Recensioni / Reviews

In one of the essays contained in the collection edited by Sara Brady and Fintan Walsh, Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (2009), J’aime Morrison writes that “[b]ecause of their double focus, crossroads are important spaces for reconsidering Irish identity” (82). This is a more than fitting description of the main objective of this volume, which, in its entirety, represents an attempt to rethink Irish culture and to chart the several ramifications of twenty-first century Irish identity. Crossroads is divided into five parts: I. “Tradition, Ritual, and Play”; II. “Place, Landscape, and Commemoration”; III. “Political Performances”; IV. “Gender, Feminism, and Queer Performance”; V. “Diaspora, Migration, and Globalization”. Clearly these sections are meant to encompass the main cultural (and political) hot spots that, at least in the eye of the foreigner, usually define and permeate Irish identity – i.e. traditional cultural expressions such as mumming, folk music and storytelling, lush green landscapes, en masse emigration, and religious and territorial issues. Throughout the collection, these components of Irish culture are (re)considered using the broad-spectrum lens of performance studies. The editors claim that they wish to “[...] impress the need for performance as a paradigm and as an object of study to be considered in greater depth in the context of Irish culture” (8). Partly this is because at the time of publication Brady and Walsh were both affiliated with a drama department in Ireland, but more significantly, they feel that performance studies have the potential to develop new critical perspectives in fields that are not typically associated with performative arts. Not exactly surprising is the fact that famous political speeches and acts – as in Anne Pulju’s essay on De Valera’s political oath – or sports events are considered to be pieces of performance, while it comes more as a surprise to see religious pilgrimages, and even roads taken into consideration. Crossroads can be read as an all-embracing survey on the concept of performance as a viable interpretative tool for all things Irish. The result is undoubtedly refreshing and thought provoking. The first part of the book is the longest, with five essays on traditional subjects. It starts with the contribution of Jack Santino, “Performing Ireland: A Performative Approach to the Study of Irish Culture”, which delves into the performative qualities of what he calls “ritualesque”. In his analysis of public events, such as the Bloody Sunday commemorations or the Gay Pride Day Studi irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies, n. 3 (2013), pp. 379-391 http://www.fupress.com/bsfm-sijis


May Twenty-Second
At the heart of Frank McGuinness's latest collection of poems is what even by his challenging standards is an astonishing achievement: a group of some twenty-three short, tightly-packed lyrics (57-68) inspired by Goya's album, entitled e Witches and Old Women. One can easily guess which of Goya's particular images has prompted which poem, but it is not the descriptive power that is at once enticing, shocking, freeing, but the wild exuberance of each imaginative outpouring. ere is a total entering into the spirit of each sketch, an inhabiting (possession?) quite devoid of any judgemental distance; instead, a reader is immersed in the sensory freedoms found by those women that lie beyond the decision to deny all traditional codes of behaviour or belief, any limitations to be imposed on experience. Rather the poems embrace the maelstrom that constitutes human awareness at any given moment in time, the sheer range of sensual, intellectual, emotional possibilities and stimuli with no holding back. e rhythms push the reader powerfully onward, not relaxing their hold, as an irresistible wildness takes over: "spread the word, hell is dead, roar it from steeples" (62). But we are not exclusively in the world of Goya's images or any traditional expression of diabolism. We are not allowed the comfort that would come with such historical placing; instead, rapidly glimpsed allusions hint at cultural, political, private (gay), local (Irish), historical analogies that bring a wide-ranging inclusiveness to the poems despite their lack of an easily de nable focus. When one embarks on a poem, anything might happen; the direction is erce, but the objective is elusive; the conclusions are emphatic, but never expected. e collection is preceded by an epigraph from Lorca celebrating how "there is no straight road in this world", only "a / 322 Just how bold the concept and execution of "Vicky de Lambray" it becomes clearer if one compares that poem to "Caroline Blackwood" (112)(113)(114), another portrait of an outsider, but one not celebrating complete independence rather one seeking to sever all ties with "our big house" (112) and an over-bearing, titled mother, intent on imposing her own values on her daughter's upbringing. is is a far more limited and circumscribed objective: the poem runs to eight stanzas but noticeably the rst four continually circle about Blackwood's con icted feelings for her mother ("revere her as a she-devil"; 112), as if in truth she cannot break away fully, or needs the very fact of her mother to justify her own alterity. e remaining stanzas (and most of the rst stanza too) outline her mode of escape which invariably relates to a man, not trust in herself. Lucien Freud con rms her own opinion of her mother yet the language chosen shows the extent to which he denigrates Blackwood too; Israel is a musician but the child born of their union is still-born, denying Blackwood a chance at motherhood. Independence then becomes a matter of ghting legally for her nancial rights to fund her lifestyle, till the advent of Robert Lowell, "my last husband" (113), who nonetheless left her to her by-now alcohol-raddled state ("I perfume rooms with bottles, / giving birth to vodka noggins"; 113). ere is none of de Lambray's joy in being alone: instead of independence, sadly, a cycle repeats itself of searching for new forms of dependence. e opening of the nal stanza de nes the degree to which she fails to escape a searing conscience about all this activity: "Can I be blamed for itting…?"; 113. Blackwood throughout her monologue is framing an elegy for her life (" ere are always yesterdays…"; 113); no energy is left for questing onward; the poem is no manifesto for needful change. In these constant attempts to remake herself, it is the circumstances only which change, not the motivating psyche. McGuinness need not intrude to make a critique; Blackwood does that herself and devastatingly.
It has been worth dwelling in detail on some eleven of the fty-seven or so poems in May Twenty-Second to explore a new-found complexity resulting from McGuinness's setting each subject within an intricate time-frame and the meticulous matching of each with a particular verse technique and metrical patterning. What results are new approaches to personal freedom that are nonetheless subtly contained by the chosen forms and warmed in each case by a sensitive compassion. Liberties are found to have their price, but the chance, given to the reader, to inhabit and explore these private worlds in imagination and experience their degree of success or failure is in itself freeing. at time is of the essence has a unique validity in this collection and is the source of its abundant riches.

Dinner with Groucho
e quotation from Lorca in May Twenty-Second about a lack of straight roads and the presence instead of endless labyrinths is an apt introduction to McGuinness's latest play, which too claims as its subject, "confusions -contradictions -lovely labyrinths at the root of our lives" (47). Dinner with Groucho zzes with outbursts of brilliance and ashes of insight. e result garnered an absolute recracker of a performance from its cast of three. It is rare for a play to keep an audience absolutely on the edge of their seats for its entire duration, not knowing where dialogue or situations might swing next and all at a thrilling pace. Tangential shifts of direction, style, modes of delivery, and tempo have one constantly on the alert. McGuinness has seized on a brief moment of cultural history and elaborated wildly: the given fact is a meeting for dinner that did actually occur between T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx in 1964, the culmination of a sporadic correspondence between the men that began three years earlier with Eliot writing a fan letter to Groucho, expressing admiration for his wit and sense of fun. Eliot was to die a year later; Marx in 1977. Little is known about their encounter, so McGuinness gives his imagination free rein, proposing a restaurant-venue that may be in London, maybe on the verge of the hereafter. It could be heaven or could be hell (both men as artists have experienced a long after-life, subject to changing taste and values); their table is presided over by the Proprietor or is she perhaps God, encouraging the men to recognise their true destinies and sit in judgment on themselves? Both men are edgily nervous: the conviviality frequently sounds like a tactic for avoiding intimacy. ey admit "We did not get what we expected of each other" and Groucho clari es that he "expected better", while Eliot responds that he "expected stranger" (28). e repartee has a brittle humour from the rst, and there is a decided sense of them playing up to each other: performing for an admirer. Steadily we come to appreciate how they share a distaste for fame and reputation that can touch on derision, particularly in Eliot ("I know my limitations…a mug's game -poetry"; 30-31), which explains why he prefers to introduce himself not as a celebrated poet but as a successful publisher. e text is a gift for actors in its demands (all three performers rose admirably to the challenges): the tone shifts rapidly between the lyrical and the abrasive, from witty hilarity to heartfelt self-questioning, as the play moves e ortlessly between comedy, which is viewed ultimately as "innocent, insane de ance" and tragedy seen as necessarily "paying the bill" (45).
is matches the men's searching intellects, shifting between self-presentation and a sense of weariness at the routines their lives have become: "the act is winding down" (the words are Eliot's but the image is drawing on Groucho's vaudeville world). "You have seen all I can do -I hope you nd it amusing" (26). Lamely, they try to bolster each other's con dence only to nd they are quickly reiterating their epithets of praise and in no time they are " nished" (26), for this routine at least. Questioning why they have allowed their lives to take the shape they have (" en for what -done your bit for what", 27), Eliot confesses "I have earned my right to silence". Marx questions this, wanting further insight into Eliot's meaning, seemingly lacking in understanding; but shortly in the play he will quote Marianne Moore's poem "Silence" in its entirety, as "the story of my life" with its assertion that the "deepest feeling always shows itself in silence" with Moore's own self-correction here: "not in silence, but restraint" (44). For Moore there should be no settled home ("Inns are not residences"). Both men reveal sadly how di cult it is to sustain Marianne Moore's state of mind (that forever questing con dently onward); even the restaurant, while welcoming, is still only a transient point of rest. Signi cantly, both men constantly summon ideas about King Lear lost in the storm, but deride the thought of Shakespeare's protagonist as a role-model, fantasizing dismissively about his relations with his daughters and with his mother. e dialogue abounds in cultural cross-references (Beckett, Shakespeare, Dante, Coleridge, Pinter, Hopkins, Marie Lloyd) de ning the scope of the men's intellectual awareness, and both make the allusions readily. One wonders if McGuinness is perhaps testing through his characters and dramaturgy the ongoing validity of T.S. Eliot's apology for the technique he deployed throughout e Waste Land: " ese fragments I have shored against my ruins".
But it would be wrong to see the play as descending into maudlin self-criticism. Both actors are required to show the gamut of their technical accomplishments: they sing, they dance (including a hilarious Charleston choreographed by David Bolger of CoisCéim); Tom Eliot (played by Greg Hicks) performs acrobatics; Groucho (Ian Bartholomew) ventriloquises with a wine glass and later with a plastic chicken; Tom resorts to magic and conjures cigars from behind Groucho's ears, pulls a vast multicoloured silk cloth from Groucho's pocket after placing there a modest handkerchief, and produces an egg from thin air, which he then transforms into the plastic hen. All this is required of the men while primarily they need / 324 to focus on that undertow of darker feeling, as both artists recognise their descent into old age and confront an artistry now completed. While Tom welcomes e ciency in publishing over creativity in poetry, Groucho, after numerous appearances as comedian, sees himself as con ned to residing in his audiences' memories as an endless shape-shifter: "I am a master of disguise" (40), always travelling "under cover" (40), never embracing a secure identity. Tom and Groucho are spurred on in these judgments by the Proprietor (played with teasing ambiguity by Ingrid Craigie) who must similarly be in command of a broad vocal and emotional range, being required by turns to adopt a tone suggestive of a séance (calling on an invocation from Euripides' Alcestis), of music-hall gaiety, an intimate familiarity with Jacobean court life and its eating habits, an injured dignity, obsequiousness, even the staccato rhythms of one undergoing a t. She nally orchestrates the shift to the play's more spiritual level with a surprisingly aggressive, feminist denigration of Hamlet's soliloquy "To be or not to be", as "all that pi e" (46), preferring an admission that "Our past is our present is our future" (46), where time and the individual life are seen as a continuum, all present in any given moment. Dinner with Groucho (like May Twenty-Second before it), expertly demonstrates the power and meaning of such vision. It is rare for a play of (often metaphysical) ideas to be so consistently zany in its modes of presentation and the cast worked at the top of their calibre, attentive to each other's performances to get the balance right allowing them, individually and as an ensemble, con dently to take risks at top speed. Dinner with Groucho is both theatre and play at their exhilarating best.
A good translation, to be such, needs a "decelerated reading" (40). Reading and translating are the two focal points that enclose the prose debut of Doireann Ní Ghríofa. A Ghost in the roat is an auto ctional novel that takes as its basis a mostly random series of encounters with a text from the Irish poetic tradition, the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire [Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire], an autobiographically-tinted poem composed by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill upon discovering that her husband, Art Ó Laoghaire, had been assassinated. e protagonist of the novel, who coincides perfectly with the author Ní Ghríofa (in this text the words "author", "narrator" and "protagonist" will be used indiscriminately to refer to the same person), runs into the poem for the rst time when she is just a child attending school: "I was a child, and she [Eibhlín] had been dead for centuries" (10). At this point, the young Ní Ghríofa was introduced to the lament through the Irish schooling system, without being able to be emotionally moved by it: "[h]er story seems sad, yes, but also a little dull. Schoolwork. Boring" (11). e second time she comes across it, she is an adolescent attending high school, but this time the meeting is "luckier". Indeed, Ní Ghríofa "develop[ed] a school-girl crush on this caoineadh" (ibidem), a symbiosis of feelings with the ancient Irish writer: "[w]hen Eibhlín Dubh describes falling in love at rst sight and abandoning her family to marry a stranger, I love her for it, just as every teenage girl loves the story of running away forever" (ibidem). e third encounter is the most random, but also the most crucial to the novel and the life of the author: during a car ride, her "eye tripped over a sign for Kilcrea" (15), the cemetery where Eibhlín buried her assassinated husband. us, Ní Ghríofa decided to undertake a third re-reading of the Caoineadh, which . 325 highlighted new elements of the poem for the author: "I was startled to nd Eibhlín Dubh pregnant again with her third child, just as I was" (17). It is this reading that brought Ní Ghríofa to feel the desire to make her own translation of the lament.
Reading, re-reading and translating are intertwined, giving life to "a liquid book" (Patel 2022), a literary microcosm made of a mother's milk and blood. Maternity is one of the main points around which the novel is built. Ní Ghríofa tells the story of a multifaceted maternity. On one hand, it appears to be strongly desired, considering the fact that she has given birth to four children; on the other hand, she tells the story of a very su ered experience of maternity: "in the milking parlour", the fourth chapter of the novel, emblematically represents this su ering, narrating the di cult birth of her fourth child, during which the only source of support is the Caoineadh that she keeps under her pillow. Ní Ghríofa also presents to the reader a vision of maternity as an obsession and as a job, as can be seen by the care that she dedicates to her four children, placing them at the centre of her daily life. She also puts forward the idea of maternity lived as an experience of solidarity: "[i]n choosing to carry a pregnancy, a woman gives of her body with a sel essness so ordinary that it goes unnoticed, even by herself. Her body becomes bound to altruism as instinctively as to hunger […] Sometimes a female body serves another by e ecting a theft upon itself " (2020a, 35).
Maternity is what ties Doireann and Eibhlín hand in glove. Referring to her third re-reading, the narrator-protagonist writes "I had never imagined her as a mother in any of my previous readings" (17). It is upon this third encounter that Ní Ghríofa starts assiduous bio-bibliographic research on Eibhlín's and her family's lives: "She wanted to know more of Eibhlín Dubh's life, to go beyond the poem and learn of this stranger's girlhood and old age. She wanted to see what became of her children and grandchildren. She wanted to nd her burial place and to lay owers on her grave" (Ní Ghríofa 2020b). Even though she acknowledges that she does not have the right academic preparation to conduct such research, "I may not be an academic, but I believe that I can sketch her years in my own way" (2020a, 75), she is able to trace an almost forgotten genealogy through the reading and studying of any kind of text, "graveyard inscriptions […], clergy and baptismal records in church ledgers, micro lm, letters, lists of student registrations, depositions, examinations, a transcribed family history written into a Bible" (Corser 2023, 124). e text, in its broader sense, carries out a central role in the novel. To-do lists are one of the text typologies that follow the reader throughout the novel and the protagonist is almost obsessed with them, as her life directly depended on the tick that signals the accomplishment of one of the tasks: "I keep my list as close as my phone, and draw a deep sense of satisfaction each time I strike a task from it. In such erasure lies joy" (2020a, 6-7). e rhythm of her daily life is marked by the owing of her pencil on the paper. Beyond her daily life, Ní Ghríofa's literary and spiritual life is animated by a constellation of texts. e reading and re-reading of a text from the Irish poetic tradition such as the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, which curiously belongs to the oral tradition and was transcribed only later by others, is what brings the author to deal with a myriad of texts. rough her bio-bibliographic research and translation of the poem, Ní Ghríofa succeeds in giving a new voice to a woman who, by chance or due to a systemic repression, had lost it, by letting her speak through herself, like a ghost in the throat, "inviting the voice of another woman to haunt my throat a while" (10; my emphasis).
It is important to emphasise the word "woman" because women are what the novel is about. Ní Ghríofa does what she calls an "act of repair, or the attempted act of repair, I should probably say" (Patel 2022). She tries to patch the damages made by history, by a world made by men (for other men) whose actions ended up silencing entire generations of women. " is is a female text" / 326 is the sentence that emblematically opens and closes the novel. A Ghost in the roat is a female text, written by a woman for other women, not to be read only by them, but to do them justice, just as Eibhlín's lament does, a text also composed by a woman for other women and whose survival is solely due to their capability and necessity of passing down orally their tradition. As the author herself said during an interview for e Paris Review, her aim was to give one of the possible multiple interpretations of the experience of femininity and of a female text, acknowledging that her perspective is the "perspective of a middle-class, cis, white woman living in Ireland" (Sasseen 2021). Not only does Ní Ghríofa give life to another female text, but she also writes a feminist text. She ghts against a patriarchal system through the use of words, using the text as a means of witness. She retrieves women and female texts destined to be forgotten by a forced condition of subordination. She does not carry out her ght through what she calls "feminist rage (which I absolutely do have)", but, as already said, through "acts of repair" (Patel 2022).
A Ghost in the roat is also a novel about writing, a text that re ects on itself, on its own structures. Writing and translating are considered as a continuous "stitching and re-stitching" (2020a, 40) of the curtains of one's "stanzas", a word which also means "room" in Italian, letting the reader grasp a veiled reference to W.B. Yeats 1 . Ní Ghríofa builds parallels between translation, writing, the decoration of a room and house chores: each stanza corresponds to a room, which needs to be taken care of in every minute detail: For months I work methodically, deliberating between synonyms, stitching and re-stitching the seams of curtains until they fall just so, letting my eye move back and forth between verbs, straightening the rugs, and polishing each linguistic ornament. Like my housework, the results of my translation are often imperfect, despite my devotion. I forget to swipe the hoover under a chair, or I spend hours washing windows and still leave smears. (ibidem) However, the metare ection goes much deeper. Indeed, the novel has an auto ctional nature. An auto ctional novel is a text where the protagonist, the narrator and the writer share the same name and surname, where elements of reality and ction intertwine and where there is stylistic and linguistic experimentation (E e, Lawlor 2022). All three of the conditions are perfectly realised in this novel. Firstly, the homonymy is evident from the very rst pages through the use of the rst-person narrator and the reference to poems that can be easily recognized as Ní Ghríofa's 2 . Secondly, the experimentation is realised through the continuous interpolation of extracts from texts of every register: "parts of the Caoineadh, but also domestic lists, instructions for making paper dolls, and even, at one point, reproduced images of nineteenth-century handwriting. e text of Ghost is often fragmented, and its form varies from chapter to chapter" (Corser 2023, 126; italics in the original). irdly, the author does not mingle reality and ction in terms of content, but of structure. As a matter of fact, the structure of the novel is revealed in the last chapter, in the very last words, when Ní Ghríofa's narration goes back, circularly, to the beginning of the text. is time, I won't let myself begin by writing Hoover or Sheets or Mop or Pump. Instead, I'll think of new words, and then I'll follow them. As I turn the bend towards home, I nd that I already know the echo with which that rst page will begin.

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Such a revelation, that the text that has just ended was already in the mind of the author from the beginning, traps it in the auto ctional genre. Indeed, such a discovery at the end changes the whole interpretation of the novel, which becomes, in the eyes of the reader, a self-conscious text, a text that, rather than hiding its own structure, prefers to self-evidently exhibit it. Such a condition reveals the auto ctionality of the novel.
at is how A Ghost in the roat brings together, under the light of a feminist auto ction, a variety of themes such as maternity, the Irish tradition, reading, writing, translating. In writing an auto ctional female text, Ní Ghríofa manages to tie her life, maternity, and literary experience together with Eibhlín's and that of all the women whose voice and whose texts have been suppressed.
Il plot ruota attorno alla vicenda di Kate che, appena vedova, scopre la doppia vita e il tradimento del marito, che l'ha lasciata in un mare di debiti in quell'Irlanda che, dopo i fasti della cosiddetta Celtic Tiger, dove il Pil volava a due cifre, si ritrova a fare i conti con una crisi che Wall aveva già pre gurato in is is the Country (London, Hodder/Sceptre) un suo romanzo del 2005 di forte impatto sociale.
Among the contemporary Irish writers whose voices resonate in the landscape of ction and who certainly deserve more exhaustive critical attention, Deirdre Madden features conspicuously. An important and highly admired author, Madden has devoted herself to the art of ction, and, unlike other writers, exclusively to the novel form. Over the span of more than thirty years, she has explored the time of the Troubles, the post-Troubles period and the changes of contemporary Ireland, shedding light on the themes of violence, trauma, memory, dislocation, identity, as well as the role of art and the artist. She is a writer who cannot be easily classi ed and who resists the label of Northern Irish writer: as she claims in the interview closing the present volume, she feels "profoundly European", having travelled extensively across Europe and lived in di erent countries for many years. is has had a strong impact on her relationship with Ireland: "I understood Ireland better for having lived in Europe, and I love Ireland" (234). e collection of essays edited by Anne Fogarty and Marisol Morales-Ladrón, Deirdre Madden. New Critical Perspectives, is a long-awaited contribution that lls a gap in the eld of Irish critical studies, as so far a great variety of essays has appeared in international collections and academic journals, but no speci c study of her ction has been published. e title itself is self-consciously revealing of the novelty embedded in the undertaking of this work by experts in Irish studies, as the time has come for a diversity of critical perspectives in the analysis and . 333 assessment of Deirdre Madden. ese are all new essays especially commissioned for the volume, and the individual studies o er a variety of broad cultural and scienti c approaches covering her oeuvre as a whole and creating a stimulating ensemble focussing on the complexity of her ction. e volume has a tripartite structure, each part dealing with a speci c thematic facet. Notably, they are framed by a Preface by Frank McGuinness and the concluding interview, which acts as an apt synopsis or compendium of the contents of the volume. e title of Frank McGuinness's Preface, "Deirdre Madden: a jagged symmetry", plays with oxymoron and antithesis and paves the way for the present book. e Preface points out Madden's "original voice" (xiii), which is actually the purpose of the whole volume whose essays explore the uniqueness of Madden's ction. Touching in particular the novels Hidden Symptoms, Nothing is Black and Authenticity, it provides an overview of themes and issues -the North, identity, art, failure, torments -as well as cross-references and intersections with other writers, notably Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, as well as Jane Austen for the use of details. e colloquial opening -"She knows her stu , Deirdre Madden" (ibidem) -highlights the rootedness in everyday life that characterises her ction. McGuinness emphasises the "strong fabrics" of her novels (ibidem) and his lexical choice etymologically recalls the skill of making and the artist's work, from the Latin "faber", maker, thus underlining Madden's self-conscious concern with art. McGuinness's use of the word "stu " is repeated in the second line and recurs in the nal paragraph, a stylistic choice that creates a circular pattern. Madden is a writer obsessed with time in a variety of ways: past, present and future recur constantly, but, as McGuinness claims, she is also a writer of her time. Secrets abound in her ction often to remain undisclosed. Complexity of themes and plots and narrative control characterise Madden's work whose greatness for McGuinness lies in her awareness that "some things can never be repaired" (xiv).
In the "Introduction", editors Anne Fogarty and Marisol Morales-Ladrón emphasise Madden's peculiar and exclusive devotion to the novel form. De ned as a "distinguished and sophisticated" novelist (1), she has published eight novels, three books for children and edited a collection of Irish short stories. A brief round-up of Madden's novels, prizes and recognitions anticipates the intertwining of themes in her ction, her Troubles and post-Troubles novels, in which "the problems of existence" and "philosophical questions about the meaning of life" (2) recur constantly. Furthermore, the analysis of a variety of anthologies published between 1985 and 2017 help to contextualise Madden's position in the cultural climate of contemporary literature in Ireland, North and South, showing the marginalization of female writers from which also Madden has su ered, in spite of the reputation she has obtained internationally.
In particular, part of the "Introduction" is devoted to the existing critical reception of Madden's work, with speci c references to at least a dozen published essays whose approaches and standpoints are analysed thoroughly as a form of assessment, but also as a springboard for the "new critical perspectives" the volume provides. is acts as a form of presentation of the essays contained in the volume and of the parts in which the collection is organised. e essays of the three thematic sections occasionally intersect, thus providing an exhaustive overview and a diversity of viewpoints. Part I is concerned with "Memory, trauma, and the Troubles" and is devoted to the Troubles novels; Part II turns to "Art and objects", thus focussing on Madden's Künstlerromane, while Part III looks at "Home and place" in Madden's ction. e topics thus cover in detail di erent and multifarious aspects of the writer's oeuvre. e four essays in Part I take into account the Troubles novels Hidden Symptoms and One by One in the Darkness as trauma novels, and in their diversity of approach and analysis tackle the impact of the legacy of the Troubles on families and individuals, as well as the role of memory in the process of recent losses. In her sensitive essay, Stephanie Lehner deals with memory and temporality in Hidden Symptoms and One by One in the Darkness, adding also the Celtic Tiger novel Time Present and Time Past. Characters are haunted by the past and by past memories, and memory images call into question the passing of time. She engages in the relevance of the visual quality of Madden's ction and in photographs in particular, which in the three novels work as a form of memory relationship to the past. She states that Madden's Troubles novels are pervaded with Benjamin's concern with the past in the exploration of temporality, memory and in the creation of memory images. Lehner exploits the notion of "imagetext" to introduce the visual element as a marker for the irretrievable past and the acceptance of the pastness of the past.
Hidden Symptoms and One by One in the Darkness are also discussed in Elizabeth Chase's contribution, which sheds light on the issue of loss and memory concentrating on the ethics of remembrance. Chase claims that Madden's novels go beyond political themes and making reference to Levinas's work on ethics and the attention to human reality, she points out that small domestic objects are emblematic of "everyday pain" (36). e topic of the trauma eresa goes through at the death of her twin brother in Hidden Symptoms returns in One by One in the Darkness, in which the Quinn sisters respond di erently to the trauma of their father's killing. e memories of the dead are a way to commemorate the past and Madden chooses the everyday, the little things, as the ethical relationship between individuals.
Catriona Clutterbuck examines the issue of loss in Hidden Symptoms, but rather than sharing the negative conclusions of other critics, she considers the novel a true Bildungsroman, as it explores a "journey towards healing" (50), no matter how hard and demanding. Referring to omas Attig's studies of grief and mourning, Clutterbuck contends that a state of loss can be conducive to a process of transformation and self-discovery. She describes eresa's entrapment in her private sorrow after the death of her brother in a route from grief to "coming to terms with loss" (55) and accepting her dead brother's faults. Interestingly, Clutterbuck pays great attention to the presence of mirrors in the novel, which she considers "synonyms for artworks" (57), thus anticipating the relevance of art and works of art in later novels by Madden. With Hidden Symptoms Madden starts to engage with the exploration of loss as a path towards a full acceptance of reality.
One by One in the Darkness is the object of Brian Cli 's analysis in terms of class and multiplicity, which turn out to be interconnected in the background of Northern Ireland's political divide. ese are part of the "ambivalent qualities of the novel" (66) and describing class and class tensions allows Madden to avoid Northern Ireland's political range and commonplace elements of the Troubles ction. Cli takes into account these issues, which come to the fore in the Quinn family with the parents' social division: humble Charlie and middle-class ambitious Emily. Class turns out to be central in the context of the Troubles as a feature of diversity and multiplicity within the Northern Catholic community. Madden exploits class issues to emphasise the sense of insecurity of a speci c historical time. e same sense of uncertainty emerges in the narrative choice of clarifying the e ects and consequences of events rather than events per se -Charlie's murder for example is not described but continues to reverberate in the family's traumatised minds.
Part II, "Art and objects", is engaged with Deirdre Madden's Künstlerromane and the author's deep concern with art and the role of the artist. e ve essays display particular attention to Authenticity, but also consider Nothing is Black and Molly Fox's Birthday, where gures of artists and issues of creativity predominate.
In this line, Sylvie Mikowski focuses on objects as realistic elements and as elements pertaining to the creative process in a variety of novels, especially Nothing is Black, Molly Fox's Birthday and Authenticity. With a wide range of references to realist novels, both English and French, Mikowski sharply shows Madden's production as part of the realist tradition, in which objects are a way for constructing characters. In the mimetic stance, what they possess, where they live, the clothes they wear are signi ers for personality. In her attention to social changes, Madden sees in the need to accumulate things a sign of materialism as a result of economic development. In Nothing is Black the contrast between Claire's sparse life in Donegal and Nuala's obsessive shopping and stealing is the tangible feature of a materialistic life she intends to criticize. However, objects are also possessed with a speci c aesthetic principle which becomes part of artistic production. erefore, Mikowski claims, objects are also connected to creativity in Madden's work. A case in point is represented by Julia's artistic installations in Authenticity, a novel that remarkably investigates artistic creation and re ects on the capacity of the artist to reach a higher level of truth and authenticity. rough the choice of characters of visual artists as in Nothing is Black or actors as in Molly Fox's Birthday, Madden's Künstlerromane are self-re ecting and provide insight into Madden's own re ection on her own writing.
Two essays focus on Authenticity from di erent perspectives. Heather Ingman's analysis follows the steps of her critical research interests in recent years, concentrating on ageing and the passing of time in the novel. After contextualising the critical background of ageing studies and especially ageing studies in Irish writing, she chooses to discuss issues of identity and authenticity exploring the life of the artist. In particular, Ingman considers the di erent ways in which three speci c characters in the novel, Dan, William and Roderic, face the ageing process and the passing of time.
Authenticity is also the centre of Hedwig Schwall's detailed psychoanalytic reading of the novel focussing on the psychological aspects of creativity. She de nes Authenticity as a Künstlerroman par excellance, in which all the artists featured wish to nd their own way as artists facing their traumas and looking for their unconscious through objects connecting them to their childhood experiences. Schwall resorts to Bollas's theory of objects relations and follows her analysis with the reaction to received objects of art and to produced objects of art. With particular attention to Julia's installation, Schwall points out that Madden's novel represents the individual's attempt to nd their real self.
In the section dedicated to art, Teresa Casal characteristically goes back to the Northern Ireland novels to address the ethical question of the role of art in depicting sectarian violence. e title of her contribution takes up a double question that obsesses eresa in Hidden Symptoms. e ethical question "what can we do?" is accompanied by the aesthetic question "What does art do?" in front of violence perpetrated by man on other human beings. Her analysis of the Troubles novels, Hidden Symptoms and One by One in the Darkness, is followed by Molly Fox's Birthday, written after the Good Friday Agreement. All of them imply that the reader is ethically and aesthetically challenged to consider both the process of grieving following trauma as well as "kinship with perpetrators of sectarian violence" (145) e reader's aesthetic experience cannot be separated from the novels' ethical sources.
Animals and objects are the concern of Julie Anne Stevens, whose study looks at Madden's children's books in the context of her adult ction. Childhood and childhood memories feature in novels such as Time Present and Time Past and Remembering Light and Stone, and her children's books display cross-connections with her novels in terms of episodes, images, objects and animals. us, Madden reuses elements of her adult ction in Snakes' Elbows, Jasper and the Green Marvel and anks for Telling me, Emily, such as the little cat as well as a Japanese fan Aisling used to possess as a child in Remembering Light and Stone.
Stevens opens her study making reference to publications for children in the twentieth century, in particular Edith Somerville's e Story of the Discontented Little Elephant and Elizabeth Bowen's e Good Tiger, whose worlds return in Madden's children's books. Robert Louis Stevenson's essay "Child Play" is analysed in order to contextualize children's perception. Animals have a central position -cats, dogs, parrots, owls are talking animals in the tradition of children's literature. However, Madden's animals are like objects, they can be easily transported and easily bought and sold, thus becoming commodities. Madden's venture into the world of children's books highlights the essential quality childhood and memory bear in her oeuvre, which characterises Stevens's essay as a relevant investigation of Madden's production. e essays in Part III are concerned with home, in an extended sense, and place. As Madden herself mentions in the interview closing this section, home is a wide conception, ranging from country to language, house, possessions, landscape (235), and the choice of this topic in the volume highlights the centrality of home in her ction.
Jerry White reads in the 1994 novel Nothing is Black an introduction to the changes and modernisation Ireland undergoes in the 1990s in relation to the European Union and to the impact the Celtic Tiger period will have on the country. White considers the novel "quasi-prophetic" (165) in the way it portrays a new middle class relying more and more on consumerism, a gradual secularisation and internationalisation. e character of Anna hailing from e Hague and choosing to come to Donegal is emblematic of a new European perspective, while Nuala looks at both foreign tourists and locals when opening a fashionable restaurant in Dublin. Claire, a painter, has moved to rural Donegal in search for a new way of seeing. e three main characters have all left home looking for a di erent kind of stability.
On the other hand, Elke D'hoker examines the di erent notions of home, the di erent forms home may take and the way in which they are deployed in Madden's novels. Pointing out the centrality of the issue of home in her ction, D'hoker takes into account a variety of novels concerned with critical thinkings of home referring to the theoretical work of Mallet, Bachelard, Blunt and Dowling among others. Di erent notions and de nitions of home as place, land, but also experiences and emotions underlie her "spatial imaginaries" of home (181), which may point out images of loneliness and alienation for example in Hidden Symptoms, whose opening image of the Bavarian barometer epitomises an unhomely home. Unhomely homes are extended to the city divided by sectarian violence, and homelessness is even more evident in e Birds of the Innocent Wood in which the destruction by re of the house leaves Jane homeless. Home as house, family, neighbourhood, city, land, country and motherland (185) is variously present and variously developed in Madden's ction, and D'hoker shows that home moves from rejection in Hidden Symptoms to the exploration of new forms of home in Remembering Light and Stone, Molly Fox's Birthday and Authenticity. Notably, if home is both fragile and solid at the same time (193), D'hoker also detects a feature of the unfamiliar in the issue of home; quoting from One by One in the Darkness she discusses the use of the word uncanny (189). is anticipates the following essay by Anne Fogarty on the "architectural uncanny" in Madden's ction.
In fact, Fogarty sharply connects the issue of home to Gothic traits, themes and e ects in e Birds of the Innocent Wood and Remembering Light and Stone. She examines the presence of Gothic patterns in both novels, which she considers "ambiguous and perplexing" (200) because haunted by family secrets which remain unexplored and/or unexplained. Without being Gothic novels per se, e Birds of the Innocent Wood and Remembering Light and Stone display hauntings, secrets, doublings or the divided self, and in particular houses, whether they be cottages, farms or ats, as the site of the "architectural uncanny", as introduced in the title of her essay.
Madden's Gothic traits are "protean" (ibidem) according to Fogarty, because intertwined with other themes and forms of narration; she claims that the Gothic is meant to emphasise the darkness of modern-day life and the sense of non-belonging of the main character. us, the uncanny house embodies the alienation of the heroines.
In the nal essay of Part IV Derek Hand turns his attention to Authenticity, Molly Fox's Birthday and Time Present and Time Past in relation to the Celtic Tiger novel. He claims that the three novels respond to the Celtic Tiger period, characterised by speed, transformation and materialistic prosperity in a challenging way, relying on "stillness" (216) in plot and form, re ection on identity and attention to art and its nature with a focus on the private. For Hand, the novels consider and re ect on "living lives" (215) in relation to art as an essential aspect of existence.
Deirdre Madden. New Critical Perspectives closes with an interview and a full bibliography. "In conversation with Deirdre Madden" is the title Marisol Morales-Ladrón gives to what really is a conversation with its uid rhythm and quiet pace. It opens with references to brief biographical details to move to Madden's childhood in a rural area in Northern Ireland, which did not entirely shelter her from the crudest features of the Troubles, bombs, barricades, road blocks, check points and helicopters. Memories of the Troubles as a child are split between the country and the city, they remain alive, and with her novel One by One in the Darkness -she says -"I wanted to bear witness to that time" (232). Madden discusses her move to Dublin to study at Trinity and her extensive travelling throughout Europe, which helped her to understand her country better. Literary in uences and the prominence of art in her novels are accompanied by re ections on family and family ties, home, and her personal relation to objects -"a portal to the past" (239). Space is devoted to her method of work, her fascination with writing in longhand and the "paraphernalia" (236) of writing, such as notebooks and pens; her interest in visual arts and crafts lead her to consider writing as "an artisan activity above all" (237), an act of making. Interestingly, the pattern of the interview re ects the organization of the entire volume, thus creating the same circular pattern that characterises Frank McGuinness's opening Preface.
In its variety of essays, marked by critical sensitivity and careful and detailed analysis, Deirdre Madden. New Critical Perspectives is a very welcome and signi cant contribution, it provides an insight into the hues and varieties of Madden's work, thus highlighting the work of a writer whose work covers a wide range of issues with a typically subtle tone. It is therefore an essential tool for the academic working on Irish ction and for the student looking for clear exposition and substantial investigation.