Essays on James Clarence Mangan This page intentionally left blank Essays on James Clarence Mangan The Man in the Cloak Edited by Sinéad Sturgeon Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Sinéad Sturgeon 2014 Individual chapters © Contributors 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-27337-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-67024-6 ISBN 978-1-137-27338-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137273383 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Essays on James Clarence Mangan : the man in the cloak / [edited by] Sinéad Sturgeon, Queen’s University Belfast, Ireland. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Mangan, James Clarence, 1803–1849—Criticism and interpretation. I. Sturgeon, Sinéad—editor. PR4973.Z5E87 2014 821'.8—dc23 Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors viii List of Abbreviations xi A Night on the Tiles with J. C. Mangan xiii Paul Muldoon Foreword xiv Jacques Chuto Introduction: James Clarence Mangan: The Man in the Cloak 1 Sinéad Sturgeon 1 Crossing Over: On Mangan’s ‘Spirits Everywhere’ 14 David Lloyd 2 ‘Fully able / to write in any language – I’m a Babel’: James Clarence Mangan and the Task of the Translator 33 David Wheatley 3 ‘Antiquity and Futurity’ in the Writings of James Clarence Mangan 53 Joseph Lennon 4 Cosmopolitan Form: Mangan’s Anthologies and the Critique of Weltliteratur 84 Cóilín Parsons 5 Night Singer: Mangan Among the Birds 102 Sinéad Sturgeon 6 ‘The last of the bardic poets’: Joyce’s Multiple Mangans 124 John McCourt 7 ‘[M]y mind is destroying me’: Consciousness, ‘Psychological Narrative’, and Supernaturalist Modes in Mangan’s Fiction 140 Richard Haslam v vi Contents 8 The Spiritual ‘Vastation’ of James Clarence Mangan: Magic, Technology, and Identity 163 Anne Jamison 9 Unauthorized Mangan 184 Sean Ryder 10 Mangan in England 201 Matthew Campbell Afterword: Shades of Mangan 221 Ciaran Carson Bibliography 230 Index 234 Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the contributors to this collection for their elo- quence and generosity; it has been a privilege to work with so many scholars and writers whose work I have long admired. I would also like to thank the staff of Special Collections in the McClay Library, Queen’s University Belfast, as well as the National Library of Ireland and Irish Academic Press. I should also like to thank my editors, Sophie Ainscough and Ben Doyle, for their advice and support. And, as ever, my heartfelt thanks to Kelly Grovier. vii Notes on Contributors Matthew Campbell is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of York. Most of his work is on British and Irish poetry of the past two centuries. He has published Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999) and Irish Poetry under the Union, 1801–1924 (2013). He was the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry and is currently working on a history of Irish poetry since 1789. Ciaran Carson is Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. He has published some two dozen books of poetry, prose and trans- lation, most recently From Elsewhere, translations from the work of the French poet Jean Follain, paired with poems inspired by the translations (Gallery Press 2014). His work has won many prizes including the T. S. Eliot Award and the Forward Prize. He is a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of Irish artists, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Jacques Chuto, retired Professor of English at the University of Paris- Est, has been researching Mangan for over forty years. After writing his PhD thesis on ‘James Clarence Mangan, poète-traducteur’ for the University of Paris 3-Sorbonne nouvelle, he has co-edited the six vol- umes of the Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan (1996–2002), one volume of Selected Poems (2003) and one of Selected Prose (2004), and is the author of James Clarence Mangan, a Bibliography of his Works (1999). His latest publication is a French translation, with introduc- tion and notes, of a selection of poems by Derek Mahon, La Mer hivernale (2013). Richard Haslam is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, United States. He has published on a range of Irish writers, including Oscar Wilde, Bernard MacLaverty, W. B. Yeats, Neil Jordan, and Sheridan Le Fanu. His earlier essay on Mangan, “‘Broad Farce and Thrilling Tragedy’: Mangan’s Fiction and Irish Gothic,” was published in Éire-Ireland (Fall/Winter 2006). Anne Jamison is a Lecturer in Literary Studies in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western viii Notes on Contributors ix Sydney. She is a feminist literary and cultural critic with a research focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Ireland and Britain, and has published widely on Irish women writers of this period, including Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, Kate O’Brien, and Alicia Lefanu. She has also published more generally on the intersections of authorship and the law, particularly the development of British copyright law. She is currently preparing a monograph for Cork University Press on Somerville and Ross and female collaborative authorship. Joseph Lennon is the Director of Irish Studies and Associate Professor of English at Villanova University. His book, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (2004), won the American Conference for Irish Studies Donald Murphy Prize. Salmon Poetry published his first volume of poetry, Fell Hunger, in 2011. He has published in peri- odicals such as the Times Literary Supplement, New Hibernia Review, and Poetry Ireland. David Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, works primarily on Irish culture and on post-colonial and cultural theory. He is the author of Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (1987), and most recently Irish Times: Temporalities of Irish Modernity (2008) and Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity: The Transformation of Oral Space (2011). He has completed a study of Samuel Beckett’s visual aesthetics, forthcoming in 2014, and is beginning a series of essays on poetry and violence. He has also published Arc & Sill: Poems, 1979–2009 (2011). John McCourt is Associate Professor of English at the Università Roma Tre. He is the author of The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904– 1920 (2000), and has recently edited James Joyce in Context (2009), and Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema (2010). His new book, Writing the Frontier, Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Paul Muldoon is Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University. Since 2007 he has served as poetry editor of The New Yorker. He has published numerous collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), Maggot (2010) and One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015). x Notes on Contributors Cóilín Parsons is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. He has published on aspects of the literature and culture of Ireland, India, and South Africa, and has completed a book manu- script on Irish modernism and the Ordnance Survey. Sean Ryder is Professor of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is the editor of James Clarence Mangan: Selected Writings (2004), and the author of numerous articles on nineteenth- century Irish nationalism and culture. He is also project director for the Thomas Moore Archive, a digital edition of Moore’s literary and musical works. Sinéad Sturgeon is a Lecturer in the School of English, Queen’s University Belfast. She has published on a range of Irish writers, including Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, and Gerald Griffin. She is currently completing a monograph on the representation of whiskey and poitín in nineteenth-century Irish writing. David Wheatley is Senior Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, and edited the Poems of James Clarence Mangan for Gallery Press (2003). He is the author of Essential Criticism of Contemporary British Poetry (2014), and has also published four collections of poetry with Gallery Press and an edition of Samuel Beckett’s Selected Poems 1930–1989 (2009). List of Abbreviations CW1 The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Poems 1818–1837, eds.