Anglo-Irish : the literary imagination in a hyphenated culture / Julian Moynahan.

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Anglo-Irish : the literary imagination in a hyphenated culture / Julian Moynahan.


Author:	Moynahan, Julian, 1925-
Publisher:	Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1995.
ISBN:	0691037574 (acid-free paper)
Format:	Book
Physical Description:	xiii, 288 p. ; 25 cm.
Subjects:	English literature Irish authors History and criticism English Ireland Intellectual life Ireland Intellectual life 19th century Ireland Intellectual life 20th century Ireland In literature

Table of Contents Book Review Annotation

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments
	Preface
	Prologue: "Irish Enough" 3
	Origination and a Checklist 12
	The Native Informer 43
	Declensions of Anglo-Irish History: The Act of Union to the Encumbered Estates Acts of 1848-49 ... With a Glance at a Singular Heroine 74
	The Anglo-Irish Writer as Diplomatic Absentee. With a Glance at John Banim 84
	The Politics of Anglo-Irish Gothic the Return of the Repressed 109
	History Again: The Era of Parnell - Myths and Realities 136
	Spinsters Ball: George Moore and the Land Agitation 144
	"The Strain of the Double Loyalty"
	W. B. Yeats and the End of Anglo-Irish Literature 198
	After the End: The Anglo-Irish Postmortem 224
	Afterword 253
	Notes 257
	Works Cited 269
	Index 279

Reviews

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Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

According to Moynahan the two major "threads" connecting Anglo-Irish writers are "a sense of conflicted social and personal identity" and "the fascination with the expressive possibilities of a distinctive 'Anglo-Irish' ... idiom." These threads sustain a continuity that began with Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, continued in the politics of the mid-19th century, and ended with Beckett's Watt. In addition to Edgeworth and Beckett, the author looks at William Carleton, Charles Lever, Charles Maturin, Joseph LeFanu, George Moore, Somerville and Ross, and W.B. Yeats. He analyzes the major work of each writer and also includes several chapters that discuss religious and political issues vital to Anglo-Irish life and writing ("Declensions of Anglo-Irish History," "The Politics of Anglo-Irish Gothic," "History Again: The Era of Parnell-Myth and Realities"). Because Moynahan offers more provocative theses and more detailed analyses and evaluations of crucial works in a clear and sometimes witty style, his study carries the subject deeper and further than Roger McHugh and Maurice Harmon's Short History of Anglo-Irish Literature from Its Origins to the Present Day (CH, Feb'83). A valuable advance in the scholarship of this vital area. Upper-division undergraduate and above. F. L. Ryan; Stonehill College

Summary

In their day, the Anglo-Irish were the ascendant minority--Protestant, loyalist, privileged landholders in a recumbent, rural, and Catholic land. Their world is vanished, but shades of the Anglo-Irish linger in the big-house estates of Ireland and in the imaginative writings of this realm. In this first comprehensive study of their literature, Julian Moynahan rediscovers the unity of their greatest writings, from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent through Yeats's poetry to Bowen's The Last September and Samuel Beckett's Watt. Throughout he challenges postcolonial assumptions, arguing that the Anglo-Irish since 1800 were indelibly Irish, not mere colonial servants of Imperial Britain.Moynahan begins in 1800 with the Act of Union, when the Anglo-Irish become Irish. Just as the fortunes of this community begin to wane, its literary power unfolds. The Anglo-Irish produce a haunting, memorable body of writings that explore a unique yet always Irish identity and destiny. Moynahan's exploration of the literature reveals women writers--Maria Edgeworth, Edith Somerville, Martin Ross, and Elizabeth Bowen--as a generative and major force in the development of this literary imagination. Along the way, he attends closely to the Gothic and to the mystery writing of C. R. Maturin and J. S. Le Fanu, and provides in-depth revaluations of William Carleton and Charles Lever.