Winter 2011 Editorial
Editorial Winter 2011
This March marks the 100th anniversary of the first issue of Studies and the Winter 2011 issue takes the centenary as its theme. This issue is also the first under new editor Bruce Bradley SJ, who succeeds Fergus O'Donoghue SJ.
Although Father Thomas Finlay and his Jesuit colleagues, who formed the original board, cannot have foreseen it, the world into which Studies, their latest publishing venture at the time, was born a hundred years ago in March 1912, was on the brink of major upheaval. A world war and revolution in Ireland would radically transform the rules of engagement with the culture they had set out to address.
A Century of Studies
Article by Bryan Fanning from Winter 2011 issue
Arguably, the most important intellectual journal in post-independence Ireland has been the Jesuit-run Studies, which is now one century and 400 issues old. This is not to say that at every given moment it was the best. Studies influenced and contributed significantly to many of the intellectual debates that featured in The Bell, The Crane Bag, Christus Rex and Administration. Unlike Christus Rex, Studies was not restricted by doctrinal censorship. It lacked the narrow editorial identity of other more focused journals. This elasticity contributed to its longevity but also to its being sometimes underrated alongside more short-lived ones......
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Winter 2011 issue
The Winter 2011 issue leads with a retrospective article, 'A Century of Studies', by Professor Bryan Fanning, School of Applied Social Studies, UCD. Other centenary-related articles come from the pens of Daire Keogh: 'Patrick Pearse, Studies and the birth of revisionism' and Oliver Rafferty SJ: Studies and the Shadow of Modernism'.
View full list of Articles
From the Archives: Studies commemorations
- A New Irish Identity
- Studies 1912-1962
- Irish Writing
- 75 Years
- 100 years
A NEW IRISH IDENTITY
[Studies, Vol. 75, No. 300 (Winter, 1986), pp. 357-360]
Editorial
It was a bold undertaking for a group of professors and graduates of the National University of Ireland to launch a new Journal in 1912 dedicated to serious intellectual analysis of major issues in letters, Philosophical Subjects and the Sciences. Given the pressures on Irish journals it is something of a pleasant surprise that, seventy-five years later, we are able to launch the 300th issue of Studies. It is a good reason to celebrate and even to engage in a little gentle trumpet blowing...
STUDIES 1912-1962
[Studies, Vol. 51, No. 201 (Spring 1962), pp. 1-8]
by James Meenan
In February 1911 the last issue of the New Ireland Review appeared. A valedictory note recalled seventeen years of successful existence and added that: 'we are content to have held the field until larger and better-equipped forces could occupy it'. The metaphor seems unduly martial for so pacific an age, but it was no less justified than the pride of survival that it expressed. The New Ireland, like the Lyceum before it, was a phase in the University struggle. Both journals looked back to Newman's Atlantis. They were a portion of the Jesuit achievement in the old University College. Now, in 1911, that College had been reconstructed into something that approached Catholic claims. It had passed out of Jesuit control (though fifty years later the new College still seems permeated by the memory of what went before). But there was still work to do...
FIFTY YEARS OF IRISH WRITING
[Studies, Vol. 51, No. 201 (Spring 1962), pp. 93-105]
by Seán O'Faoláin
When the editor of Studies kindly invited me to write an article on the fortunes of Irish literature over the past fifty years I presumed that the main interest of anything I might have to say would lie in the fact that I am an Irish writer who was born in 1900, which implies, I supopose, that, within the limitations of my personal oddities and idiosyncrasies, what I here say cannot fail to be, at any rate to some degree, representative of the views of the generation after Yeats...
SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS OF STUDIES
[Studies, Vol. 75, No. 300, Winter 1986]
by Brian P. Kennedy
It is a remarkable achievement for any periodical to reach its 300th issue after seventy-five years of continuous publication. But Studies has long been acknowledged as a distinguished contributor to Irish intellectual life. Seán Lemass held the view that Studies had provided 'articles forming the basis of discussion which has sometimes determined the future of our country. A review of the importance and status of Studies...is important to the development of the nation'...
Studies was launched in March 1912. It was, and still is, published by the Jesuits. A catholic intent was signalled by its subtitle: An Irish Quarterly Review of Letters, Philosophy and Science.
The stated object of Studies, set out in a foreword to the first issue, was to ‘give publicity to work of a scholarly type, extending over many important branches of study, and appealing to a wider circle of cultured readers than strictly specialist journals could be expected to reach’.
