Dear Colleagues,
The Department of Italian UCC and CASiLAC (Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures) warmly invite you to the inaugural lecture of the Irish in Italy exhibition:
“In Joyce’s Wake : Irish-Italian Literary connections in the early twentieth century”
by Professor John McCourt (University of Macerata)
Creative Zone, UCC Library at 3.30pm on Thursday 7th February.
This lecture will be followed at 4.30pm
by the launch of the Irish in Italy exhibition by His Excellency Paolo Serpi and UCC President Dr. Patrick O’Shea
Refreshments will be served.
Irish in Italy (curated by Antonio Bibbò) will run from February to the end of March in the Boole Library, UCC
The concept of Ireland emerges at critical moments in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century, with Irish politics entering national debates and contributing to a better understanding of the specificity of Irish literature in Italy.
The early years of the twentieth century were a crucial time of nation-building for both countries, with the establishment of an independent Ireland and the start of the fascist regime in Italy.
The recognition of Irish cultural independence in Italy was not however a matter of course. At the start of the century and until the mid-to-late 1920s, the Celtic Revival alone was identified with Ireland, with few minor exceptions. The “Irishness” of writers such as Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, to name but a few, generally passed unnoticed.
It was only thanks to a number of passionate scholars, translators, historians, that the Italian public was made more aware of the specific character of Irish literature and started perceiving it as a separate entity within the system of literatures in English.
Following the Easter Rising of 1916, a new idea of Ireland as a rebellious country started to arise only to become fully-fledged towards the early 1930s. This Ireland, which co-existed with earlier notions of the Celtic and mystical country, was especially favoured by fascist intellectuals trying to propagate the image of a potentially fascist ally, a postcolonial victim of the “cruel British empire”, “the perfidious Albion” as it was known in fascist Italy. This prompted a greater interest in Ireland, which reached its peak with the ban on English writers during WWII. At this time, writers with either little connection with Ireland or none at all (e.g. Eugene O’Neill and even Emily Brontë) were marketed as Irish in Italy, especially by former futurist Anton Giulio Bragaglia and other theatre directors eager to find new scripts to produce.
Little of this would survive at the end of the war, but the brief and intense Irish season of Italian theatre would germinate in future protagonists of Italian theatre and literature, such as Giorgio Manganelli, Paolo Grassi and Pier Paolo Pasolini.