Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature 1995) - Softcover

Deane, Seamus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198184905 ISBN 13: 9780198184904

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1998

Synopsis

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 Irish Minstrelsy 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 Irish print 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.

About this title

Review:

The demanding subtleties of these lectures provide, in fact, both a case in point and an encouraging augury for the future. (Roy Foster, The Times)

In a brilliant analysis of the relationship of land to speech, Deane writes that "soil is what land becomes when it is ideologically constructed as a natal source ..." (Proinsias Ó Drisceoil, The Irish Times)

About the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0198184905
• ISBN 13: 9780198184904
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280