The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism (review)

Abstract

Brown, Terence. The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. $78.00 he. $29.99 sc. 281pp.Irish cultural and literary studies are fraught and contested fields of inquiry. In the 1970s, the 'revisionist' debate about the objectivity and effects of historiography divided practitioners and audiences. More recendy, feminist approaches and postcolonial studies have josded for position within the academy, prompting divergent analyses and stimulating exchanges. In his engaging introduction to The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism, Terence Brown positions this study and his broader body of work, eschewing theoretical lenses and perspectives. His earlier contributions Studies include books on Louis MacNeice.W B.Yeats, and poetry, but is best known for the ground-breaking Irefond: A and Cultural History (1981), a seminal text where Brown's pioneering disciplinary perspective situated Hterature in its social and poHtical texts. The book under review comprises a coUection of twenty-one essays on a range of mosdy canonical authors, dating from 1990 onwards. includes essays on poets such as Louis MacNeice, Patrick Seamus Heaney, John Hewitt, Michael Longley, Brendan KenneUy, Muldoon and Derek Mahon. Other essays focus on the fiction of McGahern, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien and John whue the plays of Brian Friel are also considered. Remaining essays the Literary Revival, writing and World War I, modernism in 1930s, the Irish Dylan Thomas, Hubert Butler, and the Irish Shakespeare.While The Literature of Ireland situates both authors and literary texts the context of political and artistic developments in Ireland and aUy, what is most pleasing about these essays is Brown's attentiveness to expHcation of individual prose passages and poems. Indeed, when notes of Seamus Heaney that he has known from the beginning that the peculiar power of poetry is to offer a kind of Hberating music, a lyric occasion which can seem free of all moral motions, secure in its own (190), could as easuy be describing his own critical work in this book. Brown is strikingly insightful and at his most engaging when offering close readings of, for example, the influence of the Puritan tradition in the poetry of Louis MacNeice or on that poet's response to World War II. Brown's evident delight and his nuanced of selected extracts provide lucid and informative readings for his readers. In addition, in his introduction, Brown highfights his settled sense that the study of literature and culture necessitates awareness of developments in the neighboring island (11). His consideration of writers in the context of cultural and political developments in Britain and the rest of Europe aUows him generate interesting and contextuafized readings.Early on in The Literature of Ireland, Brown distances himself from the force field of postcolonial interpretations that has recently dominated studies; however, his summary of this field does not suggest a thorough engagement with the possibUities of this critical framework within the context. Later, his reading of Daniel Corkery as expounding a nationafist ideology that accommodated certain modernist concerns seems precisely a site where an additional postcolonial lens would prove illuminating and enriching. By articulating his exclusion of postcolonial theory in the intraduction, the limiting effects of non-engagement can seem more difficult to argue with in the subsequent essays; but these effects are constraining nonetheless. …