Books by Patrick Bixby
University of California Press, 2022
is a gifted storyteller. License to Travel provides a wide-ranging history of the passport, inclu... more is a gifted storyteller. License to Travel provides a wide-ranging history of the passport, including a systematic survey of its invention, deployment, and literary repercussions, as well as a series of considerations on contemporary issues facing travel, globalization, and immigration. Bixby has gathered spectacular anecdotes that are not limited to British and American culture, but also engage with German, Russian, Chinese, and French examples, which are all very well chosen and discussed in depth.
Manchester UP, 2022
Nietzsche and Irish Modernism is a literary and cultural history that examines the circulation of... more Nietzsche and Irish Modernism is a literary and cultural history that examines the circulation of the German philosopher’s ideas in the work of Irish writers and, more broadly, in the Irish public sphere during the modernist era. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche’s name became synonymous with a host of “dangerous” ideas that seemed to threaten the very foundations of Western civilization: not just the death of God or the rise of the Übermensch, but challenges to traditional moral standards, the spirit of democracy, and Enlightenment rationality. At the same time, he was recognized as an acute psychologist who had developed a lexicon – including concepts such as decadence, nihilism, bad conscience, and ressentiment – for diagnosing the ills of the modern mind and the troubles of the modern age, a lexicon that would in due course spread through a variety of discourses and national traditions. To be sure, Nietzsche’s writings have provided a case study in how the cultures of modernism circulated through Europe and beyond, generating book-length accounts of their reception in variety of national settings, including England, France, Germany, Spain, Russia, and most recently the United States. But to date, literary and cultural historians have neglected to examine the significance of Nietzsche’s thought against the backdrop of Irish culture and society during the turbulent years of cultural revival, Home Rule agitation, world war, revolution, civil war, and nation building.
In addition to expanding the map of the German philosopher’s reception, Nietzsche and Irish Modernism revises established notions of influence and affinity in order to trace the movement of his ideas through a variety of texts and contexts – ranging from the canonical works of drama, poetry, and fiction to scholarly essays, magazine articles, newspaper debates, public lectures, and private correspondence. The study moves chronologically from the emergence of Nietzsche’s controversial ideas in the English-speaking world during the 1890s to their implication in hopes for a postcolonial Ireland and a postwar Europe during the 1920s. Along the way, it provides in-depth analyses of writings by George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, as well as those by often-overlooked authors such as George Egerton, John Eglinton, and Thomas Kettle. Attending closely to this array of writings, the study argues that Nietzsche provides Irish modernists with the potential for new, disruptive modes of speech, which address both local historical circumstances and the predicaments of modernity at large. For these writers, moreover, to draw on the Nietzschean lexicon is to adopt a strategy, however risky and uncertain, calculated to outflank other artists and intellectuals, as well as propagandists and politicians, in a cultural skirmish that helped to advance the broader revolution in taste and value known as “modernism.” The outcome of this line of argumentation is a new understanding of Irish modernism, which contributes to emerging themes in modernist studies by providing a nuanced account of modern Irish culture as a site of transnational convergence and contestation, defined by a complex interaction between indigenous concerns and foreign perspectives.
At the time of her death in 1962, Kathleen M. Murphy was recognized as “the most widely and most ... more At the time of her death in 1962, Kathleen M. Murphy was recognized as “the most widely and most knowledgeably travelled Irish woman of her time . . . in so far as she let herself be known to the public at all.” An abiding interest in sacred sites and ancient civilizations took Murphy down the Amazon and over the Andes, into the jungles of Southeast Asia and onto the deserts of the Middle East, above the Arctic Circle and behind the Iron Curtain.
After the Second World War, Murphy began publishing a series of vivid, humorous, and often harrowing accounts of her travels in The Capuchin Annual, a journal reaching a largely Catholic and nationalist audience in Ireland and the United States. At home in the Irish midlands, Murphy may have been a modest and retiring figure, but her travelogues shuttle between religious devotion and searching curiosity, primitivist assumptions and probing insights, gender decorum and bold adventuring. Unaccompanied Traveler, with its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, retrieves these remarkable accounts from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.
Cambridge University Press, 2019
A History of Irish Modernism brings together new writing on a wide variety of cultural production... more A History of Irish Modernism brings together new writing on a wide variety of cultural production from the 1890s to the 1970s, including examples from literature, film, painting, music, radio, and architecture. Each chapter considers a particular aspect of Irish culture and reflects on its contribution to modernism at large. In addition to new research on Irish Revival and cultural nationalism, which places them squarely in the modernist arena, chapters offer transnational perspectives, including Irish-American experiences and artworks. The historical standpoint adopted in each chapter enables our contributors, many working across multiple disciplines, to examine how modernist practices developed across geographical and temporal distances. A History of Irish Modernism attests to the unique development of modernism in Ireland—driven by political as well as artistic concerns—even as it embodies aesthetic principles that are the hallmark of modernism in Europe, the Americas and beyond.
Between 1878 and 1881, Standish O’Grady published a three-volume History of Ireland that simultan... more Between 1878 and 1881, Standish O’Grady published a three-volume History of Ireland that simultaneously recounted the heroic ancient past of the Irish people and helped to usher in a new era of cultural revival and political upheaval. At the heart of this history was the figure of Cuculain, the great mythic hero who would inspire a generation of writers and revolutionaries, from W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory to Patrick Pearse. Despite the profound influence O’Grady’s writings had on literary and political culture in Ireland, they are not as well known as they should be, particularly in view of the increasingly global interest in Irish culture. This critical edition of the Cuculain legend offers a concise, abridged version of the central story in History of Ireland―the rise of the young warrior, his famous exploits in the Táin Bó Cualinge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), and his heroic death. Castle and Bixby’s edition also includes a scholarly introduction, biography, timeline, glossary, editorial notes, and critical essays, demonstrating the significance of O’Grady’s writing for the continued reimagining of Ireland’s past, present, and future. Inviting a new generation of readers to encounter this work, the volume provides the tools necessary to appreciate both O’Grady’s enduring importance as a writer and Cuculain’s continuing resonance as a cultural icon.
Samuel Beckett has long been seen as a distinctly “apolitical” and “ahistorical” writer, but this... more Samuel Beckett has long been seen as a distinctly “apolitical” and “ahistorical” writer, but this reputation fails to do the Irishman justice. Reading Beckett’s novels in relation to political speeches, anthropological studies, national monuments, and other of literary texts, I reveal their ongoing engagement with the legacies of British imperialism and Irish nationalism. In this way, my study demonstrates that Beckett’s challenge to these legacies makes his writing integral to understanding not only the history of the novel and the fate of modernism, but also the emergence of postcolonial literature and culture.
Articles and Chapters by Patrick Bixby
Samuel Beckett and Translation, 2021
Modernist Cultures , 2018
After the outbreak of war in August 1914, Friedrich Nietzsche’s name quickly became prominent in ... more After the outbreak of war in August 1914, Friedrich Nietzsche’s name quickly became prominent in Irish and English newspapers as shorthand for a “philosophy of evil” associated with the German Empire. This essay considers the rhetorical uses made of the philosopher and his ideas by commentators in the popular press, including: Thomas Kettle, University College Dublin economics professor and minor poet turned war correspondent and British recruitment officer, who wrote a series of articles attributing the rise of German militarism to Nietzsche’s influence; a host of Ireland’s Catholic clerics, who negotiated their difficult position between the Irish nationalist cause and the British war effort by arguing in newspapers around the country that both nations must stand together against Nietzsche’s “frightful” doctrines; and W. B. Yeats, who rather mischievously evoked the philosopher’s name in Kettle’s presence at a nationalist celebration in November 1914, drawing rousing applause from his Dublin audience and generating headlines in the Irish press. During the course of the war, the Nietzsche controversy raged on in newspapers across the allied nations, while Yeats remained largely silent about the conflict. But, in January 1919, only weeks after the armistice was signed, he returned to Nietzsche’s philosophy through a series of allusions in “The Second Coming,” a poem that famously responds to the trauma – and the propaganda – of the war years by transforming the imagery of Christian faith into a nightmarish vision of the Anti-Christ.
Journal of Beckett Studies, 2018
This essay examines a remarkable 2012 production of Endgame (“the Endgame project”) starring Dan ... more This essay examines a remarkable 2012 production of Endgame (“the Endgame project”) starring Dan Moran and Chris Jones, longtime New York actors who both live with Parkinson’s disease. Rejecting the limiting assumptions imposed upon them by their profession (and the critical tendency to assimilate the disabled body to philosophical abstraction), the actors drew the attention of their audience to corporeal difference as a nexus of observation, contemplation, and appreciation in the theater. But this is not to say that the production somehow arrested the oscillation between affirmation and negation that defines the discursive structures of the play. Rather, it is argued here, the Endgame project enters into this textual uncertainty to highlight precisely those issues that have too often been absented or occluded in critical responses to the play: the ethical difficulties of giving witness to suffering, the problems of disentangling compassion and oppression, the matters of valuing and regulating the body.
Modernism/Modernity, 2017
On 13 July 1904, not long after he had commenced his first attempt to write a novel, the young Ja... more On 13 July 1904, not long after he had commenced his first attempt to write a novel, the young James Joyce signed a note to George Roberts with the alias, “James Overman.” The self-applied label has been dismissed by many biographers and critics, including Richard Ellmann himself, as little more than an ironic joke – appended, as it is, to a comically overstated lettercard asking for the loan of a quid. But what if the figure of the Uebermensch offered Joyce a valuable resource not just for imagining a higher type of being, but for transvaluing communal values, for forging the “uncreated conscience” of his race, for breaking out of a history of personal and national ressentiment? This essay undertakes an effort to account for the many allusions to Nietzsche’s thought in Joyce’s writing, by marking the transference, translation, and transformation of Continental ideas in Irish contexts, in order to demonstrate their crucial significance for the novelist’s artistic enterprise. At this key moment in his career, and in the history of Ireland, Joyce adopts the pose of the self-affirming individual with enough confidence to live beyond the social norms of the bourgeois respectability, nationalist antipathy, and the Catholic faith that had defined his youth. If the modernist artist in this conception comes to resemble that familiar heroic figure of literary history, who somehow transcends the restrictions of his society and redeems its resentful values, the young writer nonetheless remains bound up in the same ecology of affects that generated those values and define his national conscience.
Estudios Irlandeses, 2017
Standish O’Grady’s Cuchulain: A Critical Edition, 2016
A History of the Modernist Novel, 2015
American Book Review, 2013
Irish Studies Review, 2012
In recent years, Beckett studies has taken an ‘ethical turn’ as critics have given increased atte... more In recent years, Beckett studies has taken an ‘ethical turn’ as critics have given increased attention to the status of the Other and otherness in the writer's oeuvre. How It Is, a key text for these critics, was written as Beckett was reading the newly published Black Diaries of Roger Casement, a volume that contains homoerotic content long considered scandalous for the Irish republican icon and yet offers a remarkable vision of social relations structured around sameness or what Leo Bersani calls ‘homo-ness’. Reading Beckett's novel alongside Casement's diaries reveals the significance of How It Is for thinking an ethico-politics that depends neither on the ideological foundations of the nation-state nor on critical perspectives that emphasise the primacy of difference, but rather on a fundamental reorientation of sociality. In this regard, Beckett's anti-redemptive narrative may be considered a work of penetrating utopian writing, which nonetheless reminds us of the hazards of utopian thought.
Studies in The Novel, 2011
Beckett and Ireland, 2010
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, 2006
Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui , 2005
Situating Beckett's writing in relation to anthropological accounts of Ireland, this article exam... more Situating Beckett's writing in relation to anthropological accounts of Ireland, this article examines how his postcolonial parody of ethnographic discourse serves to critique the notion of cultural authenticity. Since the late nineteenth-century anthropological representations, from A.C. Haddon's studies for The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland to Conrad Arensberg's ethnographies of western Ireland, had incorporated native culture into
Uploads
Books by Patrick Bixby
In addition to expanding the map of the German philosopher’s reception, Nietzsche and Irish Modernism revises established notions of influence and affinity in order to trace the movement of his ideas through a variety of texts and contexts – ranging from the canonical works of drama, poetry, and fiction to scholarly essays, magazine articles, newspaper debates, public lectures, and private correspondence. The study moves chronologically from the emergence of Nietzsche’s controversial ideas in the English-speaking world during the 1890s to their implication in hopes for a postcolonial Ireland and a postwar Europe during the 1920s. Along the way, it provides in-depth analyses of writings by George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, as well as those by often-overlooked authors such as George Egerton, John Eglinton, and Thomas Kettle. Attending closely to this array of writings, the study argues that Nietzsche provides Irish modernists with the potential for new, disruptive modes of speech, which address both local historical circumstances and the predicaments of modernity at large. For these writers, moreover, to draw on the Nietzschean lexicon is to adopt a strategy, however risky and uncertain, calculated to outflank other artists and intellectuals, as well as propagandists and politicians, in a cultural skirmish that helped to advance the broader revolution in taste and value known as “modernism.” The outcome of this line of argumentation is a new understanding of Irish modernism, which contributes to emerging themes in modernist studies by providing a nuanced account of modern Irish culture as a site of transnational convergence and contestation, defined by a complex interaction between indigenous concerns and foreign perspectives.
After the Second World War, Murphy began publishing a series of vivid, humorous, and often harrowing accounts of her travels in The Capuchin Annual, a journal reaching a largely Catholic and nationalist audience in Ireland and the United States. At home in the Irish midlands, Murphy may have been a modest and retiring figure, but her travelogues shuttle between religious devotion and searching curiosity, primitivist assumptions and probing insights, gender decorum and bold adventuring. Unaccompanied Traveler, with its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, retrieves these remarkable accounts from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.
Articles and Chapters by Patrick Bixby
In addition to expanding the map of the German philosopher’s reception, Nietzsche and Irish Modernism revises established notions of influence and affinity in order to trace the movement of his ideas through a variety of texts and contexts – ranging from the canonical works of drama, poetry, and fiction to scholarly essays, magazine articles, newspaper debates, public lectures, and private correspondence. The study moves chronologically from the emergence of Nietzsche’s controversial ideas in the English-speaking world during the 1890s to their implication in hopes for a postcolonial Ireland and a postwar Europe during the 1920s. Along the way, it provides in-depth analyses of writings by George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, as well as those by often-overlooked authors such as George Egerton, John Eglinton, and Thomas Kettle. Attending closely to this array of writings, the study argues that Nietzsche provides Irish modernists with the potential for new, disruptive modes of speech, which address both local historical circumstances and the predicaments of modernity at large. For these writers, moreover, to draw on the Nietzschean lexicon is to adopt a strategy, however risky and uncertain, calculated to outflank other artists and intellectuals, as well as propagandists and politicians, in a cultural skirmish that helped to advance the broader revolution in taste and value known as “modernism.” The outcome of this line of argumentation is a new understanding of Irish modernism, which contributes to emerging themes in modernist studies by providing a nuanced account of modern Irish culture as a site of transnational convergence and contestation, defined by a complex interaction between indigenous concerns and foreign perspectives.
After the Second World War, Murphy began publishing a series of vivid, humorous, and often harrowing accounts of her travels in The Capuchin Annual, a journal reaching a largely Catholic and nationalist audience in Ireland and the United States. At home in the Irish midlands, Murphy may have been a modest and retiring figure, but her travelogues shuttle between religious devotion and searching curiosity, primitivist assumptions and probing insights, gender decorum and bold adventuring. Unaccompanied Traveler, with its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, retrieves these remarkable accounts from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.