Celtic Fringe Research Articles

Recognising Place, Space and Nation in Researching Women's Movements: Sisterhood and After

Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project has attempted to capture regional and national as well as ethnic diversity within the complex geographical and political entities of the United Kingdom. We argue against generalising about the UK or ‘British’ movement, important as the cities of England and specifically London have been to the development of political mass, acknowledging the independent networks in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Our findings suggest that in contrast to English activists' tendency to be suspicious of the state, in the ‘Celtic periphery’ of Wales, Scotland and – more complicatedly – Northern Ireland, feminists have more often sought state–level political opportunities to advance claims within these jurisdictions.

Letter by Kerr and Lees Regarding Article, “Country Comparisons of Human Stroke Research Since 2001: A Bibliometric Study”

To the Editor: We read with interest Asplund et al's1 bibliometric study of stroke research. They undertook an international comparison of the quantity and quality of stroke research from 2001 to 2011. They found that by far the leading producer of stroke research articles was the United States followed by Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany.1 The methodology they describe, using the bibliometric software Bibexcel,2 is versatile and can be readily brought to bear in other situations such as comparisons between regions and cities within the same country. In their analysis, the United Kingdom is treated as 1 unit; however, the United Kingdom is not a homogeneous entity. Long-standing differences in economic prosperity and health exist between England and the Celtic fringe of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Even within England, similar differences exist between the prosperous southeast and …

What We Don't Know About the Ancient Celts

When one says that one wants to study and, perhaps, reconstruct the religion of the ancient Celts, it is well to be clear about whom one speaks. 'Celtic' describes a language group which, over time, has divided into two strains - P-Celtic, spoken in Wales, Cornwall and Brittany and Q-Celtic, spoken in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. One must also be clear about the possible tools for such study that are available. As so many things Celtic comes in threes, so do our sources - archaeology, classical commentaries and the vernacular traditions of the Celtic countries.

Cultures of local economy in a Celtic fringe region

This paper seeks to help reconceptualize the spaces of local and regional economies by developing the idea of the ‘compound economy’. It is set in the context of a growing body of work in geography that emphasizes the importance of culture as a factor shaping differentiated local and regional economic development and, correspondingly, as an important dynamic informing the ability of localities and regions to negotiate economic forces operating at national and supranational scales. Exploring both dominant and counter-hegemonic economic imaginaries as articulated in academic debates, we draw on the case study of Central Wales and demonstrate how these imaginaries are variously manifested in government policy discourse of the National Assembly for Wales and in the understandings and practices of business stakeholders in the region. Through comparing and contrasting these representations, we provide an empirical illustration of what, building on the work of Gibson-Graham and others, we term the ‘compound economy’, whose drivers, relations and logics are far more diverse and complex than mainstream and alternative models tend to suggest. We conclude by assessing the implications of the compound economy for both economic policy and geographical theory.

Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands: Shelley’s Poetic Development and Romantic Geography by Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey

Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey. Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands: Shelley's Poetic Development and Romantic Geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Pp. 224. $55.00. Alvey's book is latest in a series of explorations of Shelley and East, which has included important contributions from Frederic Colwell, Nigel Leask, and Benjamin Colbert. book comprises five chapters, covering Queen Mab, Alastor, Mont Banc, Prometheus Unbound, and The Witch of Atlas. Alvey's predominant concern is to examine themes of imperialism, cross-cultural curiosity, and representation of other, an emphasis that has been a productive vein in Shelley criticism for over twenty years. Alvey's book seals and to some extent concludes this sequence of scholarship. Alvey's introduction traces genesis and orientation of abovementioned sequence. She then begins her argument proper with a chapter on Queen Mab, where her intent is to show how versatile Shelley's rhetoric of otherness is, incorporating both near but marginal (Wales and other portions of Celtic fringe) with far and even mythical (the Americans and Atlantis). Atlantis, as a place of mystery and storied antiquity, shares an obscurity and remoteness from contemporary (36) with East, and it is in this spirit that Alvey suggests that Mayan and Aztec ruins are referenced in Queen Mab. In a mythopoeic sense, Atlantis--as Alvey demonstrates in her second chapter, on Mastor,--foregrounds perhaps central conceptual innovation in her book. This is importance to Shelley of a certain doubling of referent of to cover both Caucasus on east side of Black Sea as well as the Indian Caucasus, mountains of Kashmir or, more generally, Hindoo-Kho (111) or modern-day Hindu Kush. This ambiguity was vital for Shelley, and valence of doubling is obvious. In Indo-European terms, it naturalizes India to West in much same way as Sir William Jones's discovery of shared linguistic aspects of Sanskrit and European tongues. In racial terms, it takes Caucasus--the locus classicus, after all, of what had already been the Caucasian--whiteness--with non-white east. Thus both origins of Europe and its salient others are to be found secreted in a mysterious mountain ambit. Alvey does some very precise geographical reading here, but while some of her insights are cogent, others are more hit-or-miss. Her engagement with this splendidly forlorn, Miltonic passage is exemplary: He wandered on Till vast Aornos seen from Petra's steep Hung o'er low horizon like a cloud; Through Balk, and where desolated tombs Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind Their wasting dust ... It is notable how the lone Chorasmian shore, which first-time reader of poem no doubt just jots down as a bit of obscure detail, becomes one of poem's aural signposts to veteran reader. Alvey rightly sees Petra as not most apparent referent, city of red rocks in present-day Jordan, but Rock of Sogdiana in what is now eastern Iran; Aryan in other words, not Arab. While she exerts a more impressive command of welter of historical data than some of her predecessors, these crypto-Persian references are one place where Alvey stumbles denotatively. For example, Alvey talks about relevance of Balk as a referent to Achaemenid Empire and to Alexander's conquest. Shelley, though, makes clear that valence is Parthian, that is, in later Hellenistic period when Parthians ruled part of former Persian realm. Similarly, Alvey refers to Persian empires (76). Strictly speaking (if one equates old and pre-Islamic), there were only two of these: Achaemenid and Sassanid. Parthians were not really Persians in core sense, but a related if distinct minority group whose empire was medial and often weak. …

Staging the “New Irish”: Interculturalism and the Future of the Post–Celtic Tiger Irish Theatre

In this article, I argue that the work of minority-ethnic artists reframes the parameters of Irish national belonging and tests the limits of “interculturalism” as official discourse in the post–Celtic Tiger nation. I engage with the search for new critical paradigms to illuminate how emergent discourses of Irish interculturalism assist in understanding and locating the work of minority-ethnic theatre artists in a critical discourse that has had difficulty accommodating their presence. To this end, I examine two recent new productions of J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World (by Pan Pan Theatre and by Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle at the Abbey Theatre) that directly engage the Irish theatre canon as a site of entry into Irish national belonging for minority-ethnic communities. I then juxtapose these Playboys with new works by Romanian and Irish-Indian playwrights Gianina Cărbunariu and Ursula Rani Sarma that stretch the limits of what can be understood as “Irish” drama. The contingent and overlapping networks of these artists’ influences, journeys, and obstacles map the multiple possibilities of Irish theatrical interculturalisms that are already in motion as well as gesturing towards the challenges faced by the post–Celtic Tiger Irish theatre to come.

Book Review: Astrology in Medieval Ireland and Wales: Fiery Shapes: Celestial Portents and Astrology in Ireland and Wales 700–1700

ASTROLOGY IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND AND WALES Fiery Shapes: Celestial Portents and Astrology in Ireland and Wales 700-1 700. Mark Williams (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010). Pp. 218. £60. ISBN 978-0-19-957184-0.The literature on the history of astrology continues to expand, even if slowly, following Otto Neugebauer's rejection sixty years ago of George Sarton's query as to why any serious scholar would wish to study the past of this wretched subject. The body of reliable literature, though, remains slight (Sartonesque attitudes have proved remarkable tenacious), which is all the more reason to greet Mark Williams's exploration of astrology in what is commonly known as the British 'Celtic fringe' (specifically, Ireland and Wales) in the millennium between the early medieval period and the early modern - approximately 700 to 1700. The earlier date is determined by the beginning of manuscript evidence, the latter by the end of astrology's status as a fit topic for intelligent discourse. The only previous work in this area, Marina Smyth's Understanding the universe in seventh-century Ireland (Boydell Press, 1996), covers only the earlier period, so Williams's book is to be welcomed.The book is divided into several distinct sections, each of which could be considered as a smaller self-contained unit. The five chapters consider celestial portents and apocalypticism in early medieval Ireland; Druidic cloud-divination and portents of Antichrist; the two great literary works, the Welsh Taliesin and the History of Geoffrey of Monmouth; astrology in medieval manuscripts, chiefly from the fifteenth century; and the work of the seventeenth-century Calvinist astrologer, Morgan Llwyd. The narrative connecting the earliest chapter, a discussion of evidence for the existence of Druidic astrology in Ireland, to the latest, is tenuous. In this, the book reflects the difficulties of Williams's material, in that, having taken Celtic astrology as his subject area, the ground vanishes before his eyes. This, of course, is a familiar problem amongst Celtic scholars, some of whom have questioned the entire notion of 'Celtic' as a suitable category. Williams avoids this pitfall by defining his work regionally instead of culturally, not as Celtic astrology but as astrology in Wales and Ireland.In spite of the apparent disjunction between the Irish and Welsh material, Williams finds at least one major linking theme: a focus on astrology as the interpretation of celestial portents, a rationale amply justified by the Star of Bethlehem, rather than as, say, the interplay of natural forces which is favoured within Aristotelian cosmology. …

Xians via Yish? Language attitudes and cultural identities on Britain's Celtic periphery

This paper is based on a study conducted in 2007 and examines the varying degrees to which the Welsh, Scottish Gaelic (henceforward ‘Gaelic’) and Cornish languages are regarded as symbols of minority identity in twenty-first century Britain. In order to quantify this tripartite comparison, questionnaires were used to measure the identities, language abilities and language attitudes of young people in full-time education at schools in Ceredigion, the western Highlands and west Cornwall. The first section of the article introduces the theoretical context and provides an analysis of existing literature on attitudes to Welsh, Gaelic and Cornish, and on the role of these ‘Xish’ minority languages in the expression of ‘Xian’ cultural identities in each context. The second section outlines the methodology employed and assesses the roles assigned to Welsh, Gaelic and Cornish in the construction of identities by students in each of the three locations.

The Celtic Nations and the African Americas

Daniel Williams has put together an extraordinarily interesting collection of essays on cultural interactions — mergers and antagonisms — between Celtic, AfricanAmerican, and Afro-Caribbean identities. In presenting fresh archival work and new close readings, the essays are also attentive issues of linguistic and racial difference and to changing theories of belonging. Michael Newton offers the first full examination of Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlanders and black Americans in the US, pursuing especially leads toward the presence of black speakers of Gaelic, thus opening a theoretical discussion about the significance race and language in notions of group membership and about alternative models of assimilation. He is right in assuming that the anecdote he begins with and returns to at the end was common among other immigrant groups as well: thus Die Emigranten, a play published in German in St Louis in 1882, included the following scene:

Celtic Nationalism and Supranationalism: Comparing Scottish and Northern Ireland Party Responses to Europe

This article explores how stateless nationalist parties in the ‘Celtic periphery’ of Scotland and Northern Ireland have used Europe to advance their territorial projects. Despite vastly different historical, political and social contexts, the Scottish National Party and Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labour Party have both advanced a pro-European, social democratic discourse that emphasises the importance of Europe as a framework for constitutional reform and shared sovereignty. However, in recent years the parties have diverged on Europe. While the SDLP has continued its principled commitment to further integration, the SNP has articulated an increased criticism of the supranational project. This divergence in party attitudes reveals the extent to which the pro-European dimension of Celtic nationalism is ideological or opportunistic.

Pride of the Lions: a sociological analysis of media coverage of the 2005 tour from the perspective of the Four Home Nations

Few sports teams or sports events compare with the British and Irish Lions series for showcasing collectively the talents of elite-level male rugby union players from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The 2005 tour to New Zealand, which was billed by the Lions management team and media consultants as the ‘Power of Four: One Objective’, was widely regarded as ‘disastrous’ and tension-ridden, not least because of the outcome – 3-0 to New Zealand –, the size and national make up of the playing squad, the inclusion of public relations consultant Alistair Campbell in the tour party and the unintended consequences arising from this, and notable tour events such as the ‘staged’ photo shoot between Clive Woodward and Gavin Henson and the infamous spear tackle on Lions captain, Brian O'Driscoll. The Lions series provides an interesting paradox in its juxtaposition of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon rivalries with international rivalries whilst, at the same time, it reflects unifying and divisive elements of national identity between, and for, the four Home Nations. Set in this context, we examine press coverage of the 2005 series which included four English tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, two from Wales, Ireland and Scotland, including all Sunday editions. Particular sensitizing concepts derived from figurational sociology were used to identify categories of meaning within the coverage such as Lions building, national tagging and untagging, invented traditions and defence of home players. The findings of this study centre around the use of praise and blame gossip in reinforcing national habitus and invented traditions such as the ‘Welsh Way’, the related amplifying and de-amplifying role of the press, and a correlative heightening of the English–Celtic nations' rivalry despite attempts by the press and other commentators to temper this whilst invoking a sense of Lions unity.

Celtic Countries from the Perspective of Polish Romantics and Exiles

In this piece on the Polish Romantic travellers confronted with Celtic cultures and countries, I have tried to show the way they reacted and how their imaginations worked. Probably some of their reactions were not different to those of all other Celtophiles. The special role of the Czartoryskis’ cultural patronage needs to be highlighted. In the nineteenth century Poland, nobody ever attempted to gather so many books about Celtic history and culture again, even after the emergence of Celtic Studies as an academic discipline later in the nineteenth century. The predictable result was that, with time, knowledge of Celtic cultures diminished among the Polish writers. The literary revival in early twentieth century Ireland, associated with Yeats and his contemporaries, did not elicit widespread reaction from Polish librarians and academics. This failure to respond to new developments in Ireland is probably to be explained in terms of the economic and socio-political conditions in the divided Poland of that time. One of the many negative results of the partitions at the end of the eighteenth century was that a large number of important Polish writers moved abroad, as well as that their relations and impressions were affected by this emigration. Being a political émigré was not always helpful in so far as the exploration of new cultures was concerned, both from the point of view of the psychological trauma of being away from home and of various everyday constraints. Generally, it was personal interests and earlier studies, and not finances or place of living that influenced some Polish authors’ choice to write on Celtic themes.

The Celtic fringe of Britain: insights from small mammal phylogeography.

Recent genetic studies have challenged the traditional view that the ancestors of British Celtic people spread from central Europe during the Iron Age and have suggested a much earlier origin for them as part of the human recolonization of Britain at the end of the last glaciation. Here we propose that small mammals provide an analogue to help resolve this controversy. Previous studies have shown that common shrews (Sorex araneus) with particular chromosomal characteristics and water voles (Arvicola terrestris) of a specific mitochondrial (mt) DNA lineage have peripheral western/northern distributions with striking similarities to that of Celtic people. We show that mtDNA lineages of three other small mammal species (bank vole Myodes glareolus, field vole Microtus agrestis and pygmy shrew Sorex minutus) also form a 'Celtic fringe'. We argue that these small mammals most reasonably colonized Britain in a two-phase process following the last glacial maximum (LGM), with climatically driven partial replacement of the first colonists by the second colonists, leaving a peripheral geographical distribution for the first colonists. We suggest that these natural Celtic fringes provide insight into the same phenomenon in humans and support its origin in processes following the end of the LGM.

JOHN KERRIGAN, Archipelagic English: Literature, History and Politics 1603-1707.

ONE suspects that some readers may view this book as, at least in part, a politically partisan work designed to promote Celtic nationalism. And indeed, on one level such an impression would be understandable. Though the author claims it is ‘not a manual for devolutionary politicians’ (87), it seems at least tacitly, and in places explicitly, sympathetic with the respective nationalist agendas in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Evidence for this is signalled, for example, in the author's stated aim to ‘strip away modern Anglocentric and Victorian imperial paradigms’ (2), and in his consistently employing terminology sceptical or hostile to the union—‘the so-called British Isles’ (21). And perhaps at times, particularly in relation to recent history, Kerrigan can frame his analysis within uncharacteristically narrow parameters: the resurgence of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish nationalism in the 1980s, for instance, takes place ‘against a background of harsh and assertively English Thatcherite government from Whitehall’ (22), with no further evidence or context offered.

Atlantic Exile and the Stateless Citizen in Irish Romanticism

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe 2009 Wordsworth Summer ConferenceAtlantic Exile and the Stateless Citizen in Irish RomanticismJulia M. WrightJulia M. Wright Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 40, Number 1Winter 2009The Wordsworth Summer Conference Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045262 Views: 8Total views on this site © 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Editorial

Ten years old today (at times it feels like 100 – particularly when proofreading) and another bumper issue of post-Christmas, recession-busting goodies to celebrate. And do I hear that, now-annual, New Year's resolution bouncing around again – to do TOG's CPD this year? I can still remember, with great disappointment, that I felt remarkably and surprisingly similar on my tenth birthday to how I had felt the day before. But a tenth birthday is a good time to take a step back and assess where we've got to and where we're going (to be honest, I don't remember doing that on my tenth birthday – but TOG hasn't the distraction of a new bicycle). Shaughn O'Brien, TOG's founding Editor-in-Chief, waxes lyrical (and appropriately so), viewing TOG's early years through rose-tinted spectacles: I can imagine the scene, down to the quill pens and smoking oil lamps. Now we are a little more ‘savvy’ – from an internet chat room for the Editorial Board members, through the full gamut of electronic article management. Sue Molony, our Managing Editor (or Editor Manager?) and her deputy, Nina Buchan, have what sometimes, frankly, seems close to a Wizard of Oz-like grip on this – but manage, with great good grace, to keep our authors, reviewers and Board members happy. Their and their predecessors’ contribution to this journal is inestimable and it has been a complete pleasure to work with them all. We've now gone international, too, with representatives from around the world on our board (Jane Moody, the unflappably wonderful Head of Publications, was very happy with this once email contact was established and we didn't have to pay international postage). Our international members have contributed greatly and it is appropriate that we publish their postcard greetings in this edition at this milestone in our history. In the UK, our specialist societies (no funny handshakes, uniforms or languages – beyond the usual plethora of acronyms to persuade us they really do know what they're talking about) also contribute greatly to professional life and to the well-being of our patients. We are delighted that so many have sent us anniversary wishes, which we also publish in these pages. So, what else is there? It is almost impossible to pick up any newspaper without being reminded of the wayward nature of our waistlines: Frances Stewart and her colleagues fill us with dread and, were I a woman, it would turn me off that fourth mince pie for ever. Robert Freeman and Ashwani Monga review the NICE guidelines on urinary incontinence – for that dying breed, the male gynaecologist, should we, perhaps, commission something on the prostate for a change? Rita Bhalla and colleagues cover yet another rare complication of labour – the inverted uterus: do you really, actually know what to do? Now you will. For those of us who live on the Celtic fringe and stand a 1 in 20 chance of being a carrier, full-blown cystic fibrosis is seen all too frequently. With medical advances, more women with cystic fibrosis are presenting in antenatal clinics. Julie Goddard and Stephen Bourke tell us what to do in this sometimes tragic scenario. Adenomyosis is, I suppose, what dry rot is to old houses: the only effective treatment is to cut it out. As we marvel at the wonders of modern medicine, isn't it incredible that we still have no idea what causes it and no effective way of treating it whilst retaining uterine function? Mehasseb and colleagues give us an update. Surrogacy is a minefield – socially, ethically, legally and medically. Most of us have an opinion on it, despite few of us having any real knowledge of what is involved. Kalsang Bhatia and her fellow authors, including the very experienced Tony Nysenbaum, write lucidly and objectively for us. Fire-drills are fun? So say Dimitrios Siassakos and colleagues on behalf of the SaFE Study Group. They are certainly necessary – can we imagine the Army, or indeed the fire brigade, waiting for a war or a raging inferno and then trying to work out what to do? Sonia Barnfield then takes us off to deepest Kenya and reminds us just how difficult obstetric practice can be away from the nightmares of targets and waiting list initiatives. And finally (to borrow a phrase from that master of wit and the sideways look at everyday life), this is my last editorial as Editor-in-Chief. Let us hope, therefore, that the quality of this page is set to improve. I have loved my time with TOG and its staff – but life moves on and I wish this very excellent journal congratulations on its tenth anniversary and every success for the next 10 years and beyond. It has been an honour to be associated with it.

Ordovician life around the Celtic fringes: diversifications, extinctions and migrations of brachiopod and trilobite faunas at middle latitudes

Abstract During the early to mid-Ordovician, marine life experienced an unprecedented rise in diversity at the species, genus and family levels that firmly installed the suspension-feeding benthos as the main component of the Palaeozoic fauna. The earlier Ordovician was characterized by a wide dispersal of the continents together with a high frequency of microcontinents and volcanic arcs. Magmatic and tectonic activity was intense, climates were warm and sea levels were high. Central to the entire diversification is the role of gamma (inter-provincial) diversity and by implication the spread of the continents and frequency of island arcs and microcontinents. A disparate group of continental fragments and island arcs loosely assigned to the Celtic province contained distinctive shelly faunas that formed a testable biogeographical unit. The Celtic faunas are characterized by a large number of endemic brachiopod taxa, some cosmopolitan forms, and taxa at the beginning or end of their stratigraphical ranges. The associated trilobite faunas are composed largely of wide-ranging genera, a few genera at the start of their stratigraphical range and some recently evolved taxa extending their geographical range. The Celtic province helped provide a burst of gamma diversity during the early stages of the Ordovician Radiation whereas the timing and position of the archipelagos associated with the Celtic province may have provided a mechanism for the diachroneity associated with the diversification.

“A Prophet out of Gwalia:” The Poetry of Idris Davies and Postcolonial Wales

In recent years there has been an ongoing debate about whether or not modern Wales can be defined as a postcolonial society in the same way as the other Celtic nations of Britain - Scotland and Ireland. This essay seeks to cast new critical light on this discussion by approaching it through the writing of Idris Davies, one of Wales’s most distinctive modern poets. It is claimed that Davies’s own background as a Welshspeaking, working-class writer living both in Wales and England allowed him to develop a unique poetic voice that has much to say about some of the key issues in a Welsh postcolonial experience: the conflict of languages, the impact of history, the relationship between class and nation, margin and centre, and not least the existential condition of exile.

Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization (review)

Reviewed by: Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization Matthew Hart Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization. Laura O'Connor. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii + 240. $49.95 (cloth). In the introduction to Haunted English, Laura O'Connor turns to the "de-Anglicization" of Ireland promoted after 1892 by Douglas Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League and first President of the Republic. Demonstrating a sensitivity to language characteristic of her analyses, O'Connor explains how Hyde's awkward neologism reflected his need to find an "alienating" label for the "toxic effects" of Anglicization, its "instrumentalist connotations" helping to suggest that British hegemony is "something harmful that [...] can be, and ought to be, reversed" (xvi). Haunted English explores the poetics of that reversal. Reading poems by W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Marianne Moore, O'Connor shows how the language of the provincialized "Celtic Fringe" survived its violent exile behind the "English Pale," living on as an "evocative object" within global Anglophone literature and playing a central part in modernist debates about "gender, secularism, [and] the changing status of literary genres" (17). For a general modernist audience, Haunted English has two significant features. First, O'Connor shows how the narrative of de-Anglicization exceeds the history of the Gaelic Revival. A long first chapter, "Beyond the Pale," addresses the history of "linguicism" ("the discrimination against others on the basis of language or speaking style" [xiii]) in Ireland, whereby the proscriptions and prejudices of life on the fringe of empire created a melancholic double consciousness: an "ambition to adopt Englishness that is interminably withheld; and a repressed identification with the Gaelic culture that is reviled as worthless and yet revered" (43). Narrating the formation and deformation of this colonial melancholy, O'Connor reads key texts of Celtic Orientalism by Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan, then explores how intellectuals like Hyde and Yeats undid the reified opposition between Teuton and Celt that was the discursive symptom and bulwark of Irish cultural oppression. She also provides impressive analyses of the cultural-political meanings of Gaelic genres like the aisling (Jacobite dream-vision poem) as represented by Aogán Ó'Rathaille's "Gile na Gile." Rooted in Ireland, Haunted English extends into the contact zone where the Celtic Fringe paradoxically overlaps and is divided from the English Pale, focusing less on Gaelic itself than on its formal and discursive significance for Anglo-Celtic poetry. Chapter two, "'Eater and Eaten': The Haunted English of W. B. Yeats," therefore deals with how English is for Yeats both quarry and prey (63). As a poet who declared that "everything I love has come to me through English," but who couldn't disavow the "shade of grief cast over Ireland by the history of linguicism" (60–1), Yeats turns the relation between Irish and English into the matter and meter of poetry. For instance, he praised Lady Gregory's mixing of "Tudor vocabulary" with "a syntax partly moulded by men who still thought in Gaelic" (76). He also offered a four stress rescanning of Milton's blank verse, where the pentameter is shaken up by "the Irish preference for a swift current" (84). O'Connor's argument, then, is that by refusing the dualism that makes Gaelic a permanent victim and English a perpetual killer, Yeats avoided the "'eat or be eaten' logic of linguicide" (5). [End Page 830] In "The Tower" or "The Curse of Cromwell," hunted Irish becomes haunted English, with Yeats developing an Anglophone idiom somewhere "between English and Gaelic, written and oral, and elitist and popular literary traditions" (109). Though Yeats made only desultory attempts to learn the "subjugated national language," Gaelic persists in his verse as a "ghostly presence" that confirms his Irishness even as its reconciliation with English imaginatively reconstitutes the waning cultural authority of the Anglo-Irish elite (110). From Anglo-Irish dialectics, chapter three shifts to "Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetics of Caricature." This geographical move represents the second way in which Haunted English is notable for modernist studies. MacDiarmid neither spoke nor read Gaelic, but by showing how the discourse of the Gael operates as an undertone in...

Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization, by Laura O'Connor

<i>Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization</i>, by Laura O'Connor