Papers by Michael McAteer
Études irlandaises, Nov 14, 2019
Open Library of Humanities Journal, 2025
Text messages and emails permeate the novels of contemporary Irish author Sally Rooney, shaping t... more Text messages and emails permeate the novels of contemporary Irish author Sally Rooney, shaping the ways in which characters relate to one another while also reflecting the globalization of Irish society through the medium of digitalization. In light of the socialist political positions that some of her principal characters adopt, this article examines digital communication in Conversations with Friends and Normal People with reference to certain concepts of Marx. I address online modes of communication in both novels in terms of Marx’s understanding of relations between workers and machines in the industrial era, Christian Fuchs’ re-articulation of his ideas for the age of digital capitalism, and the critique of empty universalism that Marx directs against the modern liberal-democratic political state. I examine Rooney’s narration of tensions between rural/small-town and urban life in Ireland as part of the online environment through which she addresses these issues. Observing the significance of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960) to her first two novels, I stress how important local Irish attachments are to Rooney’s fiction, both as a means of resisting empty universalism and as testimony to human exploitation in the present age of digital capitalism.
Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 2025
Published between 1878 and 1881, the three volumes of Standish O'Grady's History of Ireland compr... more Published between 1878 and 1881, the three volumes of Standish O'Grady's History of Ireland comprise a narrative of Irish mythology, driven by the author's conviction that many of the ancient tales were rooted in actual history. Although not immediately felt, the impact of History of Ireland became long-lasting, a point of departure for an array of literary works treating Irish mythological topics during what came to be known as the Irish Literary Revival. This paper addresses History of Ireland from the perspective of O'Grady's background as a student of ancient Greek civilization. It considers the most important comparisons that he drew between Irish and Greek antiquity, including his contention that the seat of the High Kings of Ireland, Tara, was equivalent in symbolism to Mount Olympus in ancient Greece. The paper assesses the strengths, weaknesses and significance of O'Grady's case for considering Irish mythology as approximate to that of the Greeks.
Standish O'Grady, AE, Yeats: History, Politics, Culture, 2002
A currency crisis: modernist dialectics in The Countess Cathleen
Four Courts Press eBooks, 2004
Irish Critical Legacies: Seamus Deane and Terence Brown
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2022
Abstract: Seamus Deane and Terence Brown have been two of the most significant voices in Irish li... more Abstract: Seamus Deane and Terence Brown have been two of the most significant voices in Irish literary criticism and culture over the past forty years. This article discusses two highly influential studies of theirs, Deane’s Celtic Revivals and Brown’s Ireland: A Social and Cultural History. I read both works as part of an important phase in the development of Irish literary criticism during the 1980s. I compare three aspects of both studies: the role of politics in the critical approaches taken in both works; the different ways in which they tackle the problem of essentialism in Irish culture; their manner of addressing the question of language, in terms of literary language in the case of Deane and the Irish language in the case of Brown. The article highlights some problems that arise in these aspects of the two studies, while also emphasizing their importance for Irish criticism Abstract: Seamus Deane e Terence Brown foram duas das vozes mais significativas na crítica literária e na cultura irlandesa nos últimos quarenta anos. Este artigo discute dois de seus estudos altamente influentes, Celtic Revivals, de Deane, e Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, de Brown. Li as duas obras como parte de uma fase importante no desenvolvimento da crítica literária irlandesa durante os anos 1980. Eu comparo três aspectos de ambos os estudos: o papel da política nas abordagens críticas feitas em ambos os trabalhos; as diferentes maneiras em que abordam o problema do essencialismo na cultura irlandesa; sua maneira de abordar a questão da linguagem, em termos de linguagem literária no caso de Deane e da língua irlandesa no caso de Brown. O artigo destaca alguns problemas que surgem nesses aspectos dos dois estudos, ao mesmo tempo em que enfatiza sua importância para a crítica irlandesa. Palavras-chave: Irish Criticism; Modernização; Literatura e política irlandesa; Língua; Essencialismo.
Excess as Spiritual Ecstasy: Yeats and Joyce
New directions in Irish and Irish American literature, 2020
Oriental Excess: Wilde, Yeats, MacNeice
New directions in Irish and Irish American literature, 2020
This chapter addresses Oriental aspects of excess in Irish writing with reference to works by Osc... more This chapter addresses Oriental aspects of excess in Irish writing with reference to works by Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice, taking Joseph Lennon’s idea of Irish Orientalism into account. Michael McAteer discusses Wilde’s play Salome in terms of Edward Said’s argument for the figuring of the Orient as excess within the discourse of Orientalism. Turning to excess in Yeats’s 1923 poem, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, McAteer examines its Orientalist aspect in relation to Derrida’s concept of the supplement and numerical excess in Badiou’s mathematical set theory account of being. From this McAteer consider excess as it appears in two poems by Louis MacNeice that were composed during his time in India in 1947.
New directions in Irish and Irish American literature, 2020
Introduction: The Idea of Excess
New directions in Irish and Irish American literature, 2020
Excess has only been addressed sporadically in modern Irish criticism and interpreted in conflict... more Excess has only been addressed sporadically in modern Irish criticism and interpreted in conflicting ways. Sometimes it is regarded negatively as a crude stereotype of the Irish temperament. Sometimes critics admire it for transgressing Irish social norms and traditional conservative values. Michael McAteer considers these critical views before turning to Matthew Arnold’s idea of the excessive nature of the Celt as a point of origin for understanding excess in modern Irish writing, taking into consideration Oscar Wilde’s and W. B. Yeats’s revaluation of Arnold’s thought in the late nineteenth century. He argues that this revaluation marks the transition from Arnold’s specifically Celtic notion of excess to excess as a feature of the modern human condition.
Money and Melodrama: Boucicault, Wilde, Shaw
New directions in Irish and Irish American literature, 2020
In this chapter, Michael McAteer addresses excess in modern Irish writing in material terms, disc... more In this chapter, Michael McAteer addresses excess in modern Irish writing in material terms, discussing plays by Dion Boucicault, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Considering the economic and material aspects of excess in Marx’s thought, McAteer discusses their significance to the existential aspect of excess as it first appears in the thought of Kierkegaard. He then discusses Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn as a play that exemplifies the intersection of economic and affective senses of excess in Irish drama. McAteer extends this reading to assess the relation between melodrama and money in The Importance of Being Earnest and John Bull’s Other Island. McAteer examines marriage in both plays in relation to Badiou’s association of excess and the void.
New directions in Irish and Irish American literature, 2020
Religious sacrifice has prompted two distinct yet related ideas on excess in modern thought after... more Religious sacrifice has prompted two distinct yet related ideas on excess in modern thought after Hegel. The first arises in Kierkegaard's famous reflection in Fear and Trembling on the story of God's injunction to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. The other appears in Bataille's idea of sacrifice for its own sake, an idea that demonstrates the powerful influence on Bataille of Nietzsche's writing on the cult of Dionysius in The Birth of Tragedy. In Bataille's understanding, cultic sacrifice is the most extreme point of the human person who takes possession of her/himself through an act of violent self-abandonment. Yet the idea of sacrifice as a basis for philosophical understanding has met with significant criticism. We find this in the writing of Nietzsche and in the major work of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment, first published in 1944 against the backdrop of catastrophe in Europe. In their critique of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer assert that religious sacrifice is always deception, since it involves an offering being made to Gods for the purpose of a human aspiration, in the process submitting divine will to human will. 1 Later in the 1970s, René Girard published one of the most influential works on sacrifice in modern times, Violence and the Sacred. Girard argues that ultimately, sacrifice is founded upon violence and barbaric scapegoating, no matter how sacred the sacrificial act might be judged. 2
Text Matters, Oct 29, 2018
This essay considers a historical novel of recent times in revisionist terms, Kevin McCarthy's de... more This essay considers a historical novel of recent times in revisionist terms, Kevin McCarthy's debut novel of 2010, Peeler. In doing so, I also address the limitations that the novel exposes within Irish revisionism. I propose that McCarthy's novel should be regarded more properly as a postrevisionist work of literature. A piece of detective fiction that is set during the Irish War of Independence from 1919 to 1921, Peeler challenges the romantic nationalist understanding of the War as one of heroic struggle by focusing its attention on a Catholic member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. In considering the circumstances in which Sergeant Seán O'Keefe finds himself as a policeman serving a community within which support for the IRA campaign against British rule is strong, the novel sheds sympathetic light on the experience of Catholic men who were members of the Royal Irish Constabulary until the force was eventually disbanded in 1922. At the same time, it demonstrates that the ambivalence in Sergeant O'Keefe's attitudes ultimately proves unsustainable, thereby challenging the value that Irish revisionism has laid upon the ambivalent nature of political and cultural circumstances in Ireland with regard to Irish-British relations. In the process, I draw attention to important connections that McCarthy's Peeler carries to Elizabeth Bowen's celebrated novel of life in Anglo-Irish society in County Cork during the period of the Irish War of Independence: The Last September of 1929.
W.B. Yeats, At the Hawk's Well and The Cat and the Moon: Manuscript Materials. Ed. Andrew Parkin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. 336 pages. USD 85.00; W.B. Yeats, ‘The Golden Helmet’ and ‘The Green Helmet’: Manuscript Materials. Ed. William P. Hogan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 200...
Irish University Review, May 1, 2012
Beyond Articulation: Brian Friel, Civil Rights, and the Northern Irish Conflict
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Natio... more The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1948 to ensure that the atrocities that took place during the course of World War II would never be allowed to happen again.1 On this premise, the refusal of any state or group to recognize the legitimacy of the thirty clauses of the Declaration — either in legal constitution or in legal practice — was tantamount to equivocation or, at worst, lending tacit justification to those atrocities. Considered in terms of international law, therefore, the refusal of any state to endorse the clauses of the Declaration might well be construed as a legitimation of the techniques of the Hitler regime or, for that matter, the mass extermination of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States Airforce in 1945. If the international community of nations, in other words, has proven either unable or unwilling to abide by the Declaration, then it is plausible to conclude that international law cannot provide protection against genocide or mass killing of civilians.2
Yeats and European Drama
... Yeats's reservations Page 22. Introduction 9 about expressionism was... more ... Yeats's reservations Page 22. Introduction 9 about expressionism was evident in his criticism of o'casey's The Silver Tassie, yet its influence was discernible in the techniques employed for some of his own plays, developed under craig's direction. ...
<i>Synge and Edwardian Ireland</i> ed. by Brian Cliff and Nicholas Grene (review)
Modernism/modernity, 2013
413 as a global movement is especially insightful, and her study reminds us that much of the raci... more 413 as a global movement is especially insightful, and her study reminds us that much of the racial discrimination described in Lao She’s novel still exists today. The only difference now, it seems, is that the west’s perception of China has changed: no longer the “sick man of the east,” it has become the “China threat,” with the United States is leading the crusade to contain this perceived threat. One wonders how Lao She would react to China’s changed status in the twenty-first century.
Kindness in Your Unkindness': Lady Gregory and History
Irish University Review, Mar 1, 2004
... Just as O&#x27;Grady had hoped years previously to inspire a new generation of writers wi... more ... Just as O&#x27;Grady had hoped years previously to inspire a new generation of writers with his own versions of the legends of Deirdre, Maeve, and Cuchulain, so Gregory hoped ... Both Gormleith and DervorgiUa share Maeve&#x27;s forceful personality ...
International Yeats studies, Nov 1, 2017
Ireland, Modernism, and Imperialism in Standish O’Grady’s The Queen of the World
The Review of English Studies, Jun 5, 2019
Standish O&#39;Grady&#39;s narratives of Irish mythology have been regarded as the inaugu... more Standish O&#39;Grady&#39;s narratives of Irish mythology have been regarded as the inaugural works of the Irish literary revival, with considerable dispute among scholars as to the nature of O&#39;Grady&#39;s influence. In 1900, O&#39;Grady published a futuristic fantasy entitled The Queen of the World under the pseudonym Luke Netterville. This work has been largely neglected in studies of the Irish revival and its relations to the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. The following essay examines the modernist aspects of O&#39;Grady&#39;s novel in relation to contrary tendencies towards imperialism and rebellion that it exhibits. In the process, I discuss the fantastic, gothic, and racial aspects of The Queen of the World, particularly as they reflect the complex nature of O&#39;Grady&#39;s political thought and influence from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century.