About the Book
Just as Ireland has produced many brilliant writers in the past century, so these writers have produced a new Ireland. In a book unprecedented in its scope and approach, Declan Kiberd offers a vivid account of the personalities and texts, English and Irish alike, that reinvented the country after centuries of colonialism. The result is a major literary history of modern Ireland, combining detailed and daring interpretations of literary masterpieces with assessments of the wider role of language, sport, clothing, politics, and philosophy in the Irish revival.
In dazzling comparisons with the experience of other postcolonial peoples, the author makes many overdue connections. Rejecting the notion that artists such as Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett became modern to the extent that they made themselves "European," he contends that the Irish experience was a dramatic instance of experimental modernity and shows how the country's artists blazed a trail that led directly to the magic realism of a García Márquez or a Rushdie. Along the way, he reveals the vital importance of Protestant values and the immense contributions of women to the enterprise. Kiberd's analysis of the culture is interwoven with sketches of the political background, bringing the course of modern Irish literature into sharp relief against a tragic history of conflict, stagnation, and change.
Inventing Ireland restores to the Irish past a sense of openness that it once had and that has since been obscured by narrow-gauge nationalists and their polemical revisionist critics. In closing, Kiberd outlines an agenda for Irish Studies in the next century and detects the signs of a second renaissance in the work of a new generation of authors and playwrights, from Brian Friel to the younger Dublin writers.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction 1. A New England Called Ireland? IRELAND--ENGLAND'S UNCONSCIOUS? Interchapter 2. Oscar Wilde--The Artist as Irishman 3. John Bull's Other Islander--Bernard Shaw ANGLO-IRELAND: THE WOMAN'S PART Interchapter 4. Tragedies of Manners--Somerville and Ross 5. Lady Gregory and the Empire Boys YEATS: LOOKING INTO THE LION'S FACE Interchapter 6. Childhood and Ireland 7. The National Longing for Form RETURN TO THE SOURCE? Interchapter 8. Deanglicization 9. Nationality or Cosmopolitanism? 10. J. M. Synge--Remembering the Future REVOLUTION AND WAR Interchapter 11. Uprising 12. The Plebeians Revise the Uprising 13. The Great War and Irish Memory WORLDS APART? 14. Ireland and the End of Empire INVENTING IRELANDS Interchapter 15. Writing Ireland, Reading England 16. Inventing Irelands 17. Revolt Into Style--Yeatsian Poetics 18. The Last Aisling--A Vision 19. James Joyce and Mythic Realism SEXUAL POLITICS Interchapter 20. Elizabeth Bowen--The Dandy in Revolt 21. Fathers and Sons 22. Mothers and Daughters PROTESTANT REVIVALS Interchapter 23. Protholics and Cathestants 24. Saint Joan--Fabian Feminist, Protestant Mystic 25. The Winding Stair 26. Religious Writing: Beckett and Others UNDERDEVELOPMENT Interchapter 27. The Periphery and the Centre 28. Flann O'Brien, Myles, and The Poor Mouth 29. The Empire Writes Back--Brendan Behan 30. Beckett's Texts of Laughter and Forgetting 31. Post-Colonial Ireland--"A Quaking Sod" RECOVERY AND RENEWAL Interchapter 32. Under Pressure--The Writer and Society 1960-90 33. Friel Translating 34. Translating Tradition REINVENTING IRELAND 35. Imagining Irish Studies Notes Index
About the Author :
Declan Kiberd is Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Review :
A critical study laced with wit, energy and unrelenting adroitness of discourse...Mr. Kiberd possesses a special gift for patient exploration of works of art in relationship to their surroundings...Wit, paradox, and an almost indecent delight in verbal jugglery place Mr. Kiberd himself in a central Irish literary tradition that also includes Swift, Joyce, and Beckett...Impudent, eloquent, full of jokes and irreverence, by turns sardonic and conciliatory, blithely subversive but, without warning, turning to display wide and serious reading, a generosity of spirit, a fierce and authentic concern for social and political justice. Rather like Wilde and Shaw...A remarkable achievement.
Kiberd possesses one of the liveliest and sharpest minds in Ireland, and it is not surprising that his book dazzles and engages. Nor that Inventing Ireland is both an international and an Irish book.
[A] state-of-the-art approach to Irish literature...a huge, erudite, scrupulous hermeneutics of the sacred literary texts in the Irish world...This is one of the best studies of Irish literature to come along in years.
Inventing Ireland...deserves to be read, not only by people with a special interest in Irish writing, but also by people with a strong interest in modern writing in English. Kiberd has much that is original and valuable to say.
A dazzling book, a book to cherish and revisit. As you read and reread the Anglo-Irish texts, you'll find it altering them, lightening them up. It changes Beckett and Joyce; it especially changes John Millington Synge. It ends by offering to reshape Irish Studies curricula.
Formidable, thoroughly enjoyable, always engaged, often brilliant...This is the fullest attempt we have had to date to read both Irish historical experience and the literature that this has involved in the light of post-colonial theory.
Inventing Ireland is that completely unusual thing: a highly readable, joyfully contentious book whose enormous learning and superb understanding of the literary text will introduce readers for the first time to a remarkably lively panorama of Irish culture during the last century. Full of novel readings, theoretical investigations and audacious connections, Declan Kiberd's book lifts Ireland out of ethnic studies and lore and places it in the post-colonial world. In doing so he situates its great cultural traditions where they jostle not only the major texts of English literature, but also those of writers like Salman Rushdie and García Márquez. The result in a dazzling, bravura performance.
[A] thought-provoking and entertaining critical blockbuster...There is no doubt that this book immediately joins a small group of indispensable books on Anglo-Irish literary history. It is also typical of the best of that school in the brio and wit with which its learning and intelligence are carried.
Kiberd's study is provocative, contentious, sly, tendentious, challenging, witty...It is a book argued with such passionate intensity that everyone with an interest in modern Irish writing will have to confront it, and in that confrontation revisions and redefinitions are likely to slouch towards birth...Kiberd's book is a resounding success. It will seduce you, bludgeon you and outrage you. Few books can boast such presence.
Kiberd's magesterial exploration of how cultural nationalism produced one of the world's great modern literatures is especially valuable as nationalism itself becomes increasingly implicated in the violence and terrorism in Northern ireland, Yugoslavia, Israel, and many African states.
Inventing Ireland is a major contribution to Irish literary studies, a work that at its best pulsates with the same iconoclastic commitment to renewal and emancipation that Kiberd reveres in the works of the Irish writers of the revolutonary generation.
An epic study in various forms of connection between literature and society, literature and history. Kiberd has set himself a mammoth task which he has undertaken with energetic erudition and accomplished with convincing style...[Kiberd's] most striking characteristic as a critic is his intellectual daring: he is capable of saying things that simply take the reader's breath away...[This book is] ebullient, monumental...epical in its aims and achievements.
[A] remarkable book...[Kiberd] brilliantly explores all the variables that contribute to what the Irish call Sinn Fein (ourselves). At the core of Kiberd's analysis is the exploration of the literary history of Ireland. What he discovers in the works of Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Synge, Bowen, and Beckett is not only fascinating reading but also an original and expanded view of Irish culture...His work is a stunningly bold achievement and also an invaluable source for readers and scholars.
Inventing Ireland is exactly what its title claims--an act of exuberant creativity. Nimbly, skillfully, and almost with a sense of near-wonderment at his own discoveries, Kiberd explores the continuities between Irish past and Irish present. And by focusing on what he calls 'revered masterpieces,' and by examining them in the wider social context out of which they came, he fashions a nation that is hospitable to all its prickly constituents.
