Irish Literature Since 1800

Norman Vance

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138153172
• eBook ISBN: 9781317870494
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book surveys Irish writing in English over the last two centuries, from Maria Edgeworth to Seamus Heaney, to give the literary student and the general reader an up-to-date sense of its variety and vitality and to indicate some of the ways in which it has been described and discussed.

It begins with a brief outline of Irish history, of Irish writing in Irish and Latin, and of writing in English before 1800. Later chapters consider Irish romanticism, Victorian Ireland, W.B.Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, new directions in Irish writing after Joyce and the literature of contemporary Ireland, north and south, from 1960 to the present.

Chapter 1

Introducing Ireland and Irish Writing

This book is mainly concerned with Irish writing in English over the last two centuries. ‘Writing’, ‘English’ and ‘the last two centuries’ all call for introductory comment. ‘Irish’ will be discussed later.

‘Writing’ will often be used instead of ‘literature’ in what follows because Irish literary development cannot be adequately understood if one concentrates exclusively on the choice and familiar works which custom and contemporary taste dignify as ‘literature’. This notion of literature as timelessly valuable writing, usually involving a ‘canon’ of classics worthy of admiration and academic study, tends to exclude much of the extremely varied reading matter which may have contributed to the formation of individual writers and to literary tradition generally. Constructing literary history purely from the narrow perspective of what now passes for ‘literary’ also privileges modern forms such as the novel over older literary modes such as historical narrative, oratory and religious and political writing, all of which have been particularly important in Ireland. Furthermore, the category of the ‘literary’ excludes merely ‘ephemeral’ or ‘popular’ writing, deemed to be unworthy of serious attention. This distinction has always been problematic with popular yet serious writers such as Charles Dickens or Graham Greene. It has now begun to seem rather old-fashioned. But as Declan Kiberd’s recent study Irish Classics (2000) has indicated, the idea of a canon of specially important, timelessly valuable Irish texts is far from extinct.

Common sense suggests that there are of course circumstances when the distinction between canonical and ephemeral or popular writing and writers can be plausibly sustained: W.B. Yeats, whose Last Poems and Two Plays were published in Dublin in 1939, is ‘canonical’ by any standards, and Margaret S. Norris, author of Glenreeba, also published in 1939, in Belfast, is not. But that is not a reason for systematically ignoring popular material. Recent research on popular culture in Ireland has demonstrated a complex and changing pattern of relationship between popular and élite culture which it would be unhelpful, indeed misleading, to ignore.

The controversial Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature, published in three substantial volumes in 1991, with two further volumes devoted to women’s writing published in 2002, enterprisingly addressed this problem of the ‘literary’ and was indeed untraditionally comprehensive, going well beyond the familiar canon of Irish writing by including speeches and other non-fictional writing. Even so, it was attacked for omissions and for inadequate representation of certain categories of material, particularly women’s writing (subsequently remedied) and Ulster dialect verse. The present book cannot hope to be comprehensive, but from time to time it will attempt to go beyond conventionally ‘literary’ material to indicate the flavour and some of the interactions of the varieties of Irish writing.

‘English’ has been the dominant, but not the sole, language in which Irish people have written in modern times. The Irish language tradition still continues, and will be discussed later in the present chapter. The period begins with the controversial passing of an Act of Union in 1800 which confirmed English as the language of government and administration (as it had been for centuries) and brought Ireland directly under the British parliament in London, abolishing the old Irish parliament. Hugh Kearney and other historians across the English-speaking world and in Germany have recently reminded us that Irish history needs to be understood in relation to and as part of British history rather than on its own or as an aspect of purely English history.¹ Culturally as well as politically, Scotland and England both significantly affected what happened in Ireland, though the traffic has not all been in one direction. After 1800, for the Irish, as for the Scots, writing – and speaking – in what could pass as the English of England was more than ever a requirement for literary and professional success in the newly enlarged United Kingdom. The Irish language, already in decline, declined further. Regional accents and dialects of English were a social disadvantage which could however be turned to literary advantage in dramatising the play of social and cultural difference. The Scots had already felt the pressure of metropolitan ‘English’ for nearly a century, even if it could seem like a dead language to Scottish people. After the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 ‘English Literature’ in the guise of ‘Rhetoric and Belles Lettres’ had been established as an academic discipline at the University of Edinburgh. But despite intermittent anxieties about ‘cultural cringe’ and the structural imbalances of population and political and economic power, English literature in Scotland and in Ireland has not feebly succumbed to coercive Englishness. In the case of Ireland in particular, in addition to tensions and divisions within Ireland itself, there was and continues to be lively and energising tension between the English metropolitan centre and the non-English periphery, whether this is conceived as regional or as national difference. The broad spectrum of Irish writing has certainly interacted with English and other literary traditions but particularly in the twentieth century it has if anything colonised, rather than been colonised by, metropolitan letters. Increasingly European and Atlantic contexts as well as the growth of English as a world-language have engulfed and transcended the old cultural polarities of Englishness and Irishness. Irish writers in English know they have no need to cringe: it was the Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw who in a 1916 Preface to Pygmalion (1912) felt able to say, with an air of amused detachment, ‘The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children how to speak it … it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.’²

In the past two centuries Ireland has come of age as a modern nation and Irish literature in English has earned respect well beyond the limits of the English-speaking world, attracting scholar-critics and translators from Japan, Egypt and the Lebanon as well as from most of the nations of Europe.³ There are obvious connections between an emerging nation and an emerging national literature. Since the seventeenth century if not earlier developing national sentiment has exploited as well as stimulated literary work to create and sustain a complex narrative of centuries of struggle for national identity. Traces of a usually resented colonial past have lingered in folk memory from much earlier times, encouraging though not necessarily legitimising recent post-colonial theorising of Irish culture.

The sense that parts of Ireland could be seen as English (or Scottish) colonies, though not at first as a single, homogeneous colony, was common among sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century adventurers who saw themselves as colonists in Ireland as in the New World. But matters did not stay that way for more than a couple of generations. The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998–9) controversially implies a colonial dimension throughout almost the whole of Ireland’s modern history by including an Irish chapter in each of its five volumes. The expression ‘metropolitan colony’ is sometimes used to describe Ireland’s relations with mainland Britain before independence. But the term ‘colony’ is usually misleading when applied indiscriminately to Ireland. It certainly did not fit the industrial north-east in its economic heyday around 1900 when it was fully integrated with industrial Britain. One must always ask which part of Ireland is being discussed, and at what period: the language of colony, colonialism and imperial domination increasingly misrepresents and oversimplifies the complicated and idiosyncratic relationship between Ireland and mainland Britain, particularly after 1800 with the advent of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

The perception of Ireland as traumatised ex-colony, perhaps a convenient alibi for some of the failures of the modern state, shares with traditional nationalism the cherished self-image of Ireland as victim-nation, ‘the most distressful country’. But recent research has demonstrated that by world standards and by the standards of normal colonial and postcolonial economic performance Ireland never was a really poor country, let alone a unique exemplar of misery and oppression among European peoples, though there was always a strong and aggrieved sense of relative deprivation by comparison with neighbouring Britain.⁴ The contemporary reader needs to negotiate with due caution both an old-fashioned residue of more or less nationalist constructions of Ireland’s developing literary identity and fashionable colonial and postcolonial perspectives which have developed in the wake of work by Edward Said, Frantz Fanon and others. The jury is still out on whether postcolonial theory can be relied on to supplant the reductive rhetoric of unreconstructed nationalism, to illuminate the complexity of Irish culture and to disclose and explore subaltern identities which had been occluded by the drive to establish an independent nation, which would of course be welcome, or whether it will continue to sing the same old song in a different key, telling us, perhaps in caricature form, what we already knew about oppression and marginalisation and cultural incompetences in a poor country. In any case, it needs to be remembered that literature in any given country is never completely accounted for in terms of national themes or colonial and postcolonial experience. It is always more interesting and varied than that.

It is already apparent that the past two centuries represent only part of the story of ‘Irish literature’, the most modern episode in a long history of partly oral culture and a long and difficult social and political history from which it cannot be altogether disentangled. Some recent literary historians have felt it necessary to start their narratives considerably earlier than 1800.⁵ Ireland’s often obscure but clearly extensive and varied pre-history, and the turbulence of the more recent political and religious past, have stimulated a richly complicated literary tradition.

Historical background

The sense of tradition itself is a major dynamic of Irish writing. The literary work of any given period needs to be read with some sense of Irish history not just because it is historically produced, responding to and reflecting particular historical circumstances, but because historical memory, including the memory of earlier literary modes and concerns, is one of the constant themes of Irish writers and a sometimes intolerable pressure upon them. Alternative histories can sustain alternative visions of the country since there is plenty to fuel a collective sense of grievance and plenty to celebrate in the mythologised Irish past. Invaders and demonised villains abound, from the Vikings to Oliver Cromwell, but so do saints and scholars and literary luminaries. For centuries more or less aggressive invocation and commemoration of the politically usable past have been characteristic of Irish political behaviour, and even when writers such as James Joyce or Samuel Beckett are seemingly indifferent or irreverent about Irish politics past and present, understanding the causes and contexts of that irreverence calls for a degree of historical explanation.

But there is an immediate difficulty about embarking on such explanations. Both fact and interpretation in Irish history have been hotly contested on political and ideological grounds. This continues in our own time in the debates about historical revisionism,⁶ as more extensive archival research and an increasingly ‘scientific’ historiography revise the historical understanding and the historical myths of earlier generations, only to incur charges (often undeserved) of seeking to establish new myths or misrepresentations through different kinds of selectivity and different if undeclared prejudice and presupposition. The matter is not made any easier by the tendency of poets and playwrights, like politicians, to acquire and transmit their history imaginatively rather than rationally, drawing on feelings rather than archival sources. The historian who coldly insists in the face of inflamed folk memory and the burning intensities of political rhetoric that it was not quite like that, or more complicated than that, might not seem to be of much real assistance in reading the more vivid parts of Irish literature. Even a selective outline chronology presents problems as selecting different dates can outline different shapes, and hint at different colours inside the outline.

Despite all the difficulties, an introductory chronology might be helpful. More detail will be supplied later, where it seems appropriate, as subsequent chapters develop a broadly chronological account of Irish writing in relation to immediate historical context. Old-fashioned Celtic-nationalist constructions of Irish history and culture naturally start with the Celts (or Gaels) in remote antiquity. But postnationalist Ireland, a term and a condition recently explored by Richard Kearney,⁷ might seek to take an even longer as well as a broader view of things. From the earliest times prevailing winds and ocean currents brought different kinds of farmers and adventurers to the fertile island of Ireland. Carbon-dating of stone artefacts found in layers of ash or charcoal confirms that there was pre-Celtic neolithic settlement in Ireland from just before 3000 B.C. Settlers capable of working in copper, bronze and gold to make weapons and jewellery arrived from about 2000 B.C. Folk-memory of successive waves of settlement from the European mainland may be preserved in the mythological Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of Invasions of Ireland), a twelfth-century text incorporating much older material, which posits six distinct invasions culminating in that of the Milesians or Gaels, a Celtic people. Only by the latter half of the first millennium before Christ, perhaps around 300 B.C., probably by gradual infiltration rather than large-scale invasion, had Celtic peoples from Britain and continental Europe become culturally dominant in Ireland.

Even then, reasonable cultural and linguistic homogeneity coexisted with great political diversity. The evidence of Celtic proper names suggests many different groupings, sometimes identified through worship of a common divinity such as Lug (the Luigne), or Boand, associated with the river Boyne (the Boandraige). Local dynasties gradually emerged which could command loyalty through ties of kinship and used that as a basis for military organisation in their struggles with other peoples and dynasties on the same island.

The coming of Christianity to Ireland is associated with St Patrick (d.493), grouped with St Brigid of Kildare (d.525) and St Colum Cille (Columba) (521–97) as one of the three great saints of Ireland. But there was more continuity with the old pagan culture than one might have expected: memories of the pre-Christian fire-goddess Brigit seem to have influenced the cult of the Christian St Brigid, also associated with fire. The monastic communities which were gradually established were centres of learning and treasuries of precious objects, but this made them particularly vulnerable to Viking raids which began in 795. The first permanent Viking settlements date from 841. These mark the beginning of town-life in Ireland: by the tenth century Dublin, Limerick and Wexford were established as Viking strongholds. Although the battle of Clontarf (1014), the defeat of the Vikings of Dublin by Brian Boru, has been claimed by patriotic tradition as a great national victory, it was really a battle of the men of Munster against the men of Leinster and their Viking allies, and Viking power in Ireland was already in decline.

English, or rather Anglo-Norman, involvement in Ireland can be dated from 1171 when Henry II mounted an expedition against Ireland, ‘authorised’ by the papal letter Laudabiliter issued by the (English) Pope Adrian IV in 1155 in the interests of reforming the Irish church. By 1175 Henry was acknowledged as overlord of much of south-east Ireland though effective political control was confined to a limited area around Dublin known as the Pale. In 1177 John de Courcy extended Norman influence by moving into the northern kingdom of Ulster.

Norman overlords such as the Fitzgeralds and the Butlers (from whom William Butler Yeats claimed descent), sometimes known as the ‘old English’ to distinguish them from later post-Reformation settlers, tended to adapt to rather than overthrow the traditional Gaelic order and often felt they owed no particular loyalty to the English crown. The so-called ‘Tudor conquest’ in the sixteenth century denotes a sustained attempt to extend English sovereignty, effective only in the Pale, throughout the rest of Ireland. In 1541 Henry VIII took the title of King of Ireland, formally constituting the country as a separate kingdom under the authority of the English Crown. The move towards greater centralisation of authority provoked extended conflict. The Fitzgeralds, Earls of Desmond, rose in rebellion between 1569 and 1573 and again between 1579 and 1583. After their defeat the confiscation of their lands made possible the ‘plantation’ of Munster with English settlers. The last and most serious rebellion, the ‘Nine Years War’ (1593–1603) is associated with Hugh O’Neill (1550–1616), second Earl of Tyrone and one of the last great heroes of Gaelic Ireland, subject of a biography by Sean O’Faolain (1942) and a play by Brian Friel, Making History (1989). This revolt involved intricate conspiracy with Catholic Spain, sworn enemy of now Protestant England, and there was a Spanish landing at Kinsale (1601) although the threatened invasion got no further. In 1607 O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, left Ireland, the so-called ‘Flight of the Earls’. Although they intended to return they never did and their lands were confiscated. This effectively marked the end of the old Gaelic aristocracy and social order in Ireland and prepared the way for the plantation of large parts of Ulster from 1609.

The Scottish James VI had now succeeded to the English throne as James I and some of his Scottish supporters were among those granted land in Ulster. Scots Presbyterian clergy gradually found their way to the north of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church was formally organised there from 1642, helping to give a distinctive character to parts of the northern province which has in a sense survived to the present. Henry VIII’s breach with Rome had been reflected in an Act of Supremacy passed by the Irish Parliament in 1537 providing, in theory, for a reformed or Protestant Irish church under royal control. Eventually Trinity College Dublin was established, in 1592, to educate Protestant clergy. But the dream of a Protestant state church in Ireland comparable to the reasonably comprehensive and successful Protestant Church of England as it emerged under Elizabeth was never fully realised. Church and state alike had little real power or authority to impose the new religion. Celtic Ireland and the Old English in Ireland tended to remain loyally Catholic so the Church of Ireland served mainly the more recent settlers, the New English, and was governed increasingly by English bishops. It was to remain a minority church: even among the Protestant New English (and Scots) there were a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing Ireland and Irish Writing
• 2 Romanticism in Ireland, 1800–1837
• 3 Victorian Ireland, 1837–1890
• 4 The Literary Revival and Other Stories, 1890–1920
• 5 James Joyce and the New Ireland, 1920–1960
• 6 Writing in Contemporary Ireland, 1960–2000
• Chronology
• General Bibliographies
• Individual Authors
• Index
• Longman Literature in English Series