Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Angelicization (review)

The emergence of Irish-Scottish Studies as a field of academic study has made possible new areas of critical debate in historical, literary, and cultural studies: these have included studies of the Irish and Scottish Diasporas, the shared Gaelic tradition of both countries as well as the overlaps that can be identified in literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ray Ryan, in Ireland and Scotland (2002), for instance, charts some of the familiar ways in which the two countries have been compared to one another as a pretext for his own wish to illustrate how “the terms—space, state, society, and nation—overlap” (137). Liam McIlvanney and Ryan’s edited collection of essays (Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society, 1700–2000), the numerous conference proceedings published through ISAI (Irish and Scottish Academic Initiative) and Crosscurrents, and the recent publication of a journal exclusively devoted to these connections (Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies) all serve to illustrate the wide-ranging and solid scholarship that can be discovered in this burgeoning discipline. Laura O’Connor’s Haunted English—a study which focuses on Celticism as a hybrid discourse that deterritorializes the English language—forms a cogent contribution to these debates.

Haunted English considers some of the ways in which Gaelic and English culture has co-existed from the sixteenth century onwards in Ireland and Scotland. O’Connor extends the concept of “the territorial Pale of early modern Ireland” (1), which historically separated English speakers from Gaelic speakers, in order to comprehend the borderlines that serve to “haunt” English, Irish, and Scottish writing. Indeed, this is a study of borderlines according to the colonialist rhetoric of translation and counter-translation. The “Celtic Fringe” is used to describe those writers who sought to translate indigenous Gaelic texts according to the conditions of the dominant culture. The term is also used to comprehend the hybridization that ensues when two different language traditions come into contact with one another. O’Connor uses these concepts in order to consider not only the poetics of W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Marianne Moore but also a broad range of texts that engage with the idea of Celticism and Celtic identity.

O’Connor begins with a close reading of Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) in which it is famously argued that the best way to create sovereign English subjects in Ireland is programmatically to supplant the language and culture of the populace. Spenser’s View is described in neo-colonial terms and is seen to demonstrate the way in which “a radical Englishing of Ireland” became ideologically paramount (3). There are some rather abrupt leaps in this preliminary discussion, from the historical and cultural specificity of Spenser’s pamphlet to later historical events (such as The Highland Clearances). O’Connor goes on to consider the discourse of Celticism as it was developed by antiquarians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, locating a divide between indigenous Gaelic culture and its translation by “specialists.” This part of the discussion encompasses James Macpherson’s influential Ossian cycle (a sequence of alleged translations from Gaelic source texts that were later proved to be forgeries) and translations of Jacobite aisling poems. Lowland Scots becomes a rather problematic intermediary in this instance in that it denotes a rather different language tradition with its own history (although, like Gaelic, Scots was subject to increasing stigmatisation both within Scotland and externally from the eighteenth century onwards).

O’Connor goes on to consider two texts that, like Spenser’s View, have accrued notoriety in Irish Studies. These are Ernest Renan’s La poésie des races Celtiques (1854) and Mathew Arnold’s “On the Study of Celtic Literature” (1865). O’Connor argues, in a manner that recalls similar assertions by Declan Kiberd, that both texts denote an attempt to frame Celtic identity in such a way that it is seen as subordinate, yet necessary to...