Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture by John Wilson Foster

Abstract

up 64 pages, or approximately 36 per cent of the book’s length, and need not have taken up a quarter as much space: the publisher has set each collated reading in regular body type, surrounded by white space, so that usually only four or five readings occupy an entire page; furthermore, though Keefer herself writes that “the consistent accordance found in readings for et [Latin and] cannot be considered lexically significant,” she still includes them “for the sake of comprehensiveness” (39). By a rough estimate, their omission would have shortened Appendix II by another fifth without sacrificing any important information. Keefer closes her analysis proper with some interesting, though highly speculative suggestions — she attempts to identify the poet with a specific group of Benedictine reformers, including St. Dunstan, established in Can­ terbury by King Edgar in 960 (60-61). In fact, her study has scarcely pre­ sented enough evidence even to speculate on this point. What the study has established, however, is that Psalm 50 was a very familiar and very important work in England during the tenth-century Benedictine monastic reform, and that the author of this poem had a wide range of sources to draw from. The general background that this book provides allows a con­ temporary, secular audience to read the poem in something approximating its original religious context, and, implicitly, makes the first strong case for reading the Old English “Kentish Psalm” as literature. d a v id m e g g in so n / University of Ottawa John Wilson Foster, Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991). 298. £25.00 cloth, £12.50 paper (North American distributors: Syracuse University Press). In an engaging introductory sketch, John Wilson Foster tells of the intellec­ tual formation of the young Belfast Protestant of the sixties who slipped out of town to go to the United States, where he attended graduate school in Oregon. Then, after a brief return to Dublin, he came to Canada in 1974, finding “a domicile and workplace” in Vancouver. His first book, Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction (1974), written before he came to Canada, Fic­ tions of the Irish Literary Revival (1987), and these sixteen essays, largely written in two clusters, in the seventies and in the second half of the eighties, reveal a unique critical intelligence. Part literary scholarship, part cultural criticism, part intervention in Irish “critical discourse,” the book is unified not only by its subject but also by the presence of a visually alert writer. At one point, in what we learn to view as a typical and disarming gesture, 107 he describes his method: “Mine is, unashamedly, the old liberal human­ ism (Arnold’s disinterestedness, even, but strategically courted) co-opting the methods of structuralism and poststructuralism, prepared to entertain, if not permit, its own supersession.” The grouping of the essays marks a process of growth towards deeper engagement and widening scope; Foster’s verve invites us to follow his story as subtexts and asides gradually become central and the writing of criticism becomes the process of defining identity. Among the many plot-lines which run through these essays, a central one concerns the attachment — for good or ill — of Irish writers to their place. The earliest essay, “The Topographical Tradition in Anglo-Irish Poetry,” is a survey of topograhical poems in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Foster studies “the changing meanings of landscape” and examines the “cul­ tural documentation” of the poems to discern how “natural features” are invested with “political meaning.” The poems are part of the process by which specific localities away from the metropolitan centres are culturally validated by a colonial establishment, sometimes simply as an aspect of new tastes for leisured travel or for the pictorial. Regional cultural identity is the broader subject here. “The Geography of Irish Fiction” concentrates on “provincial” novels, mostly written in the thirties and forties, but Foster’s subtext is a diagnosis of how the growth of the self is hampered, sometimes to the extreme of “diseased subjectivity.” His reading of Patrick Kavanagh’s stunted oeuvre is an acute diagnosis of a waste of talent and should be read next to “Envoy and...