Drawing upon Richard Kearney’s readings of the theories of Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida (although not entirely indebted to his interpretation of either thinker), this article proposes an examination of Brian Friel’s Translations that will elucidate how this seminal Irish play stages moments of ethicality via linguistic, carnal, and, ultimately, what I term ‘spectral hospitality’ that allows for non-violent encounters between supposedly closed off conceptions of selves and others. Derrida’s Specters of Marx is the primary Derridean text utilised for the hauntological analysis that shapes this article. Spectral hospitality is considered as encompassing carnal and linguistic ethicality without ever being just one or the other. Translations is interpreted as envisaging in microcosm how an ethical, open, messianic Ireland ‘to come’ might be forged. I argue that this reading of Translations can also be used to elucidate points of connection and of departure between the work and thought of Ricoeur and Derrida.

In April of 1932, the Irish writer, revolutionary, and political activist Peadar O’Donnell took a libel case against the editor of the Irish Rosary, the Very Reverend H. V. Casey O.P. for claims he had visited communist Russia. This case illuminates transnational connections between Ireland, Britain, and Russia as well as throwing light upon the relationship of the Free State to censorship and literature. Set in the immediate aftermath of the ‘red scare’ election of 1932, O’Donnell’s trial is an important case in Irish literary history, as well as being a public spectacle for the launch of W. B. Yeats’s society for the promotion of Irish writing, the Irish Academy of Letters.

Building upon two interconnected twenty-first century developments in Irish studies and modernist studies, this essay revisits the critical debate concerning Patrick Kavanagh’s engagement with aesthetic modernism in The Great Hunger. Rather than primarily focusing on the aesthetic correspondences between Kavanagh’s poem and the literature produced by his European modernist contemporaries, however, this essay brings The Great Hunger into dialogue with the formal techniques and thematic preoccupations evident in the work of African American modernist writers, such as Sterling A. Brown and Lanston Hughes, and examines how The Great Hunger draws dynamism from the jazz aesthetic and from the modes of cultural resistance that are embodied in this aesthetic form. In addition to highlighting how modernist literature can emerge from the ostensibly rural margins of the metropolitan centre, so to speak, this essay explores how African American art and thought provides a critical framework to explore the dynamics of power and oppression in other cultural contexts. In doing so, it shows how Kavanagh’s agricultural modernism draws on aspects of the jazz aesthetic to dramatise the physical, emotional, and psychological burden borne by the citizens of mid-twentieth century Ireland at a time when using this aesthetic form was in and of itself a subversive act.

By all accounts, Ireland currently faces an acute housing crisis not seen since the 1960s. While the country has historically struggled with housing inadequacy and eviction, this most recent crisis, unlike those facilitated by colonial dispossession, is a self-inflicted wound – the result of short-sighted economic decision-making and the failures of a free-market approach. Yet, what many analyses have failed to appreciate is the culture animating housing in both its material and symbolic dimensions. Using contemporary Irish photography as a source of inquiry into the cultural origins of the crisis, this article considers how imaginative constructions of home by Martin Parr, Paul Seawright, Anthony Haughey, Aideen Barry and others have troubled domesticity in post-war Ireland. Bringing ‘domestic documents’ of the present into dialogue with those produced before the 2008 financial crash, the article argues that such images reveal a critical gap between the post-colonial conception of home and the complex reality of its lived experience in modern Ireland, suggesting that housing crisis may follow, at least partly, from a failure to reconcile the present with the past.

This essay examines William Butler Yeats's early and sustained engagement with wireless communication, focusing on the broadcasts he produced between 1931 and 1937 for Radio Éireann (now RTÉ Radio), BBC Northern Ireland, and BBC National. Particular attention is given to instances where Yeats was directly involved in delivering poetry readings and crafting their accompanying paratextual elements. His broadcasting activity offers a fertile ground for investigating the liminal nature of the medium, positioned at the intersection of orality and writing, ephemerality and permanence. Central to this analysis are the tensions between tradition and innovation in Yeats's radio corpus. On the one hand, he approached the adaptation of written texts into spoken performance as a form of oral rewriting infused with the ritualistic and transformative power of ancient traditions. On the other, his broadcasts introduced pioneering techniques, marked by a meticulous attention to the nuances of voice and rhythm, alongside a dynamic interplay between self-representation and audience engagement. These complementary tendencies not only defined Yeats's distinctive on-air persona but also highlighted his unique and lasting influence on the development of radio literature.