W. J. McCormack: A Bibliography of His Works

The following listing has been copied with the subject’s permission from the W. J. McCormack website at www.billmccormack.ie/. Please check that source for any updates from Nov. 2004. (Note: The poetry of “Hugh Maxton” is not included.)

Monographs in criticism and literary history
  • The Silence of Barbara Synge (Manchester UP 2003), 304pp.
  • Roger Casement in Death; or, Haunting the Free State (UCD Press 2002), 240pp.
  • Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; NY: New York UP 2000), 500pp.
  • Sheridan Le Fanu (Stroud: Alan Sutton 1997), 324pp.
  • The Pamphlet Debate on the Union between Great Britain and Ireland 1797 to 1800 (Dublin: IAP 1996), 126pp.
  • From Burke to Beckett: Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork UP 1994), 470pp.
  • The Dublin Paper War of 1786-1788; a Bibliographical and Critical Inquiry (Dublin: IAP 1993), 168pp.
  • Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen (Manchester UP 1993), 256pp.
  • Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland [2nd enl. edn] (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1991), 324pp.
  • The Battle of the Books; Two Decades of Irish Cultural Debate (Mullingar: Lilliput Press 1986), 96pp.
  • Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985), 424pp.
  • Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980), 310pp., ill.
Edited poetry collections [as Mc Cormack/Maxton]
  • Ferocious Humanism: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Before Swift to Yeats and After (London: Dent; NY: New York UP 2000), 356pp.
  • Selected Poems of Austin Clarke (London: Penguin 1992), 280pp. [new edn. with corrections].
  • Selected Poems of Austin Clarke (Dublin: Lilliput Press; Winston-Salem (N. Carolina): Wake Forest UP 1991), 280pp.
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Scholarly editions
  • Ed., Plays Pleasant by Bernard Shaw (London: Penguin 2003 2004), Introduction: ‘Laughter and After’, pp.vii-xiv.
  • Ed., Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope (London: Everyman 1997).
  • Ed., La Vendée, by Anthony Trollope [Oxford World Classics] (OUP 1994).
  • Ed., Ormond, by Maria Edgeworth (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1990).
  • Ed., In a Glass Darkly, by Sheridan Le Fanu (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1990).
  • Ed., Memoirs of a Wild Goose, by Charles Bewley (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1989.
  • Ed., with Kim Walker, The Absentee, by Maria Edgeworth [Oxford World Classics] (OUP 1988).
  • Ed., Borrhomeo the Astrologer, by Sheridan Le Fanu (Edinburgh: Tragara Press 1985).
  • Ed., The Eustace Diamonds, by Anthony Trollope [Oxford World Classics] (OUP 1983).
  • Ed., The Kellys and the O’Kellys, by Anthony Trollope, intro. by William Trevor [Oxford World Classics] (OUP 1982).
  • Ed., Uncle Silas, by Sheridan Le Fanu (Oxford: World’s Classics 1981).
Reference works, anthologies & essay collections
  • Collections of essays and other edited works:Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Oxford: Blackwell 2001), 700pp. [revised and extended paperback edn.].
  • Consulting editor to, and formerly co- general editor of The Works of Maria Edgeworth, gen. eds., Marilyn Butler & Mitzi Myers, 12 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto 1999-2003).
  • Sect. Ed., in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed., Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day Co.; London: Faber 1991), 1: ‘Maria Edgeworth’, pp.1011-1052; ‘Language, Class and Genre 1780-1830’ (pp.1070-1172); ‘The Intellectual Revival of the 1830s and ’40s’ (pp.1173-1300). Vol. 2: ‘Irish Gothicism, its Finer Legacy, 1820-1945’ (pp.831-949).
  • Gen. Ed., The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1998), 686pp.
  • Ed., In the Prison of his Days; a Miscellany for Nelson Mandela on his Seventieth Birthday (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1988), 96pp.
  • Ed. Team Member, ‘The Dublin University Magazine, 1833-1877’ [attributions] in Walter E. Houghton, ed., The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900 (Toronto UP 1987), Vol. 4, pp.193-363.
  • with A. J. Stead, James Joyce and Modern Literature (London: Routledge 1982), 222pp.
  • Ed., A Festschrift for Francis Stuart on his Seventieth Birthday (Dublin: Dolmen Press 1972), 64pp.
Articles and Contributions
[ A select list, omitting items later subsumed into longer work, and omitting also some short pieces in art history.]
  • ‘Never Give All the Heart’, introduction to Oliver MacDonagh, Ireland: the Union and its Aftermath [2nd edn.] (Dublin: University College Press 2003), pp.vii-xvii.
  • ‘Dr W. J. Maloney, MC, of Edinburgh, Gallipoli and New York’, in Davis Coakley and Mary O’Doherty, eds., Borderlands: Essays in Literature and Medicine in Honour of JB Lyons (Dublin: Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland 2002), pp.44-59.
  • ‘Some Versions of Progress Under the Union, With Special Reference to Robert Owen in the 1820s’, in Bruce Stewart, ed., Hearts and Minds: Irish Culture and Society under the Act of Union (Gerrards Cross: Smythe 2002), pp.90-97.
  • ‘Haunted Realism: Beckett Through Fontane’, in Patricia Howe and Helen Chambers (eds), Theodor Fontane and the European Context. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2001), pp.181-196.
  • ‘John Millington Synge (1871-1909): The Well of the Saints: Synge and De-Sacralization’, in Janis & Richard Londraville, eds. John Quinn: Selected Irish Writers from his Library (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press 2001), pp.307-323.
  • ‘Joseph O’Neill (1886-1953) The Kingdom-Maker and its Author’, in Janis & Richard Londraville, eds. John Quinn: Selected Irish Writers from his Library. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press 2001), pp.271-281.
  • ‘Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan’, in The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature [3rd edn., ed. Joanne Shattock] (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2000.
  • ‘Between Burke and the Union’, in John Whale, ed., Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Manchester: Manchester UP 1999), pp.60- 93.
  • Introduction to The Irish Parliamentary Register, 1782-1797 [fasc. rep.] (Bristol: Thoemmes Press 1999), 17 vols [see 1, pp.v-xi].
  • ‘Wilde and Parnell’, in Jerusha Mc Cormack, ed., Wilde the Irishman (New Haven, London: Yale UP 1998), pp.95-102.
  • ‘Irish Gothic’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook to Gothic Literature (London: Macmillan 1998), pp.135-137.
  • ‘J. Sheridan Le Fanu’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook to Gothic Literature. London: Macmillan 1998), pp.145-146.
  • ‘Fallings from us, vanishings ... Or, How I Didn’t Get to Where I am Today; an Inaugural Lecture Given ... 18 March 1997’ (London: Goldsmiths College 1999), 18pp.
  • ‘The “Plymouth” Brethren? Prologomena to the Re-writing of J. M. Synge’s Biography’, in ‘The Endless Knot: Literature and Religion in Ireland’, Religion and Literature [(Special Issue], 28:2-3 (Summer-Autumn 1996), pp.83-96.
  • ‘Never Put Your Name to an Anonymous Letter’: Serial Reading in The Dublin University Magazine, 1861 to 1869’, in The Year Book of English Studies, 26 (1996), pp.100-115.
  • Convergent Criticism; The “Biographia Literaria” of Vivian Mercier and the State of Irish Literary History’, in Bullán [Oxford], 2:1 (Summer 1995) pp.79-100.
  • ‘Austin Clarke: The Poet as Scapegoat of Modernism’, in Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, eds. Modernism and Ireland: the Poetry of the 1930s (Cork: Cork UP 1995), pp.75-102.
  • (with N. F. Lowe) Jonathan Swift as Publisher of Sir William Temple’s Correspondence’, in Swift Studies, 8 (1993), pp.45-57.
  • ‘Edmund Burke, his Image in Painting and Literature’ [and also] ‘Men of the West’ [Douglas Hyde, J. M. Synge, and Mairtín Ó Cadhain, in Treasures of the Mind, ed. David Scott (London: Sothebys 1992), pp.119-125, 127-134.
  • ‘Samuel Beckett and the Negro Anthology’, in Hermathena (September 1992), pp.73-92.
  • ‘In Piam Memoriam Agnes Nemes Nagy (1922-1991)’, with two poems translated by Hugh Maxton, in New Hungarian Quarterly, 124 (Winter 1991), pp.23-30.
  • ‘The Tedium of History: an Approach to Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage’, in Ciaran Brady, ed. Ideology and the Historians; Papers Read to the 19th Irish Conference of Historians (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1991), pp.77-98.
  • ‘Ideology and Setting, with Special Reference to the Fiction of Maria Edgeworth’, in Otto Rauchbauer, ed., Ancestral Voices: The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag 1991), pp.33-60.
  • ‘Seamus Heaney and the Business of Culture’, in Text and Context (1990), pp.23-33.
  • ‘Flavius Arrianus in Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage, a Case of Nominalist Allusion, in Historical and Literary Review (Dublin) No. 1 (1991), pp.1-4.
  • ‘Eighteenth-century Protestant Ascendancy; Yeats and the Historians’, in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 4 (1989), pp.159-81.
  • ‘French Revolution ... Anglo-Irish Literature ... Beginnings? The Case of Maria Edgeworth’, in Hugh Gough and David Dickson, eds. Ireland and the French Revolution (Dublin: Irish Academic Press 1990), pp.229-243.
  • ‘James Joyce, Cliché, and the Irish Language’, in Bernard Benstock, ed. James Joyce; the Augmented Ninth; Proceedings of the Ninth James Joyce Symposium (Syracuse: Syracuse UP 1989), pp.323-36.
  • ‘Isaac Butt and the Inner Failure of Protestant Home Rule’, in Ciaran Brady, ed. Worsted in the Game; Losers in Irish History (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1989), pp.121-31.
  • ‘Yeats and Modernisation’, in Linen Hall Review, 5:4 (1988), pp.4-7.
  • ‘Finnegans Wake and Irish Literary History’, in Joris Duytschaever and Geert Lernout, eds. History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988), pp.111-135.
  • ‘Thomas Orde and Some Dublin Printing Jobs, 1787’, in Long Room, 33 (1988), pp.17-19.
  • ‘Vision and Revision in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Irish Parliamentary Rhetoric’, in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 2 (1987), pp.7-37.
  • ‘Seeing Darkly: Notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett’, Hermathena, 141 (1986), pp.22-44.
  • ‘On Gulliver’s Travels’, in Jeremy Hawthorn, ed. Narrative from Malory to Motion Pictures (London: Edward Arnold 1985), pp.70-84.
  • ‘“The Protestant Strain”; Or, a Short History of Anglo-Irish Literature from Coleridge to Thomas Mann’, in Gerard Dawe and Edna Longley, eds. Across a Roaring Hill; Essays in Honour of John Hewitt (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1985), pp.48-78.
  • ‘Goldsmith, Biography, and the Phenomenology of Anglo-Irish Literature’, in Andrew Swarbrick, ed. The Art of Oliver Goldsmith (London: Vision Press 1984), pp.168-194.
  • ‘Sean O’Casey’s Unpublished Correspondence with Raissa Lomonosova 1925-26’, in Irish Slavonic Studies, 5 (1984) pp 181-191 [R. Davies].
  • ‘Sons and Fathers: W. B. Yeats and a Problem in Modernism’, in U. Dutta, ed. Unageing Intellect: Essays on W. B. Yeats (Delhi: Doaba House 1983), pp.14-29.
  • The Genesis of Protestant Ascendancy’, in Francis Barker et al, eds., 1789: Reading, Writing, Revolution (Chelmsford: University of Essex Press 1980), pp.302-323.
  • James Joyce’s “Eveline” and a Problem in Modernism’, in Dorothea Siegmund Schultze, ed. Irland: Gesellschaft und Kultur III (Halle: Martin Luther-Universitat 1982), pp.252-264.
  • ‘Yeats’s ‘Purgatory’: a Play and a Tradition’, in Crane Bag, 3:2 (1979), pp.33-44.
  • ‘Yeats and a New Tradition’, in Crane Bag, 3:1 (1978), pp.30-40 rep. in David Pierce, ed., W. B. Yeats: Critical Assessments (Mountfield: Helm 2000): 3, pp.496-510.
  • ‘J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Richard Marston (1848)”: the History of an Anglo-Irish Text’, in 1848: the Sociology of Literature, ed. Francis Barker et. al (Colchester: University of Essex 1978), pp.107-25.
  • ‘Francis Stuart, the Recent Fiction’, in Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown, eds., The Irish Novel in Our Time (Lille: Universite de Lille 1976), pp.175-83.
  • ‘Flaggers’ in Maria Edgeworth’s Absentee’, in Notes and Queries (n.s.) 23:10 (October 1976) p. 453.
  • ‘A Manuscript Letter from Michael Banim’, in Hermathena, 117 (1974), pp.37-38.
  • ‘Sylvester O’Halloran and Maria Edgeworth’s Absentee’, in Long Room, 9 (1974) p. 41.
  • ‘The Absentee and Maria Edgeworth’s Notion of Didactic Fiction’, in Atlantis, 5 (1973), pp.123-135.
  • ‘J. S. Le Fanu: Letters to William Blackwood and John Forster’, in Long Room, 8 (1973), pp.29-36.
  • ‘Swedenborgianism as Structure in Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas’, in Long Room, 6 (1972), pp.23-29.
  • ‘Straight Lines Becoming Circles; the Poetry of Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon’, in Acorn, 17 (1972), pp.29-33, 39-43.
  • ‘Mairtín Ó Cadhain as Folklorist: a Bibliographical Note’, in Hermathena, 113 (1972), pp.35-39.
  • ‘Francis Stuart, a Checklist and Commentary’, in Long Room, 3 (1971), pp.38-49.
  • ‘A Preliminary Checklist of the Separate Publications of Mairtin Ó Cadhain’, in Long Room, 2 (1970), pp.7-9.
Some related activities
  • Prepared a libretto (based on a text by W. B. Yeats) for an opera by John Buckley, first performed in October 1991 (Dublin, Belfast, Wexford Festival etc.) Second production, London (Covent Garden) May 1993.
  • Prepared the catalogue entry for Blue Funk, the Irish participants in the Sonsbeek 93 International Art Exhibition (Arnhem June 1993.)
  • Wrote the catalogue essay - ‘Negative Powers’ - for the four-person exhibition, Alchemy 1993.
  • Took part in a day-long Hungarian TV series of programmes on Irish culture, February 1995.
  • Represented Ireland at the Coimbra International Poetry Festival May 1995.
  • Wrote exhibition notes to ‘Ferenc Martyn: Ulysses’, for the exhibition displayed during the Millennium James Joyce International Symposium, June 2000.
  • ‘Verse and Prose to Concern the Damaged Art of Margaret Fitzgibbon’ issued to mark the installation of Fitzgibbon’s Hortus Conclusus at the Crawford Gallery, Cork, October 2002.
  • ‘The Spanish Arch’; programme note for the Abbey Theatre’s production of The House of Bernarda Alba by F. G. Lorca (trans. Sebastian Barry), May 2003.
  • ‘Synge and the Nineteenth Century’; programme note for the Abbey Theatre’s production of The Playboy of the Western World, summer 2004.

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