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[...]many queer lives were lived outside Ireland or hidden or suppressed within Ireland. Dorcey draws on her own experiences and her own aesthetic to set the context for the book and pays generous tribute both to the writers examined and to the exciting scope of the study: \"I am more than proud to realise that Irish writers have produced since the 1980s, a body of work describing gay life as we know it, that is confidant, distinctive and illuminating\" (xiv). The structure of the book allows the analysis to span several decades of social change in Ireland and marks the progress towards acceptance and legal validation.

Dimock discusses a weaker, lower-level kind of theorizing making no prediction about the primacy of any genre and no prediction either about its being the last word. This approach is not offered in strict opposition to Mikhail Bakhtin, partly because the bold assertions outlined seem qualified by his own practical criticism and by some of his late writings. Here, he looks to a different work, then, as his example of sovereign theory, one focused on science rather than literature, but important, as sounding board and foil, openly articulating its absolutism. He introduces a trio of genres--fiction, drama, and poetry--variously represented by Henry James, Colm Toibin, and W. B. Yeats.

This article reads Colm Toibin's latest novel, House of Names (2017), as a contemporary revision of Greek tragedy in which the mythic character of Clytemnestra takes centre stage, acquires a philosophical voice, and shows how her new refiguration is articulated around three major concerns: (1) the existential question of loss and grief, (2) the transgression of traditional power relations, and (3) the development of a modern metaphysical conception of the world. What emerges as a result of these particular characteristics of the new Queen of Argos is a powerfully revived character, a vengeful rationalist, a circumspect rebel, and a prophet for our liquid modernity. Keywords: Clytemnestra; Colm Toibin; House of Names; grief; power; faith.

Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel Brooklyn accompanies Eilis Lacey, a native of Enniscorthy, Ireland of the 1950s on a reluctant voyage across the Atlantic. Her passage reconstructs a common experience of immigration and exile to New York for the Irish working class seeking to escape the lack of prospects in small-town Ireland after the Second World War. Caught as she is between two homes—the traditional Irish culture she emerges from and the new capitalist society of America to which she emigrates—Eilis is placed in a polemical relationship to the public sphere, staked on multiple grounds of in-betweenness: she is a woman, Irish, and an exile. Belonging, for her, is posited on a complex understanding of the tensions between national and transnational identities. Eilis’s parochialism, at first, and cosmopolitanism, later on, are both decisive characteristics that become driving forces behind her social integration and marriage prospects. She is initially barred from promising job and marriage opportunities due to her naivety and lack of sophistication. As an Irish female immigrant, Eilis becomes in the course of the novel a cosmopolitan from the margins, one of the newly uprooted, and ultimately a split self.

Martineau reviews Henry James and American Painting by Colm Toibin, Marc Simpson and Declan Kiely and The Complete Writings of Henry James on Art and Drama, Volume I: Art edited by Peter Collister.

[...]Tóibín came out as a gay man in 1993, the same year when homosexuality became decriminalized in Ireland and a few years before he published his first novel with a gay man as a leading character. [...]each body moves in a universe of bodies: the idea of a body is essentially pluralistic, so that the corporeity of society is placed at one and the same time in conjunction with the singular-body and with the pluralistic universe-body, in homogenous and complex relationships. According to Kim Wallace, the new political framework that Ireland faced during this decade, the \"crossing of ideological boundaries\", made Irish writers \"able to create imaginative spaces in which concepts of identity, community and nationality can be explored and redefined\" (2000: 257). According to Matthew Ryan, the fact that all of these gay characters visit the Wexford coast far from the capital city Dublin entails a project of \"textual reterritorialization\" which creates a tension between tradition and modernity.

This essay examines the role and significance of marine geographies in the fiction of Colm Tóibín, with specific reference to his novels The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), and The Blackwater Lightship (1999). By showing how liminal landscapes resonate with Tóibín's revisionist sensibility, the essay argues that the marine spaces of these novels are properly read as enabling metaphors for the transitional state of contemporary Irish society, which may yet figure forth a future freed from the constraining myth of national territory and its attendant calcified ideologies, as perceived by the novelist.