Exploring Contrasts: Depiction of Irish Rural Life in Yeats and Kavanagh

ABSTRACTThis article maps out the history of the pantoum form, from its origins in Austronesian culture as a pantun, to its emergence in modern Irish poetry. It is contended here that the pantoum represents the manifestation of cultural appropriation and distortion by the colonial oppressor, specifically that of the European colonisers of Austronesia. Detailed evidence for this argument is provided, drawing out the Francophone and Anglophone manipulations of the form as it developed in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. This essay proceeds to interrogate the use of the form by modern Irish poets to suggest that, while the continued use of this form risks perpetuating colonial oppression, Irish poets attentive to the history of the form foreground transnational cultural hybridity in an effort to not divest the form of its rich history and its importance in Austronesian culture. This conclusion is reached through close readings of texts by Anthony Cronin, Paul Muldoon, Nick Laird, Caitríona O’Reilly, Eleanor Hooker, and Justin Quinn.

One definition of 'Irish' that I liked a lot was Samuel Beckett's. When he was interviewed by a French journalist, the journalist said: 'Vous etes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?'. To which Beckett replied: 'Au contraire'. (Seamus Heaney) (1) In 1982, the same year he harnessed Samuel Beckett's quip to define a notion of Irishness, Seamus Heaney protested at his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry by pointing out that his passport was green. It is somewhat surprising that Heaney would invoke Beckett in a discussion of Irish national identity, as the latter's attachment to the national colour--and much else--was rather problematic. A week after the 1931 publication of Beckett's first book, Proust, in Chatto & Windus's 'Dolphin' series, the editor Charles Prentice wrote to Beckett apologizing for the fact that the front cover was brown rather than green: 'Clearly I have been trying to steal you from Ireland.' (2) Beckett's answer, that he had 'not noticed whether the Dolphin was green or brown', represents an early instance of what would become a lifelong ambivalence towards his native country. (3) This studied indifference is evident again in 1938, when Beckett describes Routledge's 'effort to make an Irishman of me' in the blurb to his novel Murphy as 'touching'. (4) Such efforts largely disappeared, however, following his permanent departure from the 'land of my unsuccessful abortion' for France, where 'the little operation is cheap, safe, legal + popular', not to mention his adoption of French as his creative medium. (5) Resurfacing only briefly during the 1956 Dublin production of Waiting for Godot, Beckett remained largely outside further developments in Irish cultural events until the early 1970s. (6) The timing of this (re)integration into collective cultural consciousness naturally owes much to the award of the Nobel Prize in 1969, but is surely also related to the eruption of the Troubles in that same year. In a climate where questions of identity, place, and displacement, and the role of the artist within society were highly charged, many Irish poets looked to Beckett's experiences when wondering, as Paul Muldoon does in '7, Middagh Street', 'Which side was I on? | Not one, or both, or none.' (7) This development is somewhat like that observable in post-war Germany, where Adorno's essay 'Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen' made Beckett central to socio-cultural and philosophical debates over the role, and possibility, of art in a society irredeemably altered by the Holocaust. (8) Yet in contrast to the efforts of German sociologists and philosophers to set Beckett into a more abstract and universal context, in Ireland, creative writers have entered into a more textual dialogue with Beckett's work, in an effort to investigate their own roles in the Irish community. In this undertaking, they have concentrated on Beckett's writings as creative texts, not merely as philosophical texts, whereby their religious and political aspects as well as largely ignored parts of his oeuvre have been explored. Thus the neglected field of Beckett's poetry has been discussed by Irish poets, amongst others Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, and David Wheatley, often in scholarly Beckett journals. This essay will trace and explore the presence of Beckett in modern Irish poetry, particularly in that of Derek Mahon. Ruptures The Irish revival of critical interest in Beckett's work in the 1970s started a process of reappropriation, leading, for example, to John Montague's solicitation of Beckett (a few months before his death in 1989) for a contribution to The Great Book of Ireland compiled by 'Poetry Ireland'. (9) The first, most important event in the process of reintroducing Beckett into Irish cultural discussions after the Second World War was the republication of his 1934 essay 'Recent Irish Poetry' in the fourth number of The Lace Curtain in 1971 by the poets Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce. …

«Marjan Shokouhi’s new book attests to the ways in which Irish ecocritical scholarship has developed into more than a simple ‘subfield’ of Irish Studies. Shokouhi takes readers on a fascinating journey through the work of three iconic Irish poets in the modern period – Yeats, Kavanagh and MacNeice – from the burgeoning perspective of Irish ecological criticism, exhibiting the complexities of the Irish Literary Revival in addressing questions of place and identity and opening new avenues of research in relation to new voices and marginal identities.» (Pilar Villar-Argáiz, University of Granada, Spain) «From wild ancient forests to the Lagan riverside, From Landscapes to Cityscapes offers a new take on the sense of place in modern Irish poetry. Using Heidegger’s concept of dwelling, it examines the verse of Yeats, Kavanagh and MacNeice from an ecocritical perspective in a worthy contribution to the field.» (Audrey Robitaillié, Lecturer in Anglophone Literature and Irish Studies, Institut Catholique de Toulouse) The study of place and place attachments has been a staple subject of enquiry in the field of Irish Studies, which ever since the emergence of an Irish ecocritical scholarship in the early 2000s has acquired a new depth. Recent publications have integrated an environmental dimension that connects literary analyses to wider cultural and global concerns such as deforestation, urban sprawl, immigration, climate change and so on. Building on the existing scholarship, the present study offers readings from modern Irish verse in the light of Ireland’s natural and cultural landscapes. Simply put, From Landscapes to Cityscapes should be viewed as a minor ecocritical exercise in Irish Studies, hoping to inspire new perspectives that arise out of an environmental scrutiny of the age-old questions of place and identity in Irish literature. The textual analysis focuses on the works of three major Irish poets of the modern period: William Butler Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice. Contesting the often politicized and historicist boundaries set for defining Irishness and arguing for a recognition of new voices and marginal identities, this book considers a range of land/cityscapes in terms of their significance to the development of a more comprehensive view of both culture and environment in Ireland.

Reviewed by: A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism by Andrew J. Auge Kieran Quinlan A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism, by Andrew J. Auge, pp. 283. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013. $39.95. Although Andrew J. Auge’s new book was partly composed while he held the O’Connor Chair for Catholic Thought at Loras College in Iowa, it is not an exercise in literary or religious apologetics of any orthodox kind. It is, rather, a defense of the existence of the numinous, a dimension of experience that he would see as irreducible and of which—though he never says so explicitly—Catholicism is but one expression. Auge explores the work of seven modern Irish poets—Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Durcan, and Paula Meehan—each of whom found compensatory riches in a tradition that had initially brought them much discomfort, both mental and emotional. He makes a convincing distinction between poets who grew up at a time when Catholicism dominated all aspects of Irish life and culture and those who came after them even when the latter—Dennis O’Driscoll and Seán Dunne are his examples—had serious religious interests. “This process of critical scrutiny,” he writes, “of separating the dross from the usable, the regressive from the revivifying, necessitates an attention to the particularities of the inherited Catholic material that is absent in the work of those who assimilate it in an already congenial form.” Auge conducts his inquiry in a theoretically sophisticated manner, but his use of theory is unobtrusive. Charles Taylor’s critiques of secular modernity are invoked; Richard Kearney’s “anatheism”—a kind of Irish alternative to generic unbelief—is called upon; referencing Michel Foucault helps elucidate the confessional experiences of Clarke; and Nietzsche is deftly used to illuminate Heaney’s trajectory. Likewise, Irish history, recent and ancient, is present to the extent that it needs to be, and he included helpful explanations of the reigning theology and canonical practices of the different periods. Auge’s work is enhanced, too, by the fact that memories of his own early piety remotely prompt his scrutiny of the lives of others who have experienced similar entrancements. [End Page 138] In the introduction, Auge sets out a thesis that runs through all of the book: “Through this dialectical engagement with Irish Catholicism, these poets engender new forms of spiritual vision and praxis that blur the sharp lines of demarcation interposed by institutionalized religion between belief and unbelief, secular and sacred.” That is not to say that the same thing is going on with every poet. Auge is hyperalert to nuance; “redress” being appropriate in one case, less so in another. Thus, Clarke found relief for the mental anguish that his early encounters with an overly interrogative confessional practice had caused him—a pain that led to his being institutionalized for an extended period and a failed marriage—in a “radical revision of the Catholic sacrament of confession.” Kavanagh, suffering from some of the same strictures, was more concerned with the Church’s co-opting and regularizing of ancient sacred space. Heaney worked his way from excessive concern with sacrifice—even in his art—to an acceptance of givenness and gratuity that received its authority “not just from the poet’s individual imagination but from the residue of traditional beliefs that still clings to them.” Montague, Ní Chuilleanáin, and Durcan became celebrants of unrecognized aspects of nuns and priests while reshaping the received perception of them and later, coping with the unexpected revelations of abuse and cover-up. Meehan rediscovered an ancient Irish goddess in modern Mariology while also becoming aware of its inherent dangers. Auge approaches each writer in a different way, selecting a particular aspect of his or her engagement with Catholicism—and thus, sometimes neglecting others—to explore the aspect of the theme relevant to his larger inquiry. When he is in what might appear to be familiar territory, Auge is careful to point out how his interpretation differs from what has gone before—for instance, in his comment that previous scholars failed to appreciate the “specific strategic function” that Clarke...

The sonnet has been a much used form in modern Irish poetry. W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, Leontia Flynn and many others have used it to considerable effect, whether in single poems or across longer sequences. The phenomenon of the modern Irish sonnet has been examined by critics in relation to the fraught Anglo-Irish political climate of the 1970s and 1980s, and Irish poetry’s growing internationalist self-confidence. The sonnet has also played a key role in critical discussions of Irish poetry’s seeming adherence to traditional notions of poetic form. However, the Shakespearean dimensions to the profusion of sonnets in modern Irish poetry have yet to be evaluated in either cultural-political or formal terms. Focusing on the spectacular, compulsive engagement of Paul Muldoon with the sonnet, this chapter traces a line back from Muldoon’s recent ‘Sonnet 15: A Graft’ (a direct response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15) to Muldoon’s earlier work in the form. It argues that Shakespeare’s Sonnets were one of the means by which Muldoon in the 1970s and 1980s sought out the end of the poem – to draw on the key guiding term of his Oxford Professor of Poetry lectures. Furthermore, the Shakespearean ends offered a means of engaging with the limits of the Irish sonnet, not least as it emerged under Seamus Heaney’s stewardship. In Muldoon’s sonnets, Shakespeare’s sonnets offer a field of ironic, disquieting excess that pushes beyond either the benighted circumstances of Anglo-Irish history or the comforts offered by any investment in the literary and its traditions.

This essay examines twentieth and twenty-first century responses by Irish poets to the Holocaust. It argues that, despite the illiberal tendencies of the Irish state towards Jewish immigration during and after the 1939-1945 war, recent commemorative activities in Ireland have included the Holocaust and are part of a wider commemorative ‘opening up’ in Ireland towards twentieth-century historical events. Important contemporary Irish poets have written Holocaust poems of notable merit including: Seamus Heaney, Harry Clifton, Derek Mahon, Pearse Hutchinson, Paul Durcan, Paul Muldoon, Thomas Kinsella and Tom Paulin, all of whom are discussed here. These poets are noted as second-generation Holocaust poets, more at home in the lyric form and less troubled by communicative dilemmas than their precursors such as Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett whose resemblance is briefly discussed. The essay concludes by arguing that Giorgio Agamben’s arguments about testimony after Auschwitz are strikingly pertinent to some of the poems under discussion. It also suggests that the historical essays of Hubert Butler may have acted as an unseen influence on some of these writers.

From Yeats and the Celtic Revival onward, Irish poets have recorded, shaped, and criticized their nation's emerging independent identity. In the process, of course, they also attempted to reforge links to the past by creating for Ireland a literary incorporating the myths, folklore, and symbols of a long-suppressed Gaelic heritage. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the literary wished into existence by Yeats has been expanded, modified, complicated, and virtually completed: it has become, so the argument goes, a given in Irish literature, a dead issue. Thus in Modern Irish Poetry, Robert Garratt assumes a change among a younger generation of writers in their attitude toward tradition (5). For today's poets, Garratt argues, the need to create and establish a in literature no longer appears foremost in their thoughts (5); contemporary poets no longer feel compelled to write the definitions and apologetics that so obsessed their poetic forefathers. Although Garratt does not use the word, forefathers is by implication a key concept in his formulation; the Garratt traces (from Yeats to Heaney) is exclusively male. For women, who until recently have appeared only as subjects and objects of poems, not as their authors, the matter of carries considerably more urgency than it does for their male counterparts. Indeed, just as the early Revivalists

In this most welcome and insightful book of essays, Andy Auge sets about analysing the role of Catholicism in the work of 7 modern Irish poets: Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Paul Durcan and Paula Meehan. Clearly, you have in this choice a mixture of highly decorated figures, one a Nobel Laureate, and some less well-established voices, although all extremely well-established among the reading public. The overall impression given as one r...

Recently, chapters on individual Irish-language authors have formed part of publications regarding modern Irish art and culture in general. Such chapters are welcome but they have excited the curiosity of readers to the degree that longer, more detailed works are now required to put writing in Irish into perspective. In this study of four modern poets (two each from two generations), Sewell attempts to illustrate not only the accumulative but the transformative nature of tradition. Chapters 1 and 2 turn from the mid-20th century master Seán Ó Riordáin to the contemporary poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh because the comparison and contrast highlights significant aspects of the amazing development of Irish poetry and, indeed, society in the period. Here, importantly, the word 'development' is meant in a neutral way - the image used is that of a zig-zag movement in the pattern of the continuing Irish tradition. Chapter 3 returns to the slightly earlier, major Irish-language poet Máirtín Ó Direáin. In doing so, it returns home (from the internationalism of the previous chapter on Searcaigh) to Ireland - a major focus and concern for the more solely traditionalist Ó Direáin. This switch back (in time, geography, social mores or outlook) fits and illustrates Sewell's concept of the zig-zag movement of a country's culture as it proceeds from generation to generation. The positioning, therefore, has a thematic purpose. The fourth and final chapter focuses on the contemporary poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill who has managed to synthesise tradition and modernity (central concerns of this book) and who, in doing so, has become the current trail-blazer of Irish poetry in either language.

In Sunlight and in Shadow Ben Howard (bio) Richard Tillinghast , Finding Ireland: A Poet's Exploration of Irish Literature and Culture. University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. 276 pages. $25; David Pierce , Light, Freedom, and Song: A Cultural History of Modern Irish Writing. Yale University Press, 2005. 350 pages. $40. Irish history casts a long shadow on contemporary Irish culture. Amidst the bright prosperity of recent years that shadow has sometimes receded from view. And in youthful stylish Dublin, with its ubiquitous mobile phones and thriving Internet cafes, it often seems to have vanished. But, in two recent books on Irish history, literature, and culture, the shadow of the past is not only present but very much in the foreground. Richard Tillinghast's Finding Ireland is a gathering of memoirs, travelogues, reviews, "letters from Ireland," and familiar essays, in which the American poet explores Irish culture mainly through the works of modern Irish writers. A longtime sojourner in Ireland, Tillinghast now lives in retirement in County Tipperary. In the manner of an informed "blow-in" speaking to the less informed, he endeavors to cross what he calls the "oceans of sentimentality and prejudice [that] keep us from seeing the Irish in their true complexity." In tones ranging from the professorial to the celebrative to the elegiac, he writes with authority on subjects as diverse as the poetry of Derek Mahon, the fiction of William Trevor, the plays of Brian Friel, the felicities of Irish traditional music, and the surviving pleasures of rural Irish life, where "there is still a place by the fire and a cup of tea for the visitor in a farmhouse kitchen." Though his book has the look of a miscellany, its center of gravity may be found in the poet's intellectual passions, namely Anglo-Irish culture and modern Irish poetry. Jonathan Swift, the first major Anglo-Irish writer, described his people as "strangers in a strange land." And Yeats, two centuries later, spoke of "Anglo-Irish solitude." In "Who Were the Anglo-Irish?" Tillinghast embraces these descriptions, portraying a culture that enjoyed its heyday in the late eighteenth century and declined thereafter, becoming ever more isolated and insecure. Distrusted by the Irish and English alike, the Anglo-Irish lived apart in their [End Page 665] big country houses, watching the Protestant Ascendancy become what Julian Moynahan has called a "Descendancy," its power eroded by Catholic Emancipation, the Great Famine, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, and the Land Law Act of 1881. Yet, as Tillinghast notes, the "existential insecurity" and "heightened awareness" of the Anglo-Irish fostered a "golden age" of Anglo-Irish writing, which includes the novels of Maria Edgeworth; the diaries, letters, and fictions of Somerville and Ross; and the major works of the Irish Literary Revival. Concurrently the "hybrid" nature of Anglo-Irish culture nourished a distinctive literary tradition, beginning with Maria Edgeworth and continuing through the fiction of George Moore, Elizabeth Bowen, and William Trevor. "Year by year from 1800 on," writes Tilling-hast, "as their position became less and less tenable, the heart and pluck and humor of those whom Yeats called 'the indomitable Irishry' built from words a hybrid body of work that will stand with the world's best." Turning to specific authors, Tillinghast discusses their distinct contributions to the Anglo-Irish tradition. In "The Uneasy World of Somerville and Ross" he rejects the common view that the coauthors romanticized the Ascendancy and portrayed sentimentalized stage-Irish characters. In Tillinghast's view they offered a "vigorous realism" that extended to their portrayal of servants' lives, and they were "deeply implicated" in the "ironies and tragedies of Irish history." In "The Asymmetrical George Moore" he defines Moore as a "nationalist" who differed "from others in the movement by his complete lack of idealism and patriotic sentiment." In "Elizabeth Bowen: The House, the Hotel, and the Child" he opposes the view of Bowen as a class-ridden snob, seeing her instead as a writer who "took the world as she found it." And in his essay on William Trevor he identifies Trevor as a "Protestant-Irish and English" author whose interest lies not in politics, history, and class in...

REVIEWS AND COMMENTARY FROM COLONY TO CANON: MAPPING MODERN IRISH LITERATURE JOYCE FLYNN Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); Julian Moynahan, The Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995). in this final decade of the twentieth century, the anniversaries of the 1798 United Irish rising and the Great Hunger have combined with scholarly interest in the literature of emerging nations to produce a steady stream of books on Irish culture and its formative conditions. Three broad studies of modern Irish literature in its multiple contexts marked 1995 as something of an annus mirabilis on the eve of the famine commemorations. All three evince awareness of postcolonial approaches and the tension between a postcolonialism associated primarily with Third World cultures, and Irish exceptionalism as a former colony in western Europe. Terry Eagleton, Julian Moynahan, and Declan Kiberd write from different Irish vantage points: Eagleton, a prominent intellectual of the British left, prefaces his book with a note that all four of his grandparents were Irish emigrants to Britain and acknowledges that the work is as much written “out of my affection for Ireland and its people” as from its intellectual motives . In his afterword, Moynahan, an Irish-American scholar and novelist, associates himself with the Anglo-Irish he discusses. Kiberd, a citizen of the Irish republic and now the professor of Anglo-Irish literature at University College, Dublin, dedicates Inventing Ireland to his children “and the comFROM COLONY TO CANON: MAPPING MODERN IRISH LITERATURE 255 ing times.” He views his task, in its attempt to sift the Irish nationalism of the last century for what is positive and can empower humane modernization, as contributing to Ireland’s hybrid present and future. The theoretical and political assumptions underlying the books diverge widely: Eagleton applies Marxist analysis, examining Irish culture for its sites of power and assessing the double effect of colonial and class privilege. Moynahan traces an elite tradition and rejects postcolonial approaches . He counters that because Ireland’s colonial status was dissolved by the 1800 Act of Union, only pre-1800 Irish literature could be termed “colonial” literature. Declan Kiberd embraces Ireland’s parallels with African and Caribbean former colonies, noting that “the introduction of the Irish case to the debate will complicate, extend, and, in some cases, expose the limits of the current models of postcoloniality.” Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Anglo-Irish, and Inventing Ireland examine nineteenth- and twentieth-century works and authors but are not inclusive surveys of Irish literary history. All three studies share an attempt to go beyond the particular by constructing traditions from recurring patterns in the texts. Sometimes such tradition-building leads to reappropriation for Ireland of major writers such as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Samuel Beckett. Elsewhere, all three works suggest new perspectives on the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Irish literary revival and its implications. For Eagleton, the revival functions as an “archaic avant-garde”: for a historical moment culminating in political independence, a privileged Anglo-Irish stratum and an emergent native Catholic middle class combined energies in an active cultural program, employing the past as a harbinger of and means to the future. Eagleton views the role of Ireland’s modernist writers, with their conflicting tendencies for and against social engagement , as achieving, albeit temporarily, the “active relationship with the people” sought by many deracinated artists in the early twentieth century . For Moynahan, the literary revival is no hybrid effort, but the culmination of Anglo-Irish literature. He sees the revival as the swan song of a hyphenated tradition that commences with Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and ends with the late work of W.B. Yeats. Moynahan labels Yeats’s work after the establishment of the Irish Free State as “commemoration ” of a tradition past, with an eventual “post-mortem” in the careers of Beckett and Elizabeth Bowen. “The year 1927 may just be the year in which Anglo-Irish culture came face-to-face with its own ending.” Where Moynahan reads an ending, Kiberd reads perhaps chapter two FROM...

Chronology 1. Ireland in poetry, 1999, 1949, 1969 Matthew Campbell 2. From Irish mode to modernisation: the poetry of Austin Clarke John Goodby 3. Patrick Kavanagh and anti-pastoral Jonathan Allison 4. Louis MacNiece: irony and responsibility Peter McDonald 5. The Irish modernists and their legacy Alex Davis 6. Poetry of the 1960s: the 'Northern Ireland Renaissance' Fran Brearton 7. Seamus Heaney and violence Dillon Johnston 8. Mahon and Longley: places and placelessness Terence Brown 9. Between two languages: contemporary poetry in Irish and English Frank Sewell 10. Boland, McGuckian, Ni Chuilleanain and the body of the nation Guinn Batten 11. Sonnets, centos, and long lines: Muldoon, Paulin, McGuckian and Carson Shane Murphy 12. Performance and dissent: Irish poets in the public sphere Lucy Collins 13. Irish poets and the world Robert Faggen 14. Irish poetry into the twenty-first century David Wheatley.

Modern poetry has been constantly engaged with the visual arts since the ‘imagism’ of the early twentieth century. Poetry about visual representations, known as ekphrasis, has been endemic to modern poetry. Modern Irish poetry was initiated by W. B. Yeats, who himself trained briefly in an art school, and often makes reference to painting and sculpture in both his poetry and prose. In his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, he opens with a ‘free verse’ lineation of Walter Pater's famous passage on La Gioconda in The Renaissance, arguing that ‘only by putting it in free verse can one show its revolutionary importance’. However, the extremely undistinguished verse resulting may be allowed instead to suggest Yeats's sense of the inextricability of poetry and painting in the foundational aesthetics of modernism. This chapter explores the link between modern Irish poetry and the visual arts, focusing on the works of various poets such as Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Louis MacNeice, Brian Coffey, Padraic Fallon, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon.

The Irish Celt is sociable, as may be known from his proverb, ‘It is better to be quarreling than to be lonely,’1 and the Irish poets of the nineteenth century have made songs abundantly when friends and rebels have been at hand to applaud. The Irish poets of the eighteenth century found both at a Limerick hostelry, above whose door was written a rhyming welcome in Gaelic to all passing poets, whether their pockets were full or empty. Its owner, himself a famous poet, entertained his fellows as long as his money lasted, and then took to minding the hens and chickens of an old peasant woman for a living, and ended his days in rags, but not, one imagines, without content. Among his friends and guests had been Red O’Sullivan, Gaelic O’Sullivan, blind O’Heffernan, and many another, and their songs had made the people, crushed by the disasters of the Boyne and Aughrim,2 remember their ancient greatness.

on by feminist theorists in other contexts. But she is alert to the ways in which the text at times almost celebrates (albeit grudgingly) women’s witty and resourceful evasions of a patriarchal system that could have been suffocating. This book is a welcome addition to Grosart’s 1884 edition and F.P. Wil­ son’s 1929 edition, both out of date and neither very user-friendly to non­ specialists. Its modern spelling and its “nonspecialist” glosses and notes will make it accessible to students; any chance to enrich the classroom with Renaissance texts outside the usual Shakespeare/Spenser/Marlowe/Jonson range is always cause for rejoicing. lin d a w o o d b r id g e / University of Alberta Michael Kenneally, ed., Irish Literature and Culture. Irish Literary Studies 35 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992). x, 196. Illustrated. Irish Literature and Culture is a collection of eleven essays, nine of which were presented at the 1988 conference of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, held at Marianopolis College, Montreal. The remaining two papers, one by Andrew Carpenter tracing the transformation of attitudes toward Irish musical and literary culture in eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish litera­ ture from rejection to acceptance, and the other by Mary Helen Thuente demonstrating the literary, cultural and political importance of The United Irishman, were solicited for this volume. These two essays, along with Terry Eagleton’s study of the aesthetics and politics of Edmund Burke, and Patrick Rafroidi’s assessment of the complex social and aesthetic impact of the work of Thomas Moore, provide a rich literary/historical background for the other seven essays whose focus is on more contemporary aspects of Irish literature and culture. Three of these examine the relationship between modern Irish literature and the sister arts. In the first, “No More Poems About Paintings?,” Edna Longley explores the influence of Pre-Raphaelite art on modern Irish poetry from Yeats to Paul Muldoon. In the second, “Music and Ritual in Ulysses,” Zack Bowen argues that Joyce’s treatment of music and song is complex and ironic. For most of the characters in Ulysses, according to Bowen, music is the means by which they create and heighten profane rituals. Bowen, however, views Bloom differently. Using music and song, Bowen sees Bloom ironically debunking the phony rituals to which the other characters are devoted. In the third, “Stage Design As A Form of Dramatic Criticism,” Richard Cave carefully compares the stage designs of different productions of plays by Wilde, Yeats, and O’Casey and convincingly demonstrates that 102 stage design at its best not only involves a high degree of dramatic criticism and appraisal, but is also, despite its collaborative nature, an art form in itself that can significantly enhance the dramatic effectiveness of a play. The final four essays in the collection discuss more generally the cultural contexts of Irish drama, cinema, and politics. Wolfgang Zach’s “Criticism, Theatre and Politics: Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City and its Early Re­ ception,” describes the highly polemical nature of the Irish, English, Amer­ ican, and German responses to the first productions of Friel’s The Freedom of the City in Dublin, London, New York, and Wiesbaden. He concludes that both the immediacy and the engagement typical of such reviews in­ variably tell us at least as much about the aesthetic views, the theatrical expectations, and the political opinions of the reviewers and the audiences as the play does. One of the more discouraging implications of this essay, particularly when it is read in conjunction with Richard Cave’s analysis of stage design, is that theatrical verisimilitude remains a fiercely held expec­ tation and “value” by a wide cross section of post-Brechtian reviewers and audiences both in Europe and North America, and that dramatic experi­ mentation is still not well understood or welcome. Such a state of dramatic affairs may well have a negative impact on the production and reception of the non-realistic dramatic works of Yeats and O’Casey as well as some of Friel. Declan Kiberd’s “Fathers and Sons: Irish-Style” introduces the cultural cliché that Irish domestic relationships are characterized by an over-intense relationship...