About the Journal

Focus and Scope | Benefits for Student Authors | Bibliography

Our title is adapted from a very playful letter that James Joyce sent to his son Giorgio and daughter-in-law Helen on October 16, 1934, responding to their protestations of hunger (which Joyce himself was no stranger to). He sent them a Maggi stock cube as well as instructions for making soup with the help of a policeman:

I was so overjoyed to see that you are now at last doing things on the cheap and having glueplate, lunches. After years my teachings and preachings have borne fruit. But the good work is only begun. I am sending you something even better. It is a small cube of Maggi’s Allerleigemuslisuppe. You take off the wrapper and let the square-inch cube drop into a ten gallon copper washing pot filled with inexpensive water. Leave it to boil gently for an hour asking the local policeman to have an eye to it and to stir it every five minutes with his truncheon. Then take off your boots and stockings and put some soot over your face and go out carrying a large sack. Then go round to the back door of the convent of S. Vincent de Paul and pull the bell which is marked Paupers. ‘When the lay brother opens the door tell him about the Maggi suppe. Address him as Monsignor and he will be so flattered that in half a minute he will be gone and back again with an armful of bits of hard crusty bread left over by the community. Thank him, calling him Your Holiness. Take this bread home and after having washed and scrubbed it well hammer the pieces and drop them into the pot of now roaring soup. Do not forget to thank the policeman and allow him to dip his truncheon in the soup and lick it. Remember to call him Policeman Esquire not Mr Policeman as people who have not been to a University sometimes do. Then wash and dry yourselves and allow the soup to cool. Then take a bowl of it and two spoons and eat it and the bread very slowly, saying: Every little bimbo has a big babbo, but no little bimbo has such a good big babbo as our good big babbo. Eat a bowl a day and the potful ought to last till the middle of next month. If you leave before then send out cards to your friends and let them have a spoonful each.

Joyce did not have any money, but he had words, and he had an incredibly capable imagination. By the end of reading the passage, you are thoroughly outside of yourself, freed by the liberating force of language. That is what the School of English seeks to promote, and through the journal we seek to provide Students with a means of communicating that freedom, as well as the mischief and guile that we might identify in Joyce’s letter.

Focus and Scope

The baseline for the Journal’s work will be the independent research projects that final-year students in the BAJH and BRE produce from their research seminars (the modules LIT1006 and LIT1039). Students will be invited by the editorial board to contribute to the journal if their work is deemed compelling. Consideration will be given to other contributions if space allows.

As such, the journal will reflect the work that is done in those seminars because, in principle, they should be delivering distinctive projects across the field of possibilities that English provides. For example, 2024-25' seminars include Mid -Twentieth Century Queer Texts, Literature and the Visual Arts, Imagining Jamaica, Poetry In and Beyond the Book, Dystopian Fictions, Vampires before Dracula, Irish Gothic, Thoughts on Shorts, The Playwright and the City, Irish Young Adult Writing, Historical Fictions, Childhood Under Fire: Literature and Displacement. However, as already stated, room will be found, if possible, for other projects, and perhaps the occasional book review, as that is another important skill that students could utilise.

Benefits for Student Authors

  • Contributing to your field of study
  • Honing your analytical skills
  • Improving the quality of your writing
  • Gaining experience with the process of literary writing
  • Learning to revise your work in response to constructive feedback
  • Preparing for graduate school
  • Building undergraduate scholarly identity
  • Gaining transferable skills

Bibliography