The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (review)

In their introduction to this work the editors, Margaret Kelleher and Philip O'Leary, of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and Boston College, respectively, remind the reader of Moses Coit Tyler's History of American Literature (1878), which he had envisaged as 'the most confidential and explicit record of the American mind, the record preserved in the nation's literature'. This work was published to coincide with the centenary of American independence. The editors refer to the five-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991–2002) as having 'established a canon of Irish literature' that in turn requires 'an accessible and reliable historical framework' within which these texts may be read and understood to the fullest extent. They posit that it is timely to produce a similar history in which to contextualize the enormous literary output of the island of Ireland, which covers a range of genres, in two principal and several other languages, and encompasses fifteen centuries of writing.

The History is contained in two volumes: the first covers the period from the fifth or sixth century to 1890, the second from 1890 to 2000. Both volumes include the editors' introduction to the overall work and a chronology (extrapolated from A New History of Ireland, vol. viii: A Chronology of Irish History to 1976 (1992)). Each volume is separately paginated and indexed. The volumes are organized into chapters, each of which includes comprehensive endnotes and a select bibliography. At the end of each volume there is a 'guide to major subject areas', which follows chapter order, elaborating the contents in a general way. This feature is one of the few disappointing elements of the work: it is a contents list, not a true subject guide, and will be of limited use to the reader.

The first volume has fifteen chapters, the first three of which deal with the centuries from 400 to 1600 and incorporate writing in the broadest sense: from Ogham stones, texts in Latin and in Old and Middle Irish, and ranging across legal, hagiographic, religious, historical, genealogical, and other subject areas, as well as literature per se. The texts, together with the complexity of the early Irish world, as well as the limitations placed on our understanding of certain aspects of that world due to a paucity of sources for the earliest periods, are clearly enunciated by Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Marc Caball, and Kaarina Hollo. Attention is paid to translations, to the Irish writing on the continent of Europe, and to the translation of European medical texts into Irish. But the main emphasis is on the literary heritage in the form of poetry, prose literature, romances, and hero tales. Here we encounter the notion of the bardic poem 'as a commodity which could be bought and sold' (Caball), and the creation of 'extended propaganda tracts whose imaginative rewriting of history was designed to cast a particular ruling family in a favourable light. To this end, eponymous ancestors were exalted and previous heroic deeds were extolled, the implication being that descendants of such giants were of the same mould' (Ní Mhaonaigh, referring to eleventh- and twelfth-century texts, for example Cogadh Gaedhel). Caball also draws our attention to 'cultural refashioning', describing it as a very deliberate effort to create the idea of the continuity of the old Gaelic order in a political landscape that was constantly threatened by powerful newcomers. These concepts — cultural refashioning, continuity, whether pseudo or real, and cultural identity — recur throughout the two volumes.

From 1550 onwards the contributions focus on literature in general or on the fortunes of a particular genre in either English or Irish during a specific period. We encounter again the idea of using literature as a tool to impose a world-view in Anne Fogarty's comprehensive treatment of 'Literature in English, 1550–1690', which adroitly negotiates the complex polemical and historical works relating to this...