Overview

Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier is a bilingual compilation of stories by Eoin Ua Cathail, an Irish emigrant, based loosely on his experiences in the West and Midwest. The author draws on the popular American Dime Novel genre throughout to offer unique reflections on nineteenth-century American life. As a member of a government mule train accompanying the U.S. military during the Plains Indian Wars, Ua Cathail depicts fierce encounters with Native American tribes, while also subtly commenting on the hypocrisy of many famine-era Irish immigrants who failed to recognize the parallels between their own plight and that of dispossessed Native peoples. These views are further challenged by his stories set in the upper Midwest. His writings are marked by the eccentricities and bloated claims characteristic of much American Western literature of the time, while also offering valuable transnational insights into Irish myth, history, and the Gaelic Revival movement. This bilingual volume, with facing Irish-English pages, marks the first publication of Ua Cathail's work in both the original Irish and in translation. It also includes a foreword from historian Richard White, a comprehensive introduction by Mahoney, and a host of previously unpublished historical images.

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9781574418279

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Reviews

Being a fluent Irish speaker from his divided native country, Eoin Ua Cathail had unique insights into the perils and potentials of life on the American frontier, where oral and written traditions generated radical new forms of short story and anecdote. His frontier is a place where the theories of original innocence come up hard against the facts of a fallen human nature. Ua Cathail's Irish-language tales anticipate Twain and Hemingway in a multicultural world of settlers, shysters, and simple idealists still confronted by the challenge of Native Americans. --Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation This is a fascinating study of the life, opinions and writings of a little-known Irish emigrant to the U.S. While millions of Irish speakers fled famine and poverty in their own country, very few of them expressed their experiences or thoughts in that language. This in itself is one reason why Ua Cathail is important. There is no one simple identikit version of the Irish emigrant of the nineteenth century, and if there was, he wouldn't fit it. He comes across in this book as a complicated person who could sympathize with the fate of the Native Americans and yet be complicit in their demise. The Irish language would often be mangled in with the indigenous languages by the Anglo establishment as yet another jabber, but yet many Irish could not see the depiction of their own indignity as any way analogous to that of the original nations. Ua Cathail's stories and adventures are also an example of what Irish prose might have been if it had been allowed to develop untrammelled by literary debates. This is a meticulous scholarly book which opens up a neglected part of Irish literary studies. --Alan Titley, author of Nailing Theses Ua Cathail's stories are valuable to scholars of Irish emigration and folklore, and his topics--life on the western and northwestern frontiers, the conflicts with Native Americans, the ecological devastation of the forests and wildlife of the upper Midwest, etc.--should be of considerable interest to scholars in a number of subfields of U.S. economic, social, cultural, and environmental history. --Kerby Miller, author of Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America The fact that these texts were written in Irish has resulted in their erasure from any serious study until now. In bringing scholarly attention to these stories once more, Mahoney has his finger assuredly on the pulse of current and developing trends in Irish Studies. --Lillis O Laoire, author of Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song-Man

"Ua Cathail's Irish-language tales anticipate Twain and Hemingway in a multicultural world of settlers, shysters, and simple idealists still confronted by the challenge of Native Americans."" - Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation"

Ua Cathail's Irish-language tales anticipate Twain and Hemingway in a multicultural world of settlers, shysters, and simple idealists still confronted by the challenge of Native Americans. - Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation

Author Information

Patrick J. Mahoney, or PÁdraig Fhia Ó MathÚna, is a Caspersen Fellow in History and Culture at Drew University and a Fulbright Scholar at the National University of Ireland Galway. He is the co-author of From a Land beyond the Wave: Connecticut's Irish Rebels, 1798-1916.

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