A Long Long Way chapter by chapter summary (2025)

The Great War and the 1916 Uprising: The Impact of Irish Military Service upon Collective Memory as seen via the Retrospective Lens of Contemporary Literature

On 24 April, 1916, more than 1,000 rebels of the Irish Volunteers and associated organizations under the leadership of Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Eamon de Valera, and others declared an independent Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin. At that same moment, tens of thousands of their countrymen were in the British Army, participating in the Great War on the mainland, and many thousands of Irishmen had already been killed in Gallipoli, Salonika, Belgium, France, and elsewhere in service to the crown. This paradox creates the opening for many interesting questions. How did those Irish troops and the Irish public, especially those connected to serving Irish soldiers, react to the Easter Uprising? Most importantly, for the purposes of this paper, what was the collective reaction to Irish service in the Great War immediately following the armistice, and what was the continued impact upon public opinion, political action, and internecine strife throughout the following decades? Using the historical novel “A Long Long Way” as a structural framework for analysis, this paper will address these unspoken realities by comparing the modern memory as reflected in this historical novel to the historical reality as recorded by witnesses and scholars.

When Willie Francis Died: The "Disturbing" Story Behind One of the Eighth Amendment's Most Enduring Standards of Risk

In the 2008 case, Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol. Four of the seven opinions looked to the 1947 Supreme Court case of Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber for Eighth Amendment Cruel and Unusual Punishments precedent in the death penalty context. Resweber upheld Louisiana’s determination to send Willie Francis—a poor, African American teenager who had survived the State’s first electrocution attempt—to the electric chair a second time. This chapter provides an in-depth examination of the Resweber case telling Francis’s personal story, the efforts of his attorneys, Bertrand de Blanc and J. Skelly Wright, to prevent his execution, and the precedential effect of Resweber, particularly in Baze. At the time Resweber was decided the Supreme Court still considered de jure segregation constitutional and held that the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause did not apply to State actions such as a second execution attempt by Louisiana. Ultimately, this Chapter argues that, in light of the passage of six decades, which heralded massive changes in criminal law and procedure, the use of Resweber as modern Eighth Amendment guidance—especially in Baze—is troubling. In addition to the legal account, this Chapter details personal reactions to Francis’s story obtained through interviews with members of Francis’s family and residents of Francis’s hometown of St. Martinville, Louisiana, as well as numerous letters that people from all over the country wrote Francis while he was waiting in jail. These letter writers discussed many topics, including their reflections on racial injustice in America and the need for religious redemption, not only for Francis but also for his judgers and this country. Yet a number of letters were deeper, more private. Francis, it seems, was not only an imprint of the social and legal times, but also a projected muse of sorts to whom individuals could confide their heartfelt thoughts and wishes—about God, death, health, hopes, family, even romance. Key terms: Fifth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment, Double Jeopardy, Due Process, Incorporation, Gilbert Ozenne, L.O. Pecot, James Dudley Simon, NAACP, A.P. Tureaud, Joseph A. Thornton, U.J. Esnault, Dennis D. Bazer, In re Kemmler, Malloy v. South Carolina, Wilkerson v. Utah, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Monte Lemann

Sebastian Barry’s Portrayal of History’s Marginalised People

Studi Irlandesi a Journal of Irish Studies, 2013

This paper addresses two groups of novels by Sebastian Barry and discusses his treatment of characters who have been marginalized by the dominant Irish historical narrative, based on the stories of members of his own family and argues that Barry's aim is not to produce a revisionist account of Irish history or justify minority positions. It is rather to present the plight of often isolated individuals and to reveal the complexity of the situations in which they find themselves. The paper uses recent theoretical writing on individual and collective memory and the relationship between memory and history.

Narrating the Community: The Short Story Cycles of Val Mulkerns and Mary Beckett

Narrating Ireland in Different Genres and Media

Final (20 July 2015) Cork deaths War of Independence and Civil War 1916-1923

This is a Pdf version of the Full List (20 July 2015) for ease of reading

Outpost and Outlier: The Ireland of Three Recent Irish Fictions

The Yeats Journal of Korea, 2018

In this essay, I read three recent Irish fictions by writers sensitive to Ireland's perennially fraught position as both outlier and outpost of European and British cultural/political domains: Edna O'Brien's The Little Red Chairs, Jo Baker's A Country Road, A Tree, and Sebastian Barry's The Temporary Gentleman.

A Long, Long Way-Cap 1

"A SOFT LAD THE LIKE OF YOU": COMPLEX FATHER-SON RELATIONSHIPS IN THREE "MILLENNIAL" IRISH TEXTS

This thesis addresses the complex relationship between fathers and sons in three highly successful literary texts that grapple with Irish nationalism: Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, and Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People. Each text comes from a different historical moment, but each of these moments is distinguished by major change, a change so paradigm-shifting as to be worthy of the adjective millennial. While multiple literary critics have paid huge attention to the figure of Ireland as mother—and, indeed, Ireland in other female roles (Old Woman, beautiful young queen, fabulous Sky Woman)—few have interrogated what dynamic father-son relationships "say" in stories, whether novels or plays, conscious of shifting political, social, and cultural realities in Ireland. It is with in this vacuum that I propose the literary device, the father and son trope, as an effective means for developing a discourse on the power struggle that is colonialism.

Thackeray's Wartime Subjects

Ireland and Latin America : a cultural history

PhD dissertation University of Zurich, 2010

According to Declan Kiberd, "postcolonial writing does not begin only when the occupier withdraws: rather it is initiated at that very moment when a native writer formulates a text committed to cultural resistance." The Irish in Latin America-a continent emerging from indigenous cultures, colonisation, and migrations-may be regarded as colonised in Ireland and as colonisers in their new home. They are a counterexample to the standard pattern of identities in the major English-speaking destinations of the Irish Diaspora. Using literary sources, the press, correspondence, music, sports, and other cultural representations, in this thesis I search the attitudes and shared values signifying identities among the immigrants and their families. Their fragmentary and wide-ranging cultures provide a rich context to study the protean process of adaptation to, or rejection of, the new countries. Evolving from oppressed to oppressors, the Irish in Latin America swiftly became ingleses. Subsequently, in order to join the local middle classes they became vaqueros, llaneros, huasos, and gauchos so they could show signs of their effective integration to the native culture, as seen by the Latin American elites. Eventually, some Irish groups separated from the English mainstream culture and shaped their own community negotiating among Irishness, Englishness, and local identities in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Cuba, and other places in the region. These identities were not only unmoored in the emigrants' minds but also manoeuvred by the political needs of community and religious leaders. After reviewing the major steps and patterns of Irish migration to Latin America, the thesis analyses texts from selected works, offers a version of how the settlers became Latin Americans or not, and elucidates the processes by which a new Irish-Latin Ameri-can hybrid was created.