Strange Country Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790

by Deane, Seamus

• ISBN13: 9780198184904
• ISBN10: 0198184905
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-05-20
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

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, from James Hardiman's IrishMinstrelsy to Synge, Yeats, and Joyce, Irish writing is dominated by a number of inherited issuesthose of national character, of conflict between discipline and excess, of division between the languages of economics and sensibility, of modernity and backwardness. Almost all the activities of Irishprint cultureits novels, songs, historical analyses, typefaces, poemstake 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.

Author Biography

Seamus Deane is Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Phantasmal France, Unreal Ireland: Sobering Reflections

National Character and the Character of Nations

Control of Types, Types of Control: the Gothic, the Occult, the Crowd

Boredom and Apocalypse: A National Paradigm

Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.