Irish Writers and Culture

Q: What do Oscar Wilde, Bono, and St. Patrick have in common?

A: They’re all Irish!

Check out your Clermont College Library for all things Irish, including books by Irish writers, plus books and videos (and streaming-specific video) about Ireland. If we don’t have what you need, we can find it for you. Click the authors’ names below for a listing of UC Libraries holdings.

 

Edgeworth, Maria, 1767-1849

Gregory, Lady, 1852 1932

Joyce, James, 1882-1941

Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989

Heaney, Seamus, 1939-2013

Stoker, Bram, 1847-1912

Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745

Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900

Yeats, William Butler, 1865-1939

 

Katie Foran-Mulcahy
Library Director

An Irish Journalist in the Queen City: Lafcadio Hearn and the Cincinnati Demi-Monde

By Kevin Grace

From the Cincinnati winter of 1874, over 140 years ago:

 It is in all times a rugged road to the Place of Nameless Graves – a road running over rolling ground, where vehicles rock from side to side like ships in a gale and groan in all their timbers. “Rattle his bones over the stones, He’s only a pauper whom nobody owns.”  Hundreds of paupers’ bones are rattled over that road every year: the Undertaker always sending out three or four at a time in a covered wagon, with frightfully stiff springs.  And as the dismal vehicle rolls along the coffins rattle and bump one against the other fearfully from side to side, and bump horribly against the thinly-lined walls of those long and ghastly boxes.

Hearn

This article, “Golgotha, A Pilgrimage to Potter’s Field”, was written for the Cincinnati Enquirer on November 29 that year by an odd, bulging- eyed Irishman by the name of Lafcadio Hearn.  Hearn, who would chronicle the lowlifes, ghosts, and murderers of Cincinnati for several years before moving on to New Orleans, eventually settled in Japan where even today he is revered as a major literary figure.  He made his journalistic mark in Cincinnati because he explored the alleys and tenements and riverside settlements that housed the city’s worst and most colorful citizens.  He explored the lives of criminals and addicts, of mediums and flim-flam men, and of those who dealt with the underbelly of Cincinnati society.  And he did it by letting them tell their stories, by involving himself in his own reporting, by writing in the authentic dialect of the storytellers, and by thrilling his readers nearly every day with a world in which they seldom visited. Continue reading

Deaf and Dumb or The Orphan Protected: A Dublin Play in the Archives & Rare Books Library

By Sydney Vollmer, ARB student assistant

Tile Page for Deaf and DumbHere at the Archives and are Books library, we have a vast collection of 18th and 19th c. plays and I have been fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to read a play from our Irish subset of these holdings. Though we have numerous titles which grabbed my attention, I came across one that I couldn’t ignore: Deaf and Dumb, translated by Thomas Holcroft and published in Dublin in 1801.

The title struck my interest because last summer, I began watching a TV show called Switched at Birth. One of the main characters in the show is Deaf, so there is a lot of sign language as well as the juxtaposition between the hearing and deaf worlds. Before watching the show, the obstacles Deaf people face and the idea of Deaf culture had never occurred to me. Continue reading