Ronan Mcdonald
Biographic Data
| ID | 3853192 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ronan Mcdonald |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ronan |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcdonald |
| SIGNATURE | MCDONALD R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7345-2505 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Tacit attention
This essay proposes the concept of ‘tacit attention’ as a lens through which to reread the early disciplinary formation of English literary criticism. Drawing on Michael Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowledge it argues that the foundational figures of English criticism all relied upon highly cultivated modes of perceptual discrimination, without explicitly theorising the attentional habits they presumed. The essay traces how each figure engaged with…
English as a discipline
In recent years there has been a blossoming of scholarly interest in the history of English as an academic discipline. This renewed attention marks a decisive shift in tone and method. Earlier hist
John Guillory
The pasts, presents and futures of transnational and global Irish Studies
As with any other discipline, we are periodically drawn towards reviewing the trajectory of Irish Studies, contemplating possible future directions: What is happening now?What should come next?Four scholars at varying stages of their academic careers and located in tertiary institutions in Ireland, USA, and Australia address these questions with specific reference to the transnational or global aspects of Irish Studies, a key focus of this specia…
Blood and Names
Vincent Buckley’s Teaching Archive
themselves part of the 'impossible archive'. Notwithstanding the innate distortions of the genre-nostalgia, self-promotion, the decorum of eulogy-the remembered teacher (or colleague) can work against the fixed positions of disciplinary history
Mock Mockers
Cynicism styles itself as the answer to the mental suffering produced by disillusionment, disappointment, and despair. It seeks to avoid them by exposing to ridicule naive idealism or treacherous hope. Modern cynics avoid the vulnerability produced by high ideals, just as their ancient counterparts eschewed dependence on all but the most essential of material needs. The philosophical tradition of the Cynics begins with the Ancients, including Dio…
Vincent Buckley, Colonialism and the Problem of Irish-Australian Identity
Perhaps no Australian writer or thinker has probed the condition of Irishness in Australia more extensively than the poet-critic Vincent Buckley (1925-88). His first memoir Cutting Green Hay (1983) considers how his own family negotiated their Irish heritage, often through modes of strategic amnesia in which Irish cultural modes mutate into Australian identity. This, for him, results in a cultural deprivation that he seeks to remedy in himself, n…
Introduction
In a famous â perhaps too famous â proclamation, the late historian Patrick Oâ Farrell (1933â 2003) declared that the â distinctive Australian identity was not born in the bush, nor at Anzac Cove: these were merely situations for its expression. No; it was born in Irishness protesting against the extremes of Englishnessâ (Oâ Farrell 12). There has been a tradition of thinking about the Irish in Australia as the grit in the oyster, a recalcitrant …
Critique and anti-critique
Is the literary academic destined to become less like Sherlock Holmes and more like Dr Watson? Rita Felski likens those caught in the mood of ‘critique’ to a detective. They decode the literary wor
The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism
The story of Irish modernism constitutes a remarkable chapter in the movement's history. This volume serves as an incisive and accessible overview of that brilliant period in which Irish artists not only helped to create a distinctive nationalist literature but also changed the face of European and anglophone culture. This Companion surveys developments in modernist poetry, drama, fiction and the visual arts. Early innovators, such as Oscar Wilde…
Modernism and Autobiography
This volume offers sixteen original essays that attest to the extraordinary inventiveness and range of modernist autobiography. It examines the ways modernist writers chose to tell their life stories, with particular attention to forms, venues, modes of address, and degrees of truthfulness. The essays are grouped around a set of rubrics that isolate the distinctive character and shared preoccupations of modernist life-writings: questions of ances…
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama
The essays in this collection cover the whole range of Irish drama from the late nineteenth-century melodramas which anticipated the rise of the Abbey Theatre to the contemporary Dublin of theatre festivals. A team of international experts from Ireland, the UK, the USA and Europe provide individual studies of internationally known playwrights of the period of the Literary Revival - Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, Shaw, Wilde, O'Casey - and contempora…
Tragedy and Irish Literature
In Tragedy and Irish Literature, McDonald considers the culture of suffering, loss, and guilt in the work of J.M. Synge, Sean O'Casey and Samuel Beckett. He applies external ideas of tragedy to the th
Strange Country
Reviewed by: Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 Ronan Mcdonald Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 269 pp. It is sometimes quipped that ‘the first item on every Irish agenda is the split.’ This adage originates, of course, in the hoary old stereotype of the Irish as intrinsically quarrelsome and factional. Given the current anti-essen…
A gallous story or a dirty deed? J M Synge and the art of guilt
Tragedy and Irish Literature
In Tragedy and Irish Literature, McDonald considers the culture of suffering, loss, and guilt in the work of J.M. Synge, Sean O'Casey and Samuel Beckett. He applies external ideas of tragedy to the th
Critique and anti-critique
Is the literary academic destined to become less like Sherlock Holmes and more like Dr Watson? Rita Felski likens those caught in the mood of ‘critique’ to a detective. They decode the literary wor
A gallous story or a dirty deed? J M Synge and the art of guilt
Strange Country
Reviewed by: Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 Ronan Mcdonald Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 269 pp. It is sometimes quipped that ‘the first item on every Irish agenda is the split.’ This adage originates, of course, in the hoary old stereotype of the Irish as intrinsically quarrelsome and factional. Given the current anti-essen…
Tragedy and Irish Literature
In Tragedy and Irish Literature, McDonald considers the culture of suffering, loss, and guilt in the work of J.M. Synge, Sean O'Casey and Samuel Beckett. He applies external ideas of tragedy to the th
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama
The essays in this collection cover the whole range of Irish drama from the late nineteenth-century melodramas which anticipated the rise of the Abbey Theatre to the contemporary Dublin of theatre festivals. A team of international experts from Ireland, the UK, the USA and Europe provide individual studies of internationally known playwrights of the period of the Literary Revival - Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, Shaw, Wilde, O'Casey - and contempora…
The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism
The story of Irish modernism constitutes a remarkable chapter in the movement's history. This volume serves as an incisive and accessible overview of that brilliant period in which Irish artists not only helped to create a distinctive nationalist literature but also changed the face of European and anglophone culture. This Companion surveys developments in modernist poetry, drama, fiction and the visual arts. Early innovators, such as Oscar Wilde…
Modernism and Autobiography
This volume offers sixteen original essays that attest to the extraordinary inventiveness and range of modernist autobiography. It examines the ways modernist writers chose to tell their life stories, with particular attention to forms, venues, modes of address, and degrees of truthfulness. The essays are grouped around a set of rubrics that isolate the distinctive character and shared preoccupations of modernist life-writings: questions of ances…
Critique and anti-critique
Is the literary academic destined to become less like Sherlock Holmes and more like Dr Watson? Rita Felski likens those caught in the mood of ‘critique’ to a detective. They decode the literary wor
Vincent Buckley’s Teaching Archive
themselves part of the 'impossible archive'. Notwithstanding the innate distortions of the genre-nostalgia, self-promotion, the decorum of eulogy-the remembered teacher (or colleague) can work against the fixed positions of disciplinary history
Mock Mockers
Cynicism styles itself as the answer to the mental suffering produced by disillusionment, disappointment, and despair. It seeks to avoid them by exposing to ridicule naive idealism or treacherous hope. Modern cynics avoid the vulnerability produced by high ideals, just as their ancient counterparts eschewed dependence on all but the most essential of material needs. The philosophical tradition of the Cynics begins with the Ancients, including Dio…
Vincent Buckley, Colonialism and the Problem of Irish-Australian Identity
Perhaps no Australian writer or thinker has probed the condition of Irishness in Australia more extensively than the poet-critic Vincent Buckley (1925-88). His first memoir Cutting Green Hay (1983) considers how his own family negotiated their Irish heritage, often through modes of strategic amnesia in which Irish cultural modes mutate into Australian identity. This, for him, results in a cultural deprivation that he seeks to remedy in himself, n…
Introduction
In a famous â perhaps too famous â proclamation, the late historian Patrick Oâ Farrell (1933â 2003) declared that the â distinctive Australian identity was not born in the bush, nor at Anzac Cove: these were merely situations for its expression. No; it was born in Irishness protesting against the extremes of Englishnessâ (Oâ Farrell 12). There has been a tradition of thinking about the Irish in Australia as the grit in the oyster, a recalcitrant …
John Guillory
The pasts, presents and futures of transnational and global Irish Studies
As with any other discipline, we are periodically drawn towards reviewing the trajectory of Irish Studies, contemplating possible future directions: What is happening now?What should come next?Four scholars at varying stages of their academic careers and located in tertiary institutions in Ireland, USA, and Australia address these questions with specific reference to the transnational or global aspects of Irish Studies, a key focus of this specia…
Blood and Names
Tacit attention
This essay proposes the concept of ‘tacit attention’ as a lens through which to reread the early disciplinary formation of English literary criticism. Drawing on Michael Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowledge it argues that the foundational figures of English criticism all relied upon highly cultivated modes of perceptual discrimination, without explicitly theorising the attentional habits they presumed. The essay traces how each figure engaged with…
English as a discipline
In recent years there has been a blossoming of scholarly interest in the history of English as an academic discipline. This renewed attention marks a decisive shift in tone and method. Earlier hist
Art (10 works) · Irish and British Studies (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · History (8 works) · Irish (8 works) · Literature (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Linguistics (6 works)