The first Irish Short Story Cycles: Barlow and Somerville & Ross’s Narratives of Community

In this paper I will argue that Jane Barlow’s Irish Idylls (1892) and Somerville & Ross’s Irish R.M. collections, rather than James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), form the starting point in the history of the modern Irish short story cycle. Barlow’s Irish Idylls and Somerville & Ross’s Irish R.M. are collections of short stories unified by a shared, though varying, set of characters as well as by setting and theme. As opposed to the cycles of Irish mythology and the framed tale collections by other nineteenth-century Irish authors, Barlow and Somerville & Ross’s collections are unified by ‘internal linking’ instead of ‘external framing’. Moreover, I hope to demonstrate that these short story cycles do not only participate in the Anglo-Irish tradition of informing the outside world about Irish life, but can also be considered part of a regional tradition of cycles which Sandra A. Zagarell has called narratives of community. She defines the genre as grouping together works which “take as their subject the life of a community […] and portray the minute and quite ordinary processes through which the community maintains itself as an entity”. Zagarell mentions Irish Idylls as an example. Somerville & Ross’s Irish R.M. collections, although they have not been labeled narratives of community, also clearly narrate the life of a community. Barlow and Somerville & Ross’s short story cycles share an episodic structure, a lack of linear plot progression, a mediating narrator and a focus on the ordinary yet typical aspects of the life of a community. Finally, I will attempt to show that the contrast between community life and the modern world typical of the genre finds a different interpretation in Irish Idylls and in the Irish R.M.status: publishe