Ireland on a Plate: Curating the 2011 State Banquet for Queen Elizabeth II

From Escoffier to Adria: Tracking Culinary Textbooks at the Dublin Institute of Technology 1941–2013

Despite these lapses of presentation, Fanning has yet again produced a stimulating book that opens new perspectives on modern Ireland. Patrick Maume works as a researcher with the Royal Irish Academy’s ongoing Dictionary of Irish Biography. He is a graduate of University College Cork and Queen’s University Belfast. William Dargan, An Honourable Life (1799–1867), Fergus Mulligan (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2013), 312 pages. Daniel O’Connell looms large in my life. His extraordinary contribution to our prospects and culture changed all that followed in his political wake. As an Irish politician I stand, with due humility, on the shoulders of his achievements. The other, more prosaic, reason for his prominence is that I can see his grave every morning from my bedroom window! This view is possible because I am very lucky to live close to the national treasure that is Glasnevin Cemetery. The proximity of this cemetary to the Botanic Gardens, and their joining through a spendid gateway constructed by the Office of Public Works, offers an extraordinary and rewarding trail. Life and death are juxtaposed, with many and varied aspects of our national heritage on display. My more recent visits to this pathway have included a visit to a slightly less well-known grave, that of William Dargan – engineer and businessman. This year marks the 150th anniversary of his death. This anniversary makes it all the more appropriate to comment on a beautiful biography, William Dargan, An Honourable Life 1799–1867, by Fergus Mulligan, a life-long devotee of this extraordinary figure. The author opens with the claim that, ‘One of the aims of this book is to show just how unique was Dargan’s contribution to Ireland and to suggest that he, as much and probably more than any other figure in nineteenth-century Ireland, deserves that overused and sometimes abused title of “patriot”. He was, this volume contends, “a giant among men”’. Upon completing this delightful book, this reader, for one, is now in full agreement with both claims. Before moving to the canvas of achievement that was the life of Dargan, it is worth pausing on some of his lesser-known contributions and efforts.Any of these would merit a footnote in Irish history, but their recognition, along with his more famous achievements, does justice 246 Studies • volume 106 • number 422 Summer 2017: Book Reviews to the breadth of his accomplishments. The Great Industrial Exhibition of 1853 has unduly faded to the recesses of our national history. Organised by the Royal Dublin Society, this event was at the instigation of Dargan, who was a life member of the RDS. His motivations extended beyond reflecting national glory. He negotiated a deal that stipulated that, if the surplus from the exhibition exceeded a certain level, he would receive £20,000 plus five per cent of the excess. If the exhibition made a loss, he would cover the deficit. This acumen was at the heart of all else he would achieve. The exhibition was held in a hall constructed on the lawns of what is commonly known as Leinster House on Kildare Street. Standing ninety metres tall, ‘The inside was painted light blue, the ribs in buff picked out in scarlet’. The opening ceremony was attended by dignitaries, including the mayors of Manchester and Liverpool and a government minister from Peru. Within a week visitor numbers reached 5,000 per day. Such success garnered royal interest, with Queen Victoria paying a visit on 30 August 1853. Upon meeting Dargan she ‘laid her hand on his arm and shook it warmly, drawing a burst of cheering from the crowd’. Such warmth extended to a visit to his home, in Mount Anville, where she drank tea and admired the views of Dublin Bay. The industry and vision of Dargan is similarly reflected in an uncelebrated, minor but fascinating episode of Irish transport history. The opening of the Dublin to Galway railway line in 1851 led to the pursuit of an extraordinary opportunity for Galway Port. This presented the potential for it to be used as the main port for transatlantic travel between Britain, Ireland and America. Mulligan notes that almost every town on the west coast, including...

Within the realm of cultural theory it seems that there is considerable confusion, or at least deep ambivalence, concerning the status and function of maps and mapping. In this context, and at the ...

Reviewed by: Ireland: A Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 1791–1891 Sara L. Maurer (bio) Ireland: A Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 1791–1891, by James H. Murphy; pp. 224. Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2003, €65.00, $65.00, €24.95 paper, $23.95 paper. Two hundred years after George IV allegedly announced that Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1801) had at last given him some real knowledge of his Irish subjects, those of us who consider our business the nineteenth-century British Isles still seem in want of a [End Page 466] reliable guide to Ireland. James H. Murphy writes to fill that need. He describes his book's purpose as twofold: on the one hand to elaborate the social context of nineteenth-century Irish literature in order to stimulate new currents of research in that field, and on the other "to report on current thinking and research on nineteenth-century Ireland from a variety of disciplines" (1). In the second endeavor, his book succeeds admirably, providing a brief but clear guide to the basic features of Irish life for those with little prior knowledge of it. Yet while Murphy presents the entire book as "based on a synthesis of current scholarship" (2), in his first stated purpose—stimulating research in nineteenth- century Irish literature—his book provides a more idiomatic view of Irish literature than he admits. This is not to say that Murphy's account of literature is not worthwhile, but rather to say that much like King George before us, we should be wary of taking any view as wholly representative when we educate ourselves on Ireland. At its best Murphy's overview reads like an animated conversation with a generous dissertation advisor, eager to point out an array of historical facts, cultural trends, and recent scholarship, as well as to suggest how these call for more in-depth investigation. Murphy offers a rapid-fire roundup of some of the most prominent features of the nineteenth-century Irish landscape; Ribbonmen, hedge schools, Daniel O'Connell's monster meetings, famine depopulation, religious factionalism, Fenians, the Home Rule movement, Paddy stereotypes, and the Gaelic Athletic Association are all concisely introduced and explained. Where scholarly opinion diverges, Murphy lists the competing theories, summarizing, for instance, schools of thought on the composition of the agrarian agitators known as Whiteboys, multiple explanations of why Tridentine Catholicism was so fervently embraced by the Irish, and debates about possible factors in the outbreak of the Land War. For scholars familiar with the British nineteenth century, but unschooled in Irish history, this book presents the basics in an easy day's read and provides a useful point of departure for further research. The volume concludes with a fifty-page bibliography of key scholarship on the Irish nineteenth century, grouped by topics such as "religion," "social life," and "land," as well as by individual literary authors. Most noteworthy about Murphy's work is the way its chronology avoids standard narratives that treat the Irish nineteenth century as either too British to count as Irish history at all, or else as one long prelude to Irish modernism and the Irish Free State. By starting his book with the first stirrings of rebellion that culminated in the 1798 uprising, Murphy crafts a historical vision of the century as begun on Irish initiative, rather than a century defined by the British imposition of the Act of Union in 1801. By ending before the Irish literary revival of the 1890s, Murphy is able to deal with the literary material in his book on terms other than whether it prefigures or fails to live up to Irish modernism. This is an Ireland that matters to a Victorian studies audience, an Ireland whose culture and history aren't simply idling in wait of their apotheosis in the twentieth century. Given this rather innovative organization, the most disappointing aspect of the book is its complete segregation of gender into the penultimate chapter, which provides a brief litany of how women's lives changed over the course of the century. Murphy knows this topic well (he coedited Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland with Margaret Kelleher [Dublin, Irish Academies Press...

In Stephen and Bloom at Life's Feast (1984), Lyndsey Tucker notes that Joyce pays close attention to food and digestion, especially in Bloom's gustatory progress through Ulysses.1 A close reading of Joyce's work also reveals characters who restrict their food intake in particular social and political situations, and in doing so, draw complicated connections between food, politics, and gender in Ireland. For instance, within both Dead and A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man, women refuse food during important holiday dinner scenes; addi tionally, Stephen Dedalus displays his complex relationship with eating throughout the day in Ulysses, eventually refusing solid food completely. For Dedalus, uncertainties about identity?not just gender, but also Irishness and wholeness?become triggers to his food behaviors. Food refusal in Joyces work, which culminate in Stephen Dedalus's eventual rejection of solid food in Ulysses, builds upon an Irish historical and cultural tradition of food refusal as a form of political speech and suggests a way to rebuild fractured identity. The political implications of food in Ireland intensify because starvation, both willing and unwilling, is a recurring theme in Irish history. The long standing tactic of denial and self-starvation to protest mistreatment or impris onment adds a local significance to any analysis of ingestion in Irish literature. In The Hunger Artists, Maud Ellmann describes how Medieval Ireland, like medieval India, had a legal procedure of Tasting to distrain,' known as troscud, whereby a creditor could fast against a debtor, or a victim of injustice could fast against the person who had injured him.2 Such self-imposed starvation emerged famously in the 1920 death of Terrence McSwiney. In the 1980s, hunger strikes were used again by prisoners in Northern Ireland.

Reviewed by: Visual, Material and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Fintan Cullen (bio) Visual, Material and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Ciara Breathnach and Catherine Lawless; pp. 273. Dublin and Portland: Four Courts Press, 2010, £50.00, $70.00. A few years ago in the preface to a book in the Nineteenth-Century Ireland series to which this new title belongs, I hoped that "a whole conference and subsequent publication will address the role of the visual in nineteenth-century Ireland" (Land and Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Úna Ní Bhroiméil and Glenn Hooper [Four Courts Press, 2008], 8). That moment has arrived. Ciara Breathnach and Catherine Lawless have put together a most useful collection of nineteen essays, at least eleven of which, dealing with visual culture, emanated from the 2008 Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland Conference held at the University of Limerick. The collection is a mixed bag of essays consisting of many that deal with the role of images, including world-famous paintings such as Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1819), on display in Dublin in 1821; Irish antiquarianism; book and journal illustrations; and anthropological photographs of Aran islanders. The final eight essays do not reference the visual but focus on print culture, be it newspapers in Ireland or Australia, the role of published translation, or official reports on the Irish poor law. Nineteen essays is a lot for one volume, and as interesting as many of them are, some fit rather uncomfortably in a volume purporting to be about the role of the visual and the material in nineteenth-century Ireland, as indicated by the edition's opening remarks. Unwittingly, some essays contribute to the decidedly mixed-bag aspect of this otherwise useful volume. The collection is also uneven in that some of the essays are highly theoretical while others are defiantly empirical; a few are chatty and untroubled by trends in the contemporary academy. The best and longest of the essays is Justin Carville's. It deals with what he calls the "visual economy" of the Irish face in 1890s Ireland as photographed by Alfred Cort Haddon and Charles R. Browne along the western seaboard [End Page 368] (159). Untroubled by the need to include descriptions of intricate scientific procedures, Carville adeptly situates the observations of Haddon and Browne in the creation of an Irish visual "type" that "continued to circulate well into the twentieth century" (168, 174). The essay is illustrated by sixteen fascinating ethnographical photographs from collections held in the National Library of Ireland and the University of Cambridge. It is only to be hoped that Carville will turn this original piece of research on Irish visual culture into a book-length study fully illustrated with these "photographic types" (168). The sixteen illustrations allotted to Carville's essay are generous in comparison to the absence of illustrations in Niamh O'Sullivan's important essay on the Dublin display of Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa. Although it is well known that this canvas toured Ireland and Britain, O'Sullivan focuses her attention on the clash of cultures occasioned by this display. This was a clash between high art and a popular panoramic representation of the Medusa incident which was also on show in Dublin at the same time. The fact that no illustration of the Géricault accompanies O'Sullivan's essay is a major drawback for the reader unacquainted with this seminal nineteenth-century image. An important topic among the eleven essays that deal with the visual is the range of displays available in Dublin and throughout Ireland during the century. The research carried out for these essays informs us in no uncertain terms that we ignore the visual at our peril. Valuable work is offered on a number of topics: Philip McEvansoneya, for example, carefully describes the slowness of certain cultural agencies to recognise the significance of Irish antiquarian objects, many of which are now central to a variety of definitions of early Irish culture. Essays by Emily Cullen and Elizabeth Boyle also take as their focus the nineteenth-century fascination with antiquarian objects and...

“This receipt is as safe as the Bank”: Reading Irish Culinary Manuscripts

Reviewed by: Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research Timothy G. McMahon (bio) Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research, edited by Laurence M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher; pp. xii + 340. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005, €25.00, $39.95. Specialist scholars and general readers alike will profit enormously from this ambitious collection, which covers aspects of the long nineteenth century in Ireland and the United Kingdom. As their subtitle implies, editors Laurence M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher have brought together "a" guide to research, rather than "the" definitive work on recent Irish scholarship—were such a creature even possible. They have, therefore, given their eleven contributors enormous leeway to prepare essays that are critical, thought-provoking, and entertaining. Much as J. J. Lee's Irish Historiography, 1970–1979 (1981) became a vital resource for students of Irish history a generation ago, Geary and Kelleher's volume promises to be a touchstone for all with an interest in the many fields of Irish studies, including history, literature in English, sociology and anthropology, historical geography, musicology, art history, and diaspora studies. That list of subjects could be extended, as the broad category of history warrants separate entries on political, social, women's, and religious history. Niall Ó Ciosáin's insightful essay on "Gaelic Culture and Language Shift" may give pause to readers who assume that the death of Gaelic, as a literary and as a spoken language, coincided with the Famine years of the late 1840s. To be sure, Ó Ciosáin emphasizes the rapidity of the shift away from the use of Irish in everyday intercourse, but he points out that few have even attempted to explain adequately the causes, the pace, or the sociocultural impacts of this dramatic transformation. Moreover, he notes that scholars prior to the 1990s largely failed to consider the ongoing production of manuscript literature in Irish because of lingering presumptions about what constituted high culture in Victorian Ireland, especially the primacy of English in the public sphere— commerce, literature, the press. In fact, Irish scribes produced more manuscripts in the nineteenth century than ever before. Similarly, because scholars have seen the Anglicization of Ireland as an essential component of the island's fitful push toward modernity, they long failed to appreciate the contested culture of "Gaelic" Ireland, where, as research in the 1990s has demonstrated, aspects of modernity competed with the pre-modern just as they did throughout the western world. Indeed, "undercutting comfortable assumptions" could be a further subtitle for this collection. Sean Ryder's discussion of literature in English, for instance, makes clear that the methodological insights gleaned from postcolonial and gender studies, along with attention to long-neglected novelists and poets, have allowed scholars to move [End Page 344] beyond the Yeatsian categories that dominated criticism for nearly a century (119). Similarly, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh's overview of political historiography embraces what he calls "the fructifying influence of cultural critics" on old debates about pre-Famine politicization, as well as on parliamentary and agrarian mobilizations later in the century (13). As the previous comments might suggest, one element that unites these disparate contributions is the growing interdisciplinary nature of inquiry into nineteenth-century Ireland. Nowhere would this be more apparent to readers than in the potentially controversial decision of the editors not to include a separate chapter on Famine studies, which practically grew into a cottage industry in the 1990s. This was, I think, the correct choice here because it allows contributors—such as Gary Owens in his chapter on social history, Maria Luddy in her overview of women's history, Marilyn Cohen and Joan Vincent in their summary of key works in anthropology and sociology, and Matthew Stout in his account of historical geography—to discuss the variety of approaches to this watershed event from perspectives that inform and challenge one another. Thus, one finds Owens lauding the collaborative Mapping the Great Irish Famine: A Survey of the Famine Decades (1999) as "the first comprehensive single-volume social history of the event" and Stout denouncing the same project as filled with "missed opportunities" to chart meaningfully the impact of the calamity (31, 87). It should not be surprising, of...

Ambivalent Realism:May Laffan's "Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor" Jill Brady Hampton It is probably true to say that few contemporary scholars of Irish literature have heard of May Laffan (1849–1916), let alone read her works. It is also true that any scholar with even a cursory knowledge of present-day debates in Irish literature would be aware of ongoing discussions concerning which writers are, and are not, to be considered part of the "canon"—a debate that grew contentious after the publication of the first three volumes of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991.1 Recent studies of nineteenth-century Irish fiction, particularly of women's contributions, have invigorated the recovery of once-neglected Irish writers. Scholars have recognized the importance of such early Irish authors as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, William Carleton, and the Banim brothers. They also have heralded writers from later in the century including Charles Lever, Charles Kickham, George Moore, and Edith Somerville and Violet Martyn (Ross). Research on Thomas Moore retains a vigorous presence in the scholarly literature; oddly, Charles Kickham, the author of Knocknagow —among the most popular and influential of all nineteenth-century novels in English—still fails to attract much attention.2 Widely lauded in the 1870s and 1880s, May Laffan, too, fell into obscurity until fairly recently. [End Page 127] For students of nineteenth-century Ireland never to read the biting satire of May Laffan would be unfortunate. In The Cabinet of Irish Literature (1883), an ambitious early attempt to represent a canon of Irish writing over four volumes, editors Charles Read and T. P. O'Connor (later a prominent Home Rule politician) recognized her distinctive contribution: Miss Laffan is to some extent the precursor of a new school of Irish fiction . . . she deserves the highest praise for the courage and remarkable skill with which she has exposed some of the shams and the narrowness that deface the society of Ireland as of every other country. Her writings in this respect mark unquestionably a new era in Irish literature.3 Read and O'Connor's praise raises questions about both the current Irish literary canon and nineteenth-century writing. They may, of course, have simply been wrong in their judgment; but it may also be that the scholarly neglect of Laffan and other, equally significant, writers provides insight into both nineteenth and twentieth-century critical judgments, and that she, too, warrants a place in the canon. Laffan's acclaimed short story "Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor" (1879), an exemplar of Irish literary social realism and penetrating satire, makes the case compelling.4 In 1979, Robert Lee Wolff 's editing of Garland's Ireland: From the Act of Union—1800 to the Death of Parnell—1891 sparked interest in Irish fiction outside the Revival.5 Notably, Wolff was a professor of history, not literature. In acknowledging literature's value as an historical source, Wolff commented that "above all, it was the novelists who taught the reading public about nineteenth-century Ireland. It is the novelists who if given the chance can still today outdo the scholars in teaching us in the late twentieth century about Ireland in the nineteenth."6 Including Laffan, the Garland collection presented a new perspective on Irish Catholic middle-class life, which recent research has further [End Page 128] developed.7 John V. Kelleher, Wolff 's colleague at Harvard, also testified to the value of the Garland collection: But to declare that most of it lacked seriousness showed either that those who leveled the charge had only a few of the lighter books in mind or, more likely, that the Ireland they knew was so changed from what it had been even a few decades earlier that they could have little comprehension of what the older writers had struggled with and tried to express.8 Kelleher also emphasized the helpful information, perceptive observation, and intelligent comment on nineteenth-century Ireland offered by the collected fiction. Born in Dublin, May Laffan was the product of a denominationally mixed marriage, a rarity in the highly sectarian Ireland of the time where religion fostered mental, social, and cultural ghettoes. Her mother, Ellen Sarah, neé Fitzgibbon...

The Pig in Irish Cuisine and Culture

Towards a Structured Approach to Reading Historic Cookbooks

Coffee Culture in Dublin: A Brief History

An Abrahamic Journey: Ireland, Faith and the Papal Visit Michael Kirwan SJ Introduction A year after the visit of Pope Francis to the World Meeting of Families in August 2018, it would be stretching things to describe Ireland as ‘transformed’. While we can remain hopeful that those who turned out for the mass gatherings in Knock, Croke Park and the Phoenix Park, as well as those watching on television, have been encouraged and strengthened by Pope Francis’s presence among us, the visit seems nonetheless to have been more an opportunity for reflection than a turning-point for the Church. Still less has it brought about the glorious restoration of a previous epoch of faith. Memorable as it was, it has left no apparent disturbance or alteration of the trajectory we are getting used to: that Ireland is a secularising, if not already secularised, society, in which Christian faith is increasingly marginal. We might contrast the papal event with the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II in Ireland in 2011 (a state visit, admittedly, and therefore more important symbolically). This was clearly a significant moment of recalibrating a historically fraught colonial relationship. Especially striking, of course, was the Queen’s presence in Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance. It is interesting, in retrospect, to note the anxiety of some Irish politicians at the time, that the Queen’s visit was ‘premature’! In hindsight, it was anything but; rather, this was a beautifully timed recognition of the political, social and economic progress that has allowed the troubled history of two nations, finally, to be brought into healing perspective. Francis’s visit did not represent any such moment of catharsis or historic reconciliation. It would have been unwise to expect it to do so. Was his visit ‘premature’? Perhaps the wounds are still too open, the crisis of Irish ecclesial suffering still too present and pervasive. Nevertheless, I wish to ask about what may be happening beneath the surface: whether the strained nature of the visit goes deeper than just its Michael Kirwan SJ Studies • volume 108 • number 430 162 timing; and whether the exchange of speeches at Dublin Castle between Pope Francis and the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, gives important clues. In this article I note the event as a moment when, for many people, Ireland’s status as a ‘post-Christian’ nation was evident. But I will also offer thoughts as to what happens when another penny drops: that at the same time, Ireland is, or is going to become, inexorably ‘post-secular’. The limits of the secular A thinker who will help us is the French Jesuit historian of spirituality and sociologist, Michel de Certeau. Here is how he begins an intriguing essay entitled ‘Believing and Making People Believe’, which he wrote at the time of the political upheavals of Paris in 1968: ‘Leon Poliakov once said that Jews are Frenchmen who, rather than no longer going to Church, no longer go to the synagogue. In the humorous tradition of the Haggadah, that joke relegates to the past beliefs that no longer organize practices. Today political convictions seem to be following the same path. One becomes a socialist to have been one, without going to demonstrations, without attending meetings, without paying dues – in short, without cost.’1 This minimal expression of belonging and participation is shown by the voice, that leftover of a word: one vote a year. The party lives on a kind of ‘trust’, claiming a spurious legitimacy on the basis of ‘the relics of ancient convictions’. Spurious, because what usually unites a party’s adherents is not their explicit attraction to its programme, but a lack of attraction to any of the alternatives. The binding force is not conviction but inertia. We shall return to Certeau, for now, we need to register the importance of what he was suggesting all of fifty years ago. The cankerous deterioration that has hollowed out Catholic Christianity in the modern West – beliefs that ‘no longer organize practices’; conviction giving way to passive indifference; the desire for a ‘cost-free’ belonging; the reliance of the institution upon a ‘ghostly remnant’ for its survival – is under way in our political system as well. For Certeau...

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...

Nineteenth-century Ireland began and ended in armed revolt. bloody insurrections of 1798 were the proximate reasons for the passing of the Act of Union two years later. 'long nineteenth century' lasted until 1922, by which time the institutions of modern Ireland were in place against a background of the Great War, the Ulster rebellion and the armed uprising of nationalist Ireland. years between 1800 and 1922 were an attempt to make the union work. In the words of Professor Boyce's subtitle, they represented a search for stability - the hope that, in an imperial structure, the ethnic, religious and national differences of the inhabitants of Ireland could be reconciled and eliminated. search for stability proved elusive. Nationalist Ireland - overwhelmingly Catholic - mobilised a mass democratic movement under O'Connell to secure Catholic Emancipation before seeing its world transformed by the social cataclysm of the Great Famine. At the same time, the Protestant north-east of Ulster was feeling the first benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Although post-Famine Ireland modernised rapidly, only the north-east had a modern economy. mixture of Protestantism and manufacturing industry integrated into the greater United Kingdom and gave a new twist to the traditional Irish Protestant hostility to Catholic political demands. In the home rule period from the 1880s to 1914, the prospect of partition moved from being almost unthinkable to being almost inevitable. Nineteenth-century Ireland collapsed in the various wars and rebellions of 1912-22. Like many other parts of Europe than and since, it had proved that an imperial superstructure can contain domestic ethnic rivalries, but cannot always eliminate them. In Ireland, the malign divisions of history proved too strong. search for stability failed. '...a substantial and thoroughly crafted study of a very complex period...His virtues as a historian predominate - clarity of thought and style, and a mastery of the telling quotation, which penetrates to the heart of the matter.' The Irish Times.