Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities: Studies in Irish Identities

The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities explores some of the tensions created when Anglo-Irish writers - Protestant in religion, of non-Irish ancestryreflected upon their preferred subject matter, Ireland and their unhyphenated Catholic contemporaries. These tensions involve the writers' sense of anxiety about their own membership in the Irish community, and at the same time their anxiety about losing their distinctive identity. Anglo-Irish writers founded modern Irish literature in English, identifying themselves with their native country and its people. Yet they often felt themselves surrounded and watched by an 'Unappeasable Host', a population that resented them. Robert Tracy discusses Irish writers who in England were considered Irish, in Ireland English - including Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, the Banim brothers, Roger O'Connor, Sheridan Le Fanu, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Elizabeth Bowen - together with James Joyce, who, although neither of English ancestry nor Protestant, similarly focuses on individuals separated or excluded from the Irish life around them.

Table of Contents:
The cracked looking-glass of a servant - inventing the colonial novel; Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan - legality versus legitimacy; fiery shorthand - the Banim brothers at work; self-fashioning as pseudo-history - Roger O'Connor's "Chronicles of Eri"; Sheridan Le Fanu and the Unmentionable; that rooted man - Yeats, "John Sherman" and "Dhoya"; long division in the long schoolroom - among school children; intelligible on the Blasket Islands - Yeats's "King Oedipus", 1926; merging into art - "The Death of Cuchulain" and the death of Yeats; living in the margin - Synge in Aran; words of mouth - Joyce and the oral tradition; Mr Joker and Dr Hyde - Joyce's politic polyglot polygraphs; in the heart of the Theban necropolis - mummyscripts and mummiescrypts in "Finnegan's Wake"; the burning roof and tower - identity in Elizabeth Bowen's "The Last September"; Elizabeth Bowen - rebuilding the big house; a ghost of style; exorcising the Anglo-Irish past.

Review :
"The Unappeasable Host is a treasure trove of scholarship, a series of 16 essays, each and all marked by a vast knowledge of Ireland and its writers, by penetrating insights, and perceptive analysis" The Boston Irish Reporter, Feb 1999 "What is immediately enthralling about the critic Robert Tracy is that he is not peddling the well trammelled list of references purveyed by various cliques." Books Ireland April 1999 "With its abundant references to just about everything Irish, this scholarly yet eminently readable volume encourages and advances Irish studies. Tracy includes much for everyone, and readers are in his debt for sharing 30 years of study in this book." F. L. Ryan, Stonehill College Choice March 1999 "Tracy is making the even more urgent contemporary claim for shared imaginative possessions between the hyphenated and the unhyphenated Irish, the hybrid and the so-called native. For, while concentrating on the writers of the Protestant minority, Tracy's analysis takes its direction from those crisis points where the two cultures draw near and confront one another. This book studies that process, with imaginative sympathy and scholarly detachment; it is a work to challenge prejudice and enlarge understanding." Dr Anthony Roche, UCD Irish Times Sept 1998, "the pieces in this book are well-grounded, widely read, astutely comparative and intellectually stimulating ... determinedly addressing continuity and context before theory and hypertext." Times Literary Supplement Nov 1998 "a useful contribution to Anglo-Irish scholarship, positing many new ideas, laying old ghosts and challenging the reader to engage with contemporary criticism and theory." Irish Literary Supplement Fall 1999 "This volume is a fitting summation to nearly four decades of work on Irish literature and culture." Matthew Campbell, University of Sheffield Irish Studies Review 7 (3) 1999