Brian Graham, In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (London: Routledge 1997), provides a bracing immersion in cultural politics-doubtless good for the health of critics and politicians but stiff medicine for the nationalist or the unionist alike. Take a couple of samples from the introductory essay on 'Ireland and Irishness: Place, Culture and Identity'. 'Nationalist identity in Ireland … has been profoundly shaped by presuppositions of malignant Britishness, constructed and presented as a "collective social fact" that wilfully denies the complexity of that culture. Equally the very essence of unionism is vested in the assumption of Irish Catholic republicanism as Other, a supposition of timeless uniformity of purpose, people, and place that negates the complex diversity of irish society, geography and history.' (p.5); 'While the colonial model is an obvious and superficially attractive one, it too offers an unduly stereotypical rendition of the complex negotiations of identity and social interactions that characterise Ireland's past.' (p.10.); and finally, 'it is most unlikely that the repercussions of hybridity can be accommodated within conventional structures of zero-sum territoriality.' Contributors include S. J. Connolly ('Culture, Identity and Tradition: Changing Definitions of Irishness'), Patrick J. Duffy ('Writing Ireland: Literature and Art in the representation of Irish Place'), Peter Shirlow ('Class, Materialism and the Fracturing of Traditional Alignments'), and Catherine Nash ('Embodied Irishness: Gender, Sexuality and Irish Identities').
Sophia Hillan-King and Sean McMahon, eds., Hope and History, Eyewitness accounts of Life in Twentieth-Century Ulster (Dublin: Friar's Bush Press 1996) contains some eighty extracts from writers, journalists, and assorted witnesses including the usual posse-Sam Hanna Bell, Michael McLaverty, Louis McNeice, Seamus Heaney, &c., but also Alice Stopford Green and Barry McGuigan, as well as Brian Faulkner and Brian Callaghan. This is a valuable resource for anyone who purports to hold an informed opinion about questions of identity in Northern Ireland. Walker recently edited with Richard English a collection of essays of 'New Perspectives' on Unionism in Modern Ireland (London: Macmillan 1996), in which Patrick Maume-the biography of Corkery-provides an archivally enriched essay on the forgotten novelists 'Frank Frankfort Moore, Shan Bullock, and St. John Ervine' in a preliminary mapping of a territory that demands closer attention than the cultural torque of the Dublin-based literary revival has so far permitted.
A keenly-awaited event took place when Andrew Carpenter's anthology of Verse in English from the Eighteenth-Century Ireland was launched at the National Library, Kildare St. on Thursday, 12th February 1998. Dr. Carpenter's research among the printed and manuscript collections of the National Library has turned up a wealth of unexamined literature, by turns squibbish, hudibrastic, sentimental, patriotic, disputatious, demotic, pathetic, amorous, buccolic, and sublime.
This treasure trove constitutes, inter alia, a mine of Hiberno-English usage-for which reason no less than their scholarship Dr. Carpenter's annotations are to be highly prized. The new publication enlarges vastly upon the selection made in his editorial section of the Field Day Anthology, revealing a vibrant Georgian literature in Ireland that renders Vivian Mercier's conception of a subterranean connection between the older Gaelic and the more modern Literary Revival periods increasingly redundant. Brendan Kennelly, himself a former proponent of the 'big gap' theory, did the honours in launching the book. The 'bucks' of Trinity College are not all neiges d'antan.