Life
Professor of English, Univ. of Sussex; author of keynote lecture at IASIL
1997, Goteborg, Sweden.
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Works
‘Celts, Carthaginians, and Constitution: Ango-Irish Literary Relations,
1780-1820’, in Irish Historical Studies, Vol. XXI (19[9]1),
pp.216-38; Irish Literature: A Social History, Tradition,
Identity and Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990; rep. edn. Four Courts
1999). Miscellaneous, review of Robert Mahony, Jonathan Swift: The
Irish Identity (Yale UP 1995) and several other writings on Swift,
in Times Literary Supplement (2 Feb. 1996), pp.6-7.
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Notes
Irish Literature: A Social History (1990): ‘Irish utterance,
Irish literary tradition, in so far as it exists as a single entity, has
always been constituted out of a disturbingly rich plurality. But cultural
politics, colonialist and nationalist, have conspired to obscure this
richness and variety. It is only in the light of this generous complexity
that modern Irish writing and the actualities and potentialities of the
contemporary Irish experience, stricken and divided as it is, can be fully
understood.’ ( p.15; quoted in Suman Gupta, ‘What colour’s
Jew Joyce …: Race in the Context of Joyce’s Irishness and Bloom’s
Jewishness’, in Bullán, 1, 2, Autumn 1994, p.64.)
‘[T]he map of Ireland’s physical features and Ireland’s place on the map of Europe are [...] the only constants in Irish affairs. In neither language nor genre nor “literature” as we tend to understand it today offers much support for sustained continuities in Ireland, do topographical and geographical permanances contribute much of substance to Irish literary tradition? They do. Poems of place have survived from the earliest times. Ireland’s geographical location close to the British mainland entails an enduring Irish-English (or Irish-British) dialectic institutionalised by conquest, obsessively explored in literature [...] But simple polarities are too simple for the tangles of the Irish experience and Irish writing. In any case, it is not so much demonstrable continuity as resented discontinuity that stimulates the tradition-seeking process.’ (p.8; quoted in Thomas Hofheinz, Joyce and the Invention of History, Cambridge UP 1995, p.[72])
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)