Introduction: Autobiography and the Irish Cultural Moment

Abstract

If, in these days of voluminous literary criticism, Irish literature can be said to have a Cinderella genre, then surely it is autobiography. When weighed against the welter of scholarship on Irish poetry, drama and fiction, the critical literature on life writing seems remarkably slight, in quantity if not quality. To date, there has been no systematic book-length survey of an autobiographical tradition persisting across four centuries and, with a few notable exceptions, critical studies of the place of life writing in the oeuvre of individual authors remain unwritten.1 None of the leading Irish Studies journals has seen fit to devote a special issue to the topic, conferences on Irish autobiography are rare and the subject seldom merits more than a cursory mention in literary companions and encyclopedias.2 This critical neglect seems all the more curious when one considers the preponderance of life writing in contemporary Irish culture, spectacularly spearheaded by Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), a book which ‘transcended bestsellerdom to become a publishing phenomenon — a million-seller, a prize-gatherer, a cult-former’ (Foster, 2001: 165). By the time its sequel, ‘Tis, appeared in 1999, booksellers’ shelves were sagging under the weight of copycat texts, proof that the autobiographical gesture was becoming endemic in ‘Celtic Tiger Ireland’ a.k.a. ‘Tribunal Ireland’. The commensurate commercial and affective impact of Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? (1996), which became ‘an emotional episode, somehow, in public life in Ireland’ (O’Faolain, 1998: 215), suggested that in an era of burgeoning narcissism and affluent secular individualism, personal stories that were once admitted only to partner or priest were now more likely to be committed to the page.