Introduction

Abstract

The thematic focus of this interdisciplinary volume revolves mainly around the concepts of voice and discourse in the Irish context. With this theme, the chapters included in the volume aim to examine Ireland through different disciplinary domains, such as linguistics, literature, media performance and translation. Chapters are grouped by theme. In Part I, ‘Enregistered Voices’, Vaughan and Moriarty approach the analysis of voice in the discourse of the Rubberbandits, a comedy duo representing the urban identity of Limerick city, while Amador-Moreno and O’Keeffe discuss literary representations of Irish English by looking at the use different authors have made of the be + after + V-ing construction. In Part II, ‘Voices from the Past’, De Rijke focuses on phonology, and pays particular attention to schwa-epenthesis in a corpus of emigrant letters. The chapter by Bonness studies the use of negative and auxiliary contraction versus full forms of the modal and auxiliary verbs be, have, will and would in Irish English during its formative period. Part III, ‘Performative Voices’, features two articles that focus on works by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. Adopting a corpus-based approach, Ruano San Segundo compares the stage directions of Waiting for Godot in both its English and French versions, and Fernández aims at locating Beckett’s response to the idea of Ireland by rereading Not I in the light of recent trends in Beckett studies, which favour a precise contextualisation of his works. The closing essay of this part, by Rodríguez-Martín, devotes attention to George Bernard Shaw and his view of Ireland in two of his historical plays: Caesar and Cleopatra and Saint Joan. Finally, in Part IV, ‘Voicing Conflict’, Zubía-Fernández tackles the effect of war on men who, once returned home, feel displaced. He compares El raro privilegio (2012) written by Argentine writer (of Irish decent) Ronnie Quinn with Fado alexandrino (2013) by Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes. In the essay by Casal, love is the cause behind the emotional turmoil of the characters that populate James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (Dubliners, 1914) and Emma Donoghue’s ‘Speaking in Tongues’ (Touchy Subjects, 2011). Finally, Schwerter’s chapter ponders the difficulties involved in translating fiction produced in Northern Ireland without erasing its idiosyncracy. She looks at two well-known Troubles novels, Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1996) and Colin Bateman’s Divorcing Jack (1995) in their French, German and Spanish translations and reflects on questions of ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’.