the projects Redefining the Region: The Transnational Dimensions of Local Colour and Heritages of Hunger, both funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). She is the author of Relocated Memories: The Great Irish Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1847-1870 (Syracuse University Press, 2017). Other recent publications include The Famine Diaspora and Irish American Women’s Writing (co-edited, Palgrave, 2024), and Famines and the Making of Heritage (co-edited, Routledge, 2024)