"something Dreadful and Grand": American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious

Elaborate analogies between Irish and Jewish history, between Irish and Jewish subjectivities, occur with surprising frequency throughout American literature. They recall James Joyce's Leopold Bloom and episodes of Ulysses, Douglas Hyde's analogies during the Celtic Revival between learning Hebrew and learning Irish, and a myriad of claims of an unusual relationship between these peoples that goes beyond comparisons of their respective diasporic histories. But how does one describe this uncanny relationship, one often marked by hostility, affinity, and ambivalence, without essentializing people whose origins, class affiliation, educations, life experiences, and so on are enormously different? "Something Dreadful and Grand": American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious describes a complex allosemitism and allohibernianism through a variety of cultural texts with which immigrant Irish and Jewish Americans were most engaged: popular music of the Tin Pan Alley era, tenement literature from Anzia Yezierska and James T. Farrell through the posthumous publication of Henry Roth's An American Type, and proletarian and socialist-inflected drama by Elmer Rice, Clifford Odets, Eugene O'Neill, and Arthur Miller as they engaged the Irish drama of such writers as Bernard Shaw and Sean O'Casey. In an effort to trace both the genealogy and more recent trajectory of immigrant drama and fiction, chapters explore both the post-Famine melodramatic stage of the nineteenth century and a host of more contemporary texts from newer generations of immigrants. Throughout, the book argues for a "circum-North Atlantic" culture in which texts from Ireland, Britain, Irish America, and Jewish America contribute substantially to both a modern American literature and to understandings of the terms "Irish" and "Jewish." How can we really know what these terms mean as they delimit or erase totally the differences inherent to them? Borrowing a term from psychoanalytic and political theory, "Something Dreadful and Grand" explores the larger dimensions of this Irish-Jewish unconscious underlying cultural production in America, arguing for the centrality of these two diasporic groups to the development of American popular music, fiction, and especially drama.

About the Author :
Stephen Watt is Provost Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Drama, Theatre, and Contemporary Dance at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Joyce, O' Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater; Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage and Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing.

Review :
"Stephen Watt does more than decipher texts in this book-he watches them like a hawk and pounces thrillingly when he finds what he wants waiting for him, a breathtaking game that perceives what deeply connects cultures and comic imaginations, basking in and brooding on their reflections. A brilliant book, that comes at the right time."--Frank McGuinness "Consistently thoughtful, thought-provoking and enjoyable, Stephen Watt's 'Something Dreadful and Grand' offers a brilliantly incisive exploration of the ambivalent and often uncanny sense of affinity that exists between Irish and Jewish experiences of ethnicity, immigration and diaspora. This is a book that is broad-minded and eye opening; its context is that of the 'Circum-Atlantic, ' and its material ranges from 19th century popular melodrama to classic 20th century modernist texts to New York stand-up comedy in the 1960s."--Lionel Pilkington, author of Theatre and Ireland "Stephen Watt's inventive study examines the affinities and anxieties shared by Irish and Jewish cultures, revealing the vital role this dynamic relationship has played in American drama since the nineteenth century. His trenchant analysis of a provocative array of texts, practices, and performances attests to the merits of combined ethnic study."--Paige Reynolds, author of Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle "Impeccably researched and incisively written, Stephen Watt's 'Something Dreadful and Grand' brilliantly illustrates how the simultaneously alluring and repulsive nature of Irishness and Jewishness underpins much American (and Irish) literature since the mid-nineteenth century, ranging over a series of authors from the neglected to the canonical, and in the process permanently and illuminatingly changing our conception of what it means to be American."--Richard Rankin Russell, author of Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama "Ploughs a deep furrow in the new and exciting field of Irish-Jewish studies." --Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies