Fionnuala Dillane – författare

Although the significance of transatlantic currents of influence on slavery and abolition in the Americas has received substantial scholarly attention, the focus has tended to be largely on the British transatlantic, or on the effects of American racial politics on the emergence of Irish American political identity in the US. The specifics of Ireland’s role as a transnational hub of anti-slavery literary and political activity, and as deeply imbricated in debates around slavery and freedom, are often overlooked. This collection points to the particularity and significance of Ireland’s place in nineteenth-century exchanges around slavery and anti-slavery. Importantly, it foregrounds the context of empire – Ireland was both one of the ‘home’ nations of the UK, on many levels deeply complicit in British imperialism, and a space of emergent anti-colonial radicalism, bourgeois nationalism, and significant literary opportunity for Black abolitionist writers – as a key mediator of the ways in which the conceptual and practical responses to slavery and anti-slavery took shape in the Irish context. Moving beyond the transatlantic model often used to position debates around slavery in the Americas, it incorporates discussion around campaigns to abolish slavery within the empire, opening up the possibility of wider comparative discussions of slavery and anti-slavery around the Indian Ocean and the African continent. It also emphasizes the plurality of positions in play across class, political, racial and national lines, and the ways in which those positions shifted in response to changing social, cultural and economic conditions. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies.

Although the significance of transatlantic currents of influence on slavery and abolition in the Americas has received substantial scholarly attention, the focus has tended to be largely on the British transatlantic, or on the effects of American racial politics on the emergence of Irish American political identity in the US. The specifics of Ireland’s role as a transnational hub of anti-slavery literary and political activity, and as deeply imbricated in debates around slavery and freedom, are often overlooked. This collection points to the particularity and significance of Ireland’s place in nineteenth-century exchanges around slavery and anti-slavery. Importantly, it foregrounds the context of empire – Ireland was both one of the ‘home’ nations of the UK, on many levels deeply complicit in British imperialism, and a space of emergent anti-colonial radicalism, bourgeois nationalism, and significant literary opportunity for Black abolitionist writers – as a key mediator of the ways in which the conceptual and practical responses to slavery and anti-slavery took shape in the Irish context. Moving beyond the transatlantic model often used to position debates around slavery in the Americas, it incorporates discussion around campaigns to abolish slavery within the empire, opening up the possibility of wider comparative discussions of slavery and anti-slavery around the Indian Ocean and the African continent. It also emphasizes the plurality of positions in play across class, political, racial and national lines, and the ways in which those positions shifted in response to changing social, cultural and economic conditions. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies.

Fionnuala Dillane revisits the first decade of Marian Evans's working life to explore the influence of the periodical press on her emergence as George Eliot and on her subsequent responses to fame. This interdisciplinary study discusses the significance of Evans's work as a journalist, editor and serial-fiction writer in the periodical press from the late 1840s to the late 1850s and positions this early career against critical responses to Evans's later literary persona, George Eliot. Dillane argues that Evans's association with the nineteenth-century periodical industry, that dominant cultural force of the age, is important for its illumination of Evans's understanding of the formation of reading audiences, the development of literary genres and the cultivation of literary celebrity.

Fionnuala Dillane revisits the first decade of Marian Evans's working life to explore the influence of the periodical press on her emergence as George Eliot and on her subsequent responses to fame. This interdisciplinary study discusses the significance of Evans's work as a journalist, editor and serial-fiction writer in the periodical press from the late 1840s to the late 1850s and positions this early career against critical responses to Evans's later literary persona, George Eliot. Dillane argues that Evans's association with the nineteenth-century periodical industry, that dominant cultural force of the age, is important for its illumination of Evans's understanding of the formation of reading audiences, the development of literary genres and the cultivation of literary celebrity.

This international collection of critical and creative work offers compelling responses to the specifics of 'tradition' and 'place' in the face of the formal and thematic challenges of the modern at particular moments in the aesthetic development of American literature. Maintaining a Place operates also as a way of thinking about the legacy of key figures within Irish cultural debates about America in honouring an esteemed colleague, Ron Callan, for his unique contribution to the field of American Studies in Ireland. Pointing to the ongoing transatlantic influence exerted by the American poetic tradition on contemporary writers, and responding to current developments in literary studies by meshing the field's critical and creative strains the collection includes new poetry by established poets working in Ireland and the US. This volume will appeal to all readers with an interest in modern American literature and its continuing influence on transatlantic thinking and creative practices.

This book elucidates the ways the pained and suffering body has been registered and mobilized in specifically Irish contexts across more than four hundred years of literature and culture. There is no singular approach to what pain means: the material addressed in this collection covers diverse cultural forms, from reports of battles and executions to stage and screen representations of sexual violence, produced in response to different historical circumstances in terms that confirm our understanding of how pain – whether endured or inflicted, witnessed or remediated – is culturally coded.Pain is as open to ongoing redefinition as the Ireland that features in all of the essays gathered here. This collection offers new paradigms for understanding Ireland’s literary and cultural history.