Posted on December 6, 2004 at 3:30 p.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — The ties between Ireland and the American South, spanning four centuries and including shared ancestries, cultures and sympathies, is the focus of a new book Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South, (Louisiana State University Press). The book is credited with being the first, in-depth exploration of this neglected subject.

The book’s author, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) associate professor of English Kieran Quinlan, Ph.D., a native of Ireland, argues that the Irish relationship to the American South involves both kin and kinship. Quinlan shows how a significant component of the Southern population has Irish origins that are far more tangled than the simplistic distinctions between Protestant Scotch Irish and plain Catholic Irish. African-Americans and Native Americans, too, have identified with the Irish through comparable experiences of subjugation, displacement and starvation.

Strange Kin looks at the connections between Irish nationalists and the Confederate cause, revealing similar historical paths in Ireland and the South. 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 20th century literary flowering in Ireland and the South, as exemplified by Irish writers James Joyce and W.B. Yeats and Southern authors William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Conner.

Quinlan’s close consideration of the familial and circumstantial resemblances between Ireland and the South will foster an enhanced understanding of each place separately as well as of the larger British and American politics.