Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790
Seamus Deane
Abstract
This book traces the emergence of a self-consciously national tradition in Irish writing from the era of the French Revolution and, specifically, from Edmund Burke’s counter-revolutionary writings. From Gerald Griffin’s The Collegians to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and from James Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy to Synge, Yeats, and Joyce, Irish writing is dominated by a number of inherited issues: national character, conflict between discipline and excess, division between the languages of economics and sensibility, and modernity and backwardness. Almost all the activities of Irish print culture–its no ... More
This book traces the emergence of a self-consciously national tradition in Irish writing from the era of the French Revolution and, specifically, from Edmund Burke’s counter-revolutionary writings. From Gerald Griffin’s The Collegians to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and from James Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy to Synge, Yeats, and Joyce, Irish writing is dominated by a number of inherited issues: national character, conflict between discipline and excess, division between the languages of economics and sensibility, and modernity and backwardness. Almost all the activities of Irish print culture–its novels, songs, historical analyses, typefaces, and poems–take place within the limits imposed by this complex inheritance. In the process, Ireland created a national literature that was also a colonial one. This was and is an achievement that is only now being fully recognised.
Keywords:
Edmund Burke,
Bram Stoker,
Irish writing,
Yeats,
Joyce,
economics,
modernity,
print culture,
Ireland,
James Hardiman
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 1999 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198184904 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184904.001.0001 |