Abstract
In light of growing awareness of the Irish diaspora and of diasporic consciousness in the 1990s, Chap. 3 examines interconnected themes of homeland and return, longing and belonging in the work of O.R. Melling, an Irish-Canadian writer and returnee to Ireland, whose fantasy fiction for children draws heavily on Irish mythology and romance. With particular focus on the female returnee, this chapter considers how Melling’s shifting perspectives on the idea of home are complicated by myth, migration, and notions of origin. Melling’s use of myth as both a unifying and disruptive force reveals yearning for a unitary self and an emplaced identity on the one hand, while hinting at a fragmented self and a more liminal and mobile notion of home on the other. The chapter traces a change from a utopian vision of homecoming in Melling’s earlier fiction to a questioning of the viability of Ireland as home in her more recent fiction. It examines Melling’s re-visioning of Irish myth, traditionally associated with masculinist nationalist values, from the perspective of the female returnee, thus giving voice to a perspective that was marginalized in Ireland and to concerns regarding rapid modernization that were largely ignored during the period of economic boom.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Lady Morgan Sydney Owenson (1781–1859) was an Anglo-Irish novelist, best known for her novel The Wild Irish Girl, first published in 1806.
- 2.
When interviewed for this study on 25 April 2018, Melling said that the Ireland in The Druid’s Tune was based on her experience of a holiday in Ballinamore in the 1970s when she was twenty-one years of age. She has memories of hay being cut with a scythe and homes without telephones or televisions.
- 3.
Melling revealed in interview that, although she found Lynch’s work old-fashioned, she used elements of it in her own writing. Other writers who strongly influenced her were C.S Lewis, P.L. Travers, J.M. Barrie, J.R. Tolkien, John Masefield, and Mrs. Molesworth.
- 4.
See, for example, Lady Morgan’s depiction of Glorvina in The Wild Irish Girl (OUP 1999), 146–147; 151–152; 158–159; or Lady Wilde’s description of the effects of the Irish landscape and climate on national character in Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (1887), 279.
- 5.
Amergin was the counselor of his brothers and the chief negotiator with the Tuatha Dé Danann. On arriving in Ireland, he recited a mystical poem in which he claimed to be at one with his surroundings. For further information see Ó hÓgáin (1990) 23–24, 244, 296–297.
- 6.
The word aisling means dream or vision. The aisling is a genre of Irish-language poetry that was popular in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which Ireland appears to the (male) poet in the form of a beautiful woman.
- 7.
The Sinn Féin/SDLP peace initiative began in 1993, the year The Singing Stone was first published in Ireland, but women’s groups had been active in working toward peace and justice through community work for many years before the novel was first published in Canada. The Women for Peace movement was founded in 1976 and its co-founders, Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, won the Nobel Peace Prize that year.
- 8.
Hana’s Suitcase by Karen Levine is based on the true story of Hana Brady, whose life in a quiet Czech town was shattered by the arrival of the Nazis. It was first published in 2002 and has been awarded the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction (2002), Sydney Taylor Book Award for Older Readers (2002), CLA Book of the Year Award (2003), Flora Stieglitz Straus Award (2004), and Rebecca Caudill Young Readers’ Book Award Nominee (2007).
- 9.
The reference to houses, meat-packing plants, dairies, and railways, while ostensibly indicating modernity, nevertheless evokes a traditional agricultural society and is replaced in the 2005 Amulet edition by reference to bungalows, supermarkets, and gas stations. The updated passage also mentions a terrace of new houses and a factory, hinting at increased industrialization and building development that occurred during the 1990s.
- 10.
The Druid’s Tune won the Young Adult Canadian Book of the Year Award in 1984 and was shortlisted for the Ruth Schwartz Children’s Literature Award in the same year. The Hunter’s Moon won the Ruth Schwartz Children’s Literature Award in 1994 and was shortlisted for the Young Adult Canadian Book of the Year Award in 1993. It was a finalist in the Mr. Christie Awards in 1993 and was shortlisted for the American Library Association Award for Top Ten Fantasy for Youth in 2006.
- 11.
Likewise, Christine St. Peter refers to the problem facing women writers in Ireland perceived as ‘other’ to the normative male Irish artist (2000: 48).
References
Arnold, Matthew. 1919. On the study of Celtic literature and other essays. London: Dent.
Campbell, Joseph. 1993 [1949]. The hero with a thousand faces. London: Fontana Press.
Carpenter, Carole, Margot Hillel, and Thomas Van der Walt. 2005. The same but different: The dynamics of local and global in Australian, Canadian and South African children’s literature. In Children’s literature global and local: Social and aesthetic perspectives, ed. Emer O’Sullivan, Reynolds Kimberley, and Rolf Romøren, 173–199. Oslo: Novus Press.
Clarke, Rosalind. 1991. The great queens: Irish goddesses from the Morrígan to Cathleen Ní Houlihan. Gerrards Cross: Smythe.
Constitution of Ireland. Electronic Irish statute book. www.irishstatutebook.ie.
Cronin, Michael. 2002. Speed limits: Ireland, globalisation and the war against time. In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, society and the global economy, ed. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin, 54–66. London: Pluto Press.
Deane, Seamus. 1997. Strange country: Modernity and nationhood in Irish writing since 1790. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dougherty, Jane Elizabeth. 2014. Coming of age in the 1990s: Mary Robinson and the Irish literary childhood. In Childhood and Irish society 1500 to the present, ed. Maria Luddy and James M. Smith, 339–336. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
Dunne, Joseph. 2002. Citizenship and education: A crisis of the Republic? In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, society and the global economy, ed. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin, 66–88. London: Pluto Press.
Eliade, Mircea. 1975 [1963]. Myth and reality. Trans. Willard R. Task. New York: Harper.
Gray, Breda. 2004. Women and the Irish diaspora. London: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart. 1990. Cultural identity and diaspora. In Identity, culture, difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Hooper, Glenn. 2005. Landscape and empire 1770–2000. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Hunt, Peter. 1987. Landscapes and journeys, metaphors and maps: The distinctive feature of English fantasy. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 12 (1): 11–14.
Innes, C.L. 1993. Woman and nation in Irish literature and society, 1880–1935. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: The literature of subversion. London: Routledge.
Kumar, Krishan. 1987. Utopia and anti utopia in modern times. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Larsen, Swend Eric. 1997. Landscape, identity and literature. Journal of Literary Studies 13 (3–4): 284–302. https://doi.org/10.1080/02564719708530173.
Lathey, Gillian. 2001. The road from Damascus: Children’s authors and the crossing of national boundaries. In Children’s literature and national identity, ed. Margaret Meek, 3–9. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books.
Lawrence, Susan. 2001. Between two worlds: O.R. Melling brings Irish myth to Canada. Quill and Quire. Accessed 7 October 2017. www.quillandquire.com.
Leerssen, Joep. 1996. Remembrance and imagination: Patterns in the historical and literary representations of Ireland in the nineteenth century. Cork: Cork University Press.
Leonard, Liam. 2008. The environmental movement in Ireland. The Netherlands: Springer.
Levine, Karen. 2016. Hana’s suitcase. Isleworth: Cherrytree.
Markowitz, Fran, and Anders H. Stefansson, eds. 2004. Homecomings: Unsettling paths of return. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
McGovern, Kelly J.S. 2014. ‘No right to be a child’: Irish girlhood and queer time in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The dancers dancing. In Childhood and Irish society 1500 to the present, ed. Maria Luddy and James M. Smith, 323–338. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
McMullan, Anna. 2003. Unhomely stages: Women taking (a) place in Irish theatre. In Critical anthology for the study of modern Irish literature, ed. Mária Kurdi, 347–353. Budapest: Nemzeti Tankȍnyvkiadó.
McWilliams, Ellen. 2013. Women and exile in contemporary Irish fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Melling, O.R. 1992 [1983]. The druid’s tune. Dublin: O’Brien Press.
———. 1993a. The hunter’s moon. Dublin: O’Brien Press.
———. 1993b [1986]. The singing stone. Dublin: O’Brien Press.
———. 1993c. Myth and history in fantasy literature. Children Books in Ireland, November. Accessed 15 October 2018. www.ormelling.org.
———. 2007. The light-bearer’s daughter. New York: Amulet.
Ó hÓgáin, Daithí. 1990. Myth, legend and romance: An encyclopaedia of the Irish folk tradition. London: Ryan.
Popov, Anton. 2010. Making sense of home and homeland: Former-Soviet Greeks’ motivations and strategies for a transnational migrant circuit. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36 (1): 67–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691830903123211.
Robinson, Mary. 1995. Address by President Mary Robinson to the Houses of the Oireachtas on a matter of public importance: Cherishing the Irish diaspora. Media Library. Accessed 5 October 2017. www.president.ie.
Rose, Jacqueline. 1992 [1984]. The case of Peter Pan, or the impossibility of children’s fiction. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Safran, William. 1991. Diasporas in modern societies: Myths of homeland and return. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1 (1): 83–89. https://doi.org/10.1353/dsp.1991.0004.
Sheeran, Patrick. 2003. Genius fabulae: The Irish sense of place. In Critical anthology for the study of modern Irish literature, ed. Mária Kurdi, 31–36. Budapest: Nemzeti Tankȍnyvkiadó.
Smyth, Gerry. 2001. Space and the Irish cultural imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
St. Peter, Christine. 2000. Changing Ireland: Strategies in women’s contemporary fiction. London: Macmillan.
Stefansson, Anders H. 2004. Homecomings to the future: From diasporic mythographies to social projects of return. In Homecomings: Unsettling paths of return, ed. Fran Markowitz and Anders H. Stefansson, 2–12. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Stephens, John. 1992. Language and ideology in children’s fiction. London: Longman.
Stephens, John, and Robyn McCallum. 1998. Retelling stories, framing culture: Traditional stories and metanarratives in children’s literature. London: Garland Publishing.
Morgan, Lady Sydney Owenson. 1999 [1806]. The wild Irish girl. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Watkins, Tony. 1994. Homeland: Landscape and identity in children’s literature. In Landscape and identity: Perspectives from Australia, ed. Wendy Parsons and Robert Goodwin, 3–20. Adelaide: Auslib.
———. 2004. Cultural studies, new historicism and children’s literature. In Literature for children: Contemporary criticism, ed. Peter Hunt, 173–195. London: Routledge.
Whitlark, James, and Wendell M. Aycock, eds. 1992. The literature of emigration and exile. Texas University Press.
Wilde, Lady Francesca. 1887. Ancient legends, mystic charms and superstitions of Ireland with sketches of the Irish past. London: Ward and Downey.
Williams, Raymond. 1985. The country and the city. London: Hogarth Press.
Yeats, W.B. 1990a. The stolen child. In W.B. Yeats selected poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares, 5. London: Pan Books.
———. 1990b. To Ireland in the coming times. In W.B. Yeats selected poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares, 22. London: Pan Books.
Zarzosa, Helia Lopez. 1998. Internal exile, exile and return: A gendered view. Journal of Refugee Studies 11 (2): 189–198. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/11.2.189.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ní Bhroin, C. (2021). Recovery of Origins: Myths of Homeland and Return in the Fantasy Fiction of O.R. Melling. In: Discourses of Home and Homeland in Irish Children’s Fiction 1990-2012. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73395-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73395-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-73394-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-73395-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)