Dialogues in the Margin: A History of the Dublin University Magazine

For decades, commentators on nineteenth-century Irish literature or history have routinely mentioned the significance of the Dublin University Magazine. Published monthly from January 1833 to December 1877, the DUM attracted as its contributors--and in several cases its editors--nearly every major Irish writer from this period. Prior to Wayne E. Hall's Dialogues in the Margin, however, there has been no systematic, book-length discussion of the magazine's entire career. In his study, Hall traces the dual nature of the magazine, its attention to both England and Ireland, which helps us to understand the sometimes guilty and reluctant, sometimes celebratory and passionate, union of these different cultural traditions and values. The DUM expressed a complex brand of Irish national identity that defined itself partly in cultural and partly in political terms. In seeking its own balance between excluding and including, between culture and politics, the DUM developed one main pattern in its pages: the magazine's political commentary stakes out the ideological ground with varying degrees of rigidity and exclusivity, while its literary contributions expand the magazine's total scope to embrace a much wider and more generous vision of ""Irishness."" Within the terms and tensions of the DUM's journalistic dialogue, then, readers can see the political and the literary values jostling against each other. The magazine serves as a detailed and thorough record of conservative political thought in the nineteenth century, and also shows that Irish political events have drawn much of their shape from the literature, even as that literature was being shaped in turn by politics. Wayne E. Hall is an associate dean in the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Cincinnati, as well as a faculty member in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. His previous book was Shadowy Heroes: Irish Literature of the 1890s. CONTENTS: Introduction. 1. Combinations and Challenges. 2. The Step into Excellence. 3. Principles of Morality and Religion. 4. Geniality under Strain. 5. A Native Periodical in a Time of Famine. 6. Pragmatism, Optimism, Mediocrity. 7. Doubling the Uncertainty of Authority. 8. The Patterns Exhausted. Conclusion. Selected Bibliography. Index.Praise for the Book:""Hall's study of the DUM is the first serious treatment of what was undoubtedly a seminal force in the Irish literary scene in the nineteenth century. . . . Such painstaking research is an invaluable source of information to both historians and literary critics; as such, it is reassuring to see a new study making no apology for what might be considered by some as rather old-fashioned scholarship. . . . Because the journal covered the greater part of the Victorian period, it is therefore an excellent barometer of Anglo-Irish relations, and Hall deftly picks his way through a minefield of conflicting opinions and complicated reactions to the conditions brought about by the Union. He is similarly adept at discussing the variations in style and content within the magazine itself, reflecting in his discussion the flexible nature of the periodical.""--Victorian Periodicals Review ""Hall's straightforwardly chronological account offers a clear and useful history of a central Irish cultural institution.""--Studies in English Literature ""Hall carefully traces the magazine's efforts to express the cultural life of Ireland--political, religious, and literary. He concentrates on the major issues of 19th-century Ireland (the famine, Protestant ascendancy, nationalism, unionism, Catholicism, landlordism); the major writers who wrote about them (Charles Lever, William Carleton, Joseph LeFanu, Samuel Ferguson, et al.); and the varying policies of the magazine's successive ed