Bricklayer Bill

Presence Is No Island : Writings in Honour of William John Mc Cormack

“…The restraint and ambiguity of his style lent itself to multiple, divergent readings. 17 It is the pared-down, rarefied, solid yet spectral quality of his compositions that supplies this polysemy. Indeed thinking of Chavannes, alongside some of the other images that Yeats approved of, such as T. Critics often cite this passage in order to prove Jarry's avant-garde credentials, assuming that the Savage God here refers to the coming generation of Dadaists and Surrealists that would venerate him.…”

“…Even then his archival research was conducted in a most gentlemanly fashion, Lecky having arranged in advance that the most likely sources be selected and presented for his attention by Sir Bernard Burke, and by J.P. Prendergast. 17 Lecky himself would have rejected any notion that he was the first Irish professional historian, or even a professional historian at all. Despite the fact that his reputation had been confirmed by his History of England he continued to see himself less as an historian than as a public intellectual for whom history-writing was only one of several modes of expression.…”

“…Before we proceed with our investigation of these sources in our search for the All Hallows College Volume, it will be useful to give a brief review of the early history of Franciscan establishments in Ireland using information provided by rare manuscript sources, by Luke Wadding's Annales and historical material published and edited in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. 17 According to a friar, Donatus Mooney writing in 1616-17 (see note 29), there were 57 friaries in existence in pre-Reformation Ireland. Many were victims of the suppression of monasteries by Henry VIII in April 1539.…”

“…Fénelon's Télémaque, fils d'Ulysse (c. 1693-94) enjoyed significant status in Ireland throughout the eighteenth century. 17 Whilst important work has been done by Mc Cormack and others on the influence of French culture generally on Irish literary modernism -on Wilde, Yeats, Synge, George Moore, Somerville and Ross -, not much research has been undertaken on the earlier French landmark texts that exerted huge influence across Europe and especially in Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Mc Cormack was the first to spot the importance of Jean Barthélémy's erudite five-volume travel novel, Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (1788) to Maria Edgeworth in both Castle Rackrent (1800) and The Absentee (1812).…”

“…155-59. 16 Interview with Wilfried F. Schoeller, in Fühmann, Den Katzenartigen, p. 279. poetry published in 1978 as the second volume of his Selected Works), 17 an opportunity to develop his skills as a Nachdichter rapidly opened up an alternative way forward. He was asked to join a team of six East German poets commissioned to produce a first volume in German of the work of Attila József, whom the Hungarian authorities were eager to promote as a poet of international significance, two decades after the early death that brought an end to his turbulent relationship with the communist party of his day.…”