A Big House Divided: Images of Irish Nationhood in Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation

In Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation (1994), the house, a microcosm for the nation, along with its marginalized occupants, reflect the borders between North and South, past and present. By critically interrogating the ways in which O’Brien’s dilapidated Big House becomes an uncanny borderland, this essay unpacks the ways in which the Irish nation attempts to define itself by “evicting” those who disrupt the laws of state and gender

Common genetic variants in the CLDN2 and PRSS1-PRSS2 loci alter risk for alcohol-related and sporadic pancreatitis

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR, and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two significant genome-wide associations identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 (1×10-12) and x-linked CLDN2 (p < 1×10-21) through a two-stage genome-wide study (Stage 1, 676 cases and 4507 controls; Stage 2, 910 cases and 4170 controls). The PRSS1 variant affects susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous (or hemizygous male) CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men – male hemizygous frequency is 0.26, female homozygote is 0.07

Home Is Where the Hurt Is: Trauma, Alienation, and Identity in Kate O’Riordan’s The Boy in the Moon

This article examines how O’Riordan’s The Boy in the Moon revises the union-as-marriage plot to consider the significance of cross-cultural contact in contemporary Ireland and England. While most of the characters depicted in the novel turn away from such an allegorical reading by moving beyond it politically, the novel reveals that the psychic drama endures. The persisting differences between England and Ireland implicitly inform other differences, such as those existing between genders, classes, and geographies. These forms of difference destabilize established definitions of home and unsettle the individual’s role within it. The Boy in the Moon presents the reader with a variation of Freud’s ‘neurotic family romance’, revealing how the emotional and psychological scarring resulting from child abuse, and the distorted histories that cover over those scars, continue to damage subsequent generations.</jats:p

Strangers at Home: Threshold Identities in Contemporary Irish Women’s Writing

This dissertation examines how contemporary Irish women writers dismantle national conceptions linking Irish women to the hearth and home by offering an alternate version of women’s lived experience, which nationalist ideologies have simplified. I consider how these writers define “home”—the domestic, the familiar, the intimate—as complicated by sexuality, exile, and violence. Using Freud’s theory of the uncanny as a lens, I analyze how these writers question established social relations in order to uncover uneasy relationships to self, home, and homeland. In my project, postcolonial theory and transnational feminisms, coupled with trauma theory, facilitate the contextualization of the uncanny as a response to the hybrid identities, dislocations, and effects of violence on gender roles within the nation. The first two chapters examine Edna O’Brien’s later fiction, which unsettles conceptions of the nation by emphasizing the experiences of marginal figures, thereby questioning who belongs within the nation’s borders. The next two chapters on the fiction of Jennifer Johnston and Mary Beckett reveal how the crossing of the public into the private sphere exposes a paradoxical homespace that is both haven and prison for rich Anglo-Irish Dubliners and working-class Catholics in Belfast. The final chapter on Kate O’Riordan’s novels explores issues of exile, alienation, and trauma through a multi-generational lens, revealing how memories of “home” and fraught parent-child relationships at once hinder and facilitate identity formation. In the epilogue, I briefly discuss how contemporary Irish poetry could address the issues raised by the works of fiction examined in my project