This book is a collection of essays and a short story written to honor Christopher Fox of Notre Dame, arguably the most influential figure in Irish Studies for the past quarter century. The essays address topics in which Professor Fox has made his own enduring scholarly contributions, and subjects to which he has made enduring contributions through his academic leadership, from the development of library collections and important fellowships at his university to the institution of a global community of scholars in Irish Studies. The disciplines represented by the essays published here include English Literature, Irish Literature, Comparative Literature, Medieval Studies, Librarianship, History, Intellectual History, Irish Folklore, Philosophy, and Documentary Film.
Seven of the fifteen essays focus on topics at the intersection of Irish Studies and Eighteenth-Century Studies, Fox’s own specialty. They include studies of Edmund Burke’s late-career view of the free market and social justice; the persistent influence of William Molyneux and Jonathan Swift in late eighteenth-century Irish patriots’ political vision; Swift’s conception of neighborliness in his fiction and sermons; the satirist’s illnesses and their bearing on his social relationships; the anthropogenic dimension of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad; the reception of Lucretius’ De rerum natura in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Isles; and an examination of the conception of the self in the philosophical work of John Locke and Charles Mein.
The remainder cover texts and issues such as the role of Continental influence on medieval Irish epic, the relations of poets and lords in early modern Ireland, perspectives on writers in Irish folklore, and the relations of social class and linguistic change in the modern novel. There is as well a pair of essays on the 1916 Dublin Easter Rising, one examining the role of the theater in the participants’ conceptions of that event, the other discussing the creation of the award winning recent documentary series of which Fox was executive producer, 1916: The Irish Rebellion. The contributions open with a Forward by the former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, and conclude with a new short story by the Irish novelist Patrick McCabe. The book includes a Select Bibliography of the publications of Professor Fox, and an Index.