Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research (review)

Specialist scholars and general readers alike will profit enormously from this ambitious collection, which covers aspects of the long nineteenth century in Ireland and the United Kingdom. As their subtitle implies, editors Laurence M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher have brought together "a" guide to research, rather than "the" definitive work on recent Irish scholarship—were such a creature even possible. They have, therefore, given their eleven contributors enormous leeway to prepare essays that are critical, thought-provoking, and entertaining. Much as J. J. Lee's Irish Historiography, 1970–1979 (1981) became a vital resource for students of Irish history a generation ago, Geary and Kelleher's volume promises to be a touchstone for all with an interest in the many fields of Irish studies, including history, literature in English, sociology and anthropology, historical geography, musicology, art history, and diaspora studies. That list of subjects could be extended, as the broad category of history warrants separate entries on political, social, women's, and religious history.

Niall Ó Ciosáin's insightful essay on "Gaelic Culture and Language Shift" may give pause to readers who assume that the death of Gaelic, as a literary and as a spoken language, coincided with the Famine years of the late 1840s. To be sure, Ó Ciosáin emphasizes the rapidity of the shift away from the use of Irish in everyday intercourse, but he points out that few have even attempted to explain adequately the causes, the pace, or the sociocultural impacts of this dramatic transformation. Moreover, he notes that scholars prior to the 1990s largely failed to consider the ongoing production of manuscript literature in Irish because of lingering presumptions about what constituted high culture in Victorian Ireland, especially the primacy of English in the public sphere— commerce, literature, the press. In fact, Irish scribes produced more manuscripts in the nineteenth century than ever before. Similarly, because scholars have seen the Anglicization of Ireland as an essential component of the island's fitful push toward modernity, they long failed to appreciate the contested culture of "Gaelic" Ireland, where, as research in the 1990s has demonstrated, aspects of modernity competed with the pre-modern just as they did throughout the western world.

Indeed, "undercutting comfortable assumptions" could be a further subtitle for this collection. Sean Ryder's discussion of literature in English, for instance, makes clear that the methodological insights gleaned from postcolonial and gender studies, along with attention to long-neglected novelists and poets, have allowed scholars to move beyond the Yeatsian categories that dominated criticism for nearly a century (119). Similarly, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh's overview of political historiography embraces what he calls "the fructifying influence of cultural critics" on old debates about pre-Famine politicization, as well as on parliamentary and agrarian mobilizations later in the century (13).

As the previous comments might suggest, one element that unites these disparate contributions is the growing interdisciplinary nature of inquiry into nineteenth-century Ireland. Nowhere would this be more apparent to readers than in the potentially controversial decision of the editors not to include a separate chapter on Famine studies, which practically grew into a cottage industry in the 1990s. This was, I think, the correct choice here because it allows contributors—such as Gary Owens in his chapter on social history, Maria Luddy in her overview of women's history, Marilyn Cohen and Joan Vincent in their summary of key works in anthropology and sociology, and Matthew Stout in his account of historical geography—to discuss the variety of approaches to this watershed event from perspectives that inform and challenge one another. Thus, one finds Owens lauding the collaborative Mapping the Great Irish Famine: A Survey of the Famine Decades (1999) as "the first comprehensive single-volume social history of the event" and Stout denouncing the same project as filled with "missed opportunities" to chart meaningfully the impact of the calamity (31, 87). It should not be surprising, of...