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
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 Garcia Marquez. The result in a dazzling, bravura performance. -- Edward W. Said 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. -- Brian Friel
Declan Kiberd is Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
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.
*New York Times Book Review*
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.
*Irish Times*
[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.
*Washington Post Book World*
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.
*Sunday Telegraph*
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.
*Washington Times*
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.
*The Tribune Magazine*
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.
*Edward W. Said*
[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.
*Times Literary Supplement*
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.
*Irish Independent*
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.
*Irish Literary Supplement*
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.
*Irish Literary Supplement*
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.
*Sunday Business Post*
[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.
*Library Journal*
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.
*Brian Friel*
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