Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South

The ties between Ireland and the American South span four centuries and include shared ancestries, cultures, and sympathies. The striking parallels between the two regions are all the more fascinating because, studded with contrasts, they are so complex. Kieran Quinlan, a native of Ireland who now resides in Alabama, is ideally suited to offer the first in-depth exploration of this neglected subject in Strange Kin. The Irish relationship to the American South is unique, Quinlan explains, in that it involves both kin and kinship. He demonstrates that a significant component of the southern population has Irish origins--which are far more tangled than the simplistic distinction between Protestant Scotch Irish and plain Catholic Irish. African and Native Americans, too, have identified with the Irish through comparable experiences of subjugation, displacement, and starvation. The historical trajectories of Ireland and the South are remarkably similar, Quinlan shows. Both suffered defeat; both have long been seen as problematic, if also highly romanticized, areas of otherwise "progressive" nations; and both have been identified with religious prejudices. Quinlan also examines the unexpected twentieth-century literary flowering in both regions, exemplified by Irish writers W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bowen, and southern authors William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor. Sophisticated as well as entertaining, Strange Kin represents a benchmark in Irish-American cultural studies.