Vance - Irish Literature Since 1800

Irish Literature Since 1800

Longman Literature in English Series

General Editors:

David Carroll, formerly University of Lancaster

Chris Walsh, Chester College of Higher Education

Michael Wheeler, University of Southampton

For a complete list of titles, see back of book

Irish Literature Since 1800

Norman Vance

First published 2002 by Pearson Education Limited

Published 2014 by Routledge

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Copyright 2002, Taylor & Francis.

The right of Norman Vance to be identified as Author

of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-49478-7 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book can be obtained from the Library of Congress

Typeset in 10/12pt Sabon by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

Contents

The multi-volume Longman Literature in English Series provides students of literature with a critical introduction to the major genres in their historical and cultural context. Each volume gives a coherent account of a clearly defined area, and the series, when complete, will offer a practical and comprehensive guide to literature written in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present. The aim of the series as a whole is to show that the most valuable and stimulating approach to the study of literature is that based upon awareness of the relations between literary forms and their historical contexts. Thus the areas covered by most of the separate volumes are defined by period and genre. Each volume offers new and informed ways of reading literary works, and provides guidance for further reading in an extensive reference section.

In recent years, the nature of English studies has been questioned in a number of increasingly radical ways. The very terms employed to define a series of this kind period, genre, history, context, canon have become the focus of extensive critical debate, which has necessarily influenced in varying degrees the successive volumes published since 1985. But however fierce the debate, it rages around the traditional terms and concepts.

As well as studies on all periods of English and American literature, the series includes books on criticism and literary theory and on the intellectual and cultural context. A comprehensive series of this kind must of course include other literatures written in English, and therefore a group of volumes deals with Irish and Scottish literature, and the literatures of India, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia and Canada. The forty-seven volumes of the series cover the following areas: Pre-Renaissance English Literature, English Poetry, English Drama, English Fiction, English Prose, Criticism and Literary Theory, Intellectual and Cultural Context, American Literature, Other Literatures in English.

David Carroll

Chris Walsh

Michael Wheeler

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to libraries and library staff in many places, notably the Sussex University library, the British Library in London, the Special Collections Library of the Queens University, Belfast, the Central Library and the Linen Hall Library in Belfast and the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. For stimulus, support and practical help of various kinds I am indebted to many colleagues, students, friends and relations, notably Nicholas Allen, Peter Boxall, Terence Brown, Tom Clyde, Alistair Davies, Fergus Dunne, Marianne Elliott, Sara Ferris, John Wilson Foster, Roy Foster, Lindsay and Muriel Green, Patrick Hicks, Rodney Hillman, Alun Howkins, Tony Inglis, Joep Leerssen, Edna Longley, Rolf Loeber, Conor McCarthy, Stephen Medcalf, Michael OFlynn, Donald Patton, Vincent Quinn, Margaret Reynolds, Barry Sloan, Bruce Stewart, Naoko Toraiwa, William and Myrtle Vance and Brian Young. My greatest debts, intellectual and other, are to my wife Brenda Richardson Vance.

The publisher is grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

PFD on behalf of Frank OConnor for the poem Hope by Frank OConnor, published in Kings, Lords and Commons: An Anthology from the Irish by Gill & Macmillan Frank OConnor; and The Random House Group Limited for the poem The Weather in Japan by Michael Longley, published in The Weather in Japan.

In some instances we have been unable to trace the owners of copyright material and we would appreciate any information that would enable us to do so.

This book is mainly concerned with Irish writing in English over the last two centuries. Writing, English and the last two centuries all call for introductory comment. Irish will be discussed later.

Writing will often be used instead of literature in what follows because Irish literary development cannot be adequately understood if one concentrates exclusively on the choice and familiar works which custom and contemporary taste dignify as literature. This notion of literature as timelessly valuable writing, usually involving a canon of classics worthy of admiration and academic study, tends to exclude much of the extremely varied reading matter which may have contributed to the formation of individual writers and to literary tradition generally. Constructing literary history purely from the narrow perspective of what now passes for literary also privileges modern forms such as the novel over older literary modes such as historical narrative, oratory and religious and political writing, all of which have been particularly important in Ireland. Furthermore, the category of the literary excludes merely ephemeral or popular writing, deemed to be unworthy of serious attention. This distinction has always been problematic with popular yet serious writers such as Charles Dickens or Graham Greene. It has now begun to seem rather old-fashioned. But as Declan Kiberds recent study Irish Classics