Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Eilean Ni Chuilleanain

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of Oscar Wilde, Trinity College's School of English held a conference on the Wilde family. This book is the proceedings of the conference. The Wilde family was prominent, sometimes sensationally so, in the literary, scholarly, political and professional milieus of Victorian Dublin and then London. D. Coakley sketches in the social and professional background of the family; Peter Froggat and Michael Ryan assess the enduring value of Sir William Wilde's work as medical historian and statistician, and as archaeologist and antiquarian; Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin looks at the role of Oscar's mother, Speranza, as an ancestor-figure for a contemporary woman writer. Lucy McDiarmid and Alan Sinfield write on Wilde's trials and on the scandalous reverberations of his name in the 20th century. Robert Dunbar places Oscar Wilde's stories for children in their Victorian context, while Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy considers their trans-formation into the successful theatre adaptation, The Star-Child. Wilde's plays are the subject of a lively discussion between distinguished Irish play-wrights and producers, Marina Carr, Thomas Kilroy, Michael Colgan and Patrick Mason.

The Wilde Legacy

Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell (1879-1944) was a talented poet, reared in Catholic Belfast, who became a pioneer of Irish Studies in the United States. His reputation as an Irish Irelander was gained in London, but in 1921 he settled outside Dublin and soon became active in radical nationalism. In the revolutionary years he became a republican justice and local councillor in Co. Wicklow. Having opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he was arrested in Bray, spending the entire Civil War interned in Mountjoy and Tintown on the Curragh. Campbell's voluminous diaries, cannily concealed from his captors, provide much more than a chronicle of events and experiences. Being the work of a skilled writer and acute observer, they offer revealing cameos of his republican colleagues, vivid notes of personal conversations, and imaginative reflections on the psychological effects of incarceration. Sympathetically edited by another distinguished poet and scholar, this selection from his diaries will fascinate all students of the Irish Civil War.

Eilean Ni Chuilleanain

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