The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture by Joe Cleary, Claire Connolly

Abstract

MLR, I03. I, zoo8 2I7 Men, the politics, however, those ofmulticultural Queens with an emphasis on the watching eye and languaging of otherness. Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes,Memory (I 994) is tackled for its footfallsofHaitian required female chastity alongside thevio lence of island sexual as well as political rape as theyplay into an America caught in itsown corresponding dialectic. Women's coming of age, Caribbean and Vietnamese intoAmerican, give Cowart his focus innuanced accounts of Jamaica Kinkaid's Lucy (I990) and Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge (I997), the latter tobe interpreted asVietnam's America as much as the other way round. Tristan Martens, theDutch American entomologist at the centre ofMylene Dressler's The Deadwood Beetle (200I), iS to be seen as unable, even inAmerica, and with theKafka echoes well picked up by Cowart, to freehimself of aNazi-shadowed Netherlands familypast. A similar darkness is to be read inWendy Law-Yone's The Coffin Tree (I983), America as uncertain immigrant healing-ground for a Burmese past which has brought pathology into a brother-and-sister American life (Law-Yone's intertextual use of The Tibetan Book of The Dead is excellently excavated). As to JunotDiaz's story cycle Drown (I996), its island-Dominican and New Jersey-Dominican family lives are read as an America shorn of heroics, one ofmask, and frequent cruelty, the very cost of immigrant survival strategy.Cowart rightly terms these impressive stories 'minimalist lyricism' (p. 195). The Diaz chapter completes a fine round of decipherment (even if itwas L. P.Hartley and not H. E. Bates who wrote that 'the past is a foreign country', p. I87), America as not the one but several host contexts togetherwith its latest immigrant literarycanon given articulate recognition. NIHON UNIVERSITY, TOKYO A. ROBERT LEE The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture. Ed. by JOECLEARY and CLAIRE CONNOLLY. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. lii+362 pp. ?I7.99. ISBN 978-0-52I-52629-6. This is a substantial volume, asmuch referencework as companion. Eighteen essays, some twentyormore pages in length, on all aspects of Irish culture are divided into two sections, general and generic. Thus chapters on language, politics, or feminism giveway tochapters on poetry, film,ormusic. The overarching conception ishistori cal and the brief towhich the contributors write is to picture the culture of Ireland from i8oo to thepresent day.The three significant concepts in the title receivemuch theoretical and historical attention, and the firsttwo, 'Modern' and 'Irish', offerup al ways nuanced and aware definitions. The last concept, 'Culture', is surveyed through various genres, providing the ample context fromwhich students will be able to fill in themany suggestions of furthercontent. The contexts will be invaluable for those studying language, literature,or film,say, in amodern andmodernizing academy, but one theme of this book is that for all the recognizable features of amodern culture, students will need a companion tohelp themwith what is specifically 'Irish'. Luke Gibbons can finishhis exhaustive survey of Irish filmby questioning whether Gerry Stembridge's 200I About Adam, set in a newlymetropolitan Dublin, was one of a number of 'truly international films that bore no visible traces of Irishness'. Gibbons is aware that 'theunprecedented growth of theCeltic Tiger economy' has created new conditions foran Irish culture which will not give up the 'cultural speci ficity'of the Irish film. It is a themewhich goes back to an earlier attempt to remove Ireland's cultural specificity, theAct of Union. At the beginning of the book, Joe Cleary's challenging introduction and Alvin Jackson's account of the beginnings of 'modern' Ireland in theUnion with Britain, suggest a theme carried throughout. This is that Irishmodernity differs not only from that of itsBritish neighbour, but also 2i8 Reviews fromother European states. In Cleary's account this is a consequence of colonization persisting into supposedly postcolonial times,where the Irish experience of enlight enment and modernity after 1789 differed fromEurope given the (failed) ideology of theUnited Irishmen and the subsequent experiences of counter-revolution, Union, famine, emigration, and (partial) liberation. The argument ispicked up again inEmer Nolan's account of an Irishmodernism which is,perhaps counter-intuitively,more marked inYeats than Joyce, but also inBernard O'Donoghue's account of poetry founded...