Here's a collection of essays, which are unlike many in Irish Studies. To start off with, Terry Eagleton's essays do not center primarily on the most famous Irish writers: Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Beckett, or some of the other more prominent names.
Eagleton says, "I must confess that I have included essays on Yeats and Beckett in this collection; but I have tried to remain as tight-lipped as possible about Joyce, and to retrieve some neglected figures and conceptual subcurrents."
To that end, Eagleton draws from the great ranks of Irish literature: Bishop Berkeley, Thomas Moore, Oliver Goldsmith, Francis Hutcheson, Laurence Sterne, Richard Steele, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, James Stephens, Charles Lever, Austin Clarke, Kate O'Brien, and Francis Stuart. And then he includes some of th lesser-known names: William Dunkin, John Toland, Frederick Ryan, "Father Prout," William McGinn, Shan Bullock, Canon Sheehan, and George Birmingham.
To that end, Eagleton draws from the great ranks of Irish literature: Bishop Berkeley, Thomas Moore, Oliver Goldsmith, Francis Hutcheson, Laurence Sterne, Richard Steele, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, James Stephens, Charles Lever, Austin Clarke, Kate O'Brien, and Francis Stuart. And then he includes some of th lesser-known names: William Dunkin, John Toland, Frederick Ryan, "Father Prout," William McGinn, Shan Bullock, Canon Sheehan, and George Birmingham.
Eagleton is well-versed in the topics of Irish writing; and he pulls from his arsenal to offer discussions of all sorts. In "Home and Away," he writes, "Throughout Irish writing, a lonely outcast hungering for freedom revolts, usually unavailingly, against the censorious social order. The rebellious is almost always solitary — one reason perhaps why it is in the short story, rather than on the more communal, companionable terrain of the novel, that the struggle is so often staged" (243).
Trouble in Irish Literature
Irish fiction is fraught with troubles. There is constant exile, internal turmoil, fighting. It's a literature of disenchantment, of harsh realities... He talks about the almost terrible duality of being... at once at home and away from Ireland. He also writes: "Reading this body of fiction, it is hard to resist the impression that Ireland drove in on themselves almost as many people as it drove out. Every novel-form is replete with rogues, misfits, dreamers, rebels... a-social rebels, martyrs, misfits, minor prophets." (247)
Trouble in Irish Literature
Irish fiction is fraught with troubles. There is constant exile, internal turmoil, fighting. It's a literature of disenchantment, of harsh realities... He talks about the almost terrible duality of being... at once at home and away from Ireland. He also writes: "Reading this body of fiction, it is hard to resist the impression that Ireland drove in on themselves almost as many people as it drove out. Every novel-form is replete with rogues, misfits, dreamers, rebels... a-social rebels, martyrs, misfits, minor prophets." (247)
But, it's out of that rag-tag bunch of character that such writers as Thomas Moore arises. "For writers like Joyce and Heaney," Eagleton says, "Moore loomed up less as an individual than as a collective sensibility or repository of archetypes, which could be discarded or negotiated but not ignored" (157). Some of those larger-than-life writers have been almost lost to literary history.
As for William Butler Yeats, it's unlikely that he will ever be forgotten. His poems strike at the very core of what Ireland is, what she was, and perhaps what she may someday become. Eagleton writes, "As a man, Yeats looked at the present with one eye on how it would appear to the future; and another kind of oxymoronic tense is characteristic of our experience of his poetry."
Ranging from the well-known to the lesser known, from satire to sentimentality, from the 18th-century to something more like modern — Eagleton manages to bring together a barrage of essays that challenge the boundaries of what Irish literature is, and what it can be.
As for William Butler Yeats, it's unlikely that he will ever be forgotten. His poems strike at the very core of what Ireland is, what she was, and perhaps what she may someday become. Eagleton writes, "As a man, Yeats looked at the present with one eye on how it would appear to the future; and another kind of oxymoronic tense is characteristic of our experience of his poetry."
Ranging from the well-known to the lesser known, from satire to sentimentality, from the 18th-century to something more like modern — Eagleton manages to bring together a barrage of essays that challenge the boundaries of what Irish literature is, and what it can be.
