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Works about this Work
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Life-Writing and Diaspora II : The Autobiographical Writings of the Irish in Britain and Australia
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: A History of Irish Autobiography 2018; (p. 331-347)'There is no more common Irish journey than that made by generations of people ‘across the water’ to Great Britain. A complex set of factors, from the countries’ geographical proximity to the colonial nature of their historical relationship, combine to ensure that Irish migration to Britain ‘comprises a very large, very special case’. Australia, too, has claims to exceptionalism as a receptor of Irish migrants. Oliver MacDonagh proposes three respects in which the Irish-Australian diaspora differs from its counterparts in Britain and North America: its historically high percentage of the total population of the new country, its very even demographic distribution and the somewhat special status of the Irish as a ‘founding people’, arriving in Australia – mainly as convicts and soldiers – at the beginning of its European colonization, thereby exercising a potentially stronger influence over the shape and destiny of the new nation than the other Irish emigrations could hope to achieve. Although points of commonality co-exist with these markers of difference – particularly for Catholic Irish migrants, who have a shared historical experience of being a denigrated out-group in both countries – any joint examination of the autobiographical writings of the Irish in Britain and Australia must expect the contrasts to eclipse the correspondences. Yet, as this chapter will show, despite being shaped by highly distinctive diasporic histories and sociocultural conditions, these respective literary corpuses reveal certain narrative preoccupations that illuminate the shifting meanings of home and belonging for those whose identities are forged across boundaries and heritages.' (Introduction)
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Vincent Buckley and His Land of No Fathers : The Irish Shadow on His Work
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Shadow of the Precursor 2012; (p. 38-47) ‘Vincent Buckley maintained that as an Irish Australian he had grown up as a member of a persecuted minority. He also claimed that, although this minority was crucial in shaping the Australian identity, its members had failed to keep an imaginative connection with their homeland. Much of his work can be read as an attempt to rediscover this link, but his understanding of the Irish element changes over his career. In his earlier work, his concern is with the Irish tradition of WB Yeats and James Joyce, and with his own forefathers as people dispossessed by the heartless English. Later he becomes involved with the fate of the nationalists in Northern Ireland. This leads him both to take direct political action in Australia and to write some of his most significant poems. These show the influence of Seamus Heaney or John Kinsella rather than Yeats, but also bring to bear a distinctly Australian sensibility.’ (38) -
Memory Ireland: Computing Consciousness and Historical Coma
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: New Hibernia Review , Winter vol. 14 no. 4 2010; (p. 129-133) -
We Stayed Up Late: Remembering Vincent Buckley
2010
single work
biography
— Appears in: New Hibernia Review , Winter vol. 14 no. 4 2010; (p. 125-128) -
‘[W]ry-Necked Memory' : The Matter of Ireland in Cutting Green Hay and Memory Ireland, and the Poems of The Pattern
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2010;'This paper examines the matter of Ireland in Buckley's two memoirs, Cutting Green Hay (1983) and Memory Ireland (1985), and the poems of The Pattern (1979), in order to revisit critically the ways in which he constructs himself as a diasporic Irish-Australian, a participant in the most remote Gaeltacht. It raises questions of victimhood, of similar and different experience of being at the mercy of the land, and of his re-engineering of the place of the political in poetry. It argues that Buckley's agonized positioning as Ireland's 'guest/foreigner/son' was a project that was doomed by its utopianism, and that, obsessed as he became with Ireland, the angst within had little to do with 'the Ireland within' or without. The paper suggests that the poet's slow and unacknowledged abandonment in his Irish period of a key tenet of modernism, its distrust of propaganda and the political, is in itself a new formation which had some continuity with the radicalism of his thinking during the formative years of the revolutionary catholic apostolate he led both at the University of Melbourne and nationally. It also points to the deployment of an ancient medieval Irish trope, that of the ocean (rather than a landmass) linking a dispersed community, as one of the ways the poetry effects a resolution of the issues of being 'Irish' in a remote country.' (Source : http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1409)
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‘[W]ry-Necked Memory' : The Matter of Ireland in Cutting Green Hay and Memory Ireland, and the Poems of The Pattern
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2010;'This paper examines the matter of Ireland in Buckley's two memoirs, Cutting Green Hay (1983) and Memory Ireland (1985), and the poems of The Pattern (1979), in order to revisit critically the ways in which he constructs himself as a diasporic Irish-Australian, a participant in the most remote Gaeltacht. It raises questions of victimhood, of similar and different experience of being at the mercy of the land, and of his re-engineering of the place of the political in poetry. It argues that Buckley's agonized positioning as Ireland's 'guest/foreigner/son' was a project that was doomed by its utopianism, and that, obsessed as he became with Ireland, the angst within had little to do with 'the Ireland within' or without. The paper suggests that the poet's slow and unacknowledged abandonment in his Irish period of a key tenet of modernism, its distrust of propaganda and the political, is in itself a new formation which had some continuity with the radicalism of his thinking during the formative years of the revolutionary catholic apostolate he led both at the University of Melbourne and nationally. It also points to the deployment of an ancient medieval Irish trope, that of the ocean (rather than a landmass) linking a dispersed community, as one of the ways the poetry effects a resolution of the issues of being 'Irish' in a remote country.' (Source : http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1409) -
We Stayed Up Late: Remembering Vincent Buckley
2010
single work
biography
— Appears in: New Hibernia Review , Winter vol. 14 no. 4 2010; (p. 125-128) -
Memory Ireland: Computing Consciousness and Historical Coma
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: New Hibernia Review , Winter vol. 14 no. 4 2010; (p. 129-133) -
Vincent Buckley and His Land of No Fathers : The Irish Shadow on His Work
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Shadow of the Precursor 2012; (p. 38-47) ‘Vincent Buckley maintained that as an Irish Australian he had grown up as a member of a persecuted minority. He also claimed that, although this minority was crucial in shaping the Australian identity, its members had failed to keep an imaginative connection with their homeland. Much of his work can be read as an attempt to rediscover this link, but his understanding of the Irish element changes over his career. In his earlier work, his concern is with the Irish tradition of WB Yeats and James Joyce, and with his own forefathers as people dispossessed by the heartless English. Later he becomes involved with the fate of the nationalists in Northern Ireland. This leads him both to take direct political action in Australia and to write some of his most significant poems. These show the influence of Seamus Heaney or John Kinsella rather than Yeats, but also bring to bear a distinctly Australian sensibility.’ (38) -
Life-Writing and Diaspora II : The Autobiographical Writings of the Irish in Britain and Australia
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: A History of Irish Autobiography 2018; (p. 331-347)'There is no more common Irish journey than that made by generations of people ‘across the water’ to Great Britain. A complex set of factors, from the countries’ geographical proximity to the colonial nature of their historical relationship, combine to ensure that Irish migration to Britain ‘comprises a very large, very special case’. Australia, too, has claims to exceptionalism as a receptor of Irish migrants. Oliver MacDonagh proposes three respects in which the Irish-Australian diaspora differs from its counterparts in Britain and North America: its historically high percentage of the total population of the new country, its very even demographic distribution and the somewhat special status of the Irish as a ‘founding people’, arriving in Australia – mainly as convicts and soldiers – at the beginning of its European colonization, thereby exercising a potentially stronger influence over the shape and destiny of the new nation than the other Irish emigrations could hope to achieve. Although points of commonality co-exist with these markers of difference – particularly for Catholic Irish migrants, who have a shared historical experience of being a denigrated out-group in both countries – any joint examination of the autobiographical writings of the Irish in Britain and Australia must expect the contrasts to eclipse the correspondences. Yet, as this chapter will show, despite being shaped by highly distinctive diasporic histories and sociocultural conditions, these respective literary corpuses reveal certain narrative preoccupations that illuminate the shifting meanings of home and belonging for those whose identities are forged across boundaries and heritages.' (Introduction)
Awards
- 1985 shortlisted National Book Council Award for Australian Literature
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cIreland,cWestern Europe, Europe,
