Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art by John Wilson Foster, and: Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture by John Wilson Foster (review)

172 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 John Wilson Foster. Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art Syracuse University Press. 407. 1987 John Wilson Foster. Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture LiUiput Press. 298. 1991. $17.95 paper The Ulster poet John Hewitt's 'Colonial Consequence,' a masculinist reflection on 'eager men' and 'our fathers,' was published in Freehold and Other Poems in 1986. It is titled in a notebook entry for 1 October 1953 'Gentlemen adventurers, or The Old Virginian,' and, in a revised version of the early 1960s, 'The Island.' Hewitt's preoccupations with identity and colonialism have him contemplating a Jacobean landscape of division and polity in which the colonizers' drive 'to tame this land and till I and plant a thriving nation here among I the black-browned tribes' is disturbed by the need to keep a watchful eye on 'random beacons on insurgent hill/ The Plantation of Ulster, the colonization of Turtle Island (an Aboriginal name for his continent), and Northern Ireland are brought into conjunction in an uneasy examination of cultural identity. The poem provides the title for John Wilson Foster's Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture. Foster volunteers his own 'tribal allegiances' to a background of 'lower middle-class loyalism and Nonconformism in east Belfast' in his sympathetic explanation of the identities of modern Irish, and particularly 'Ulster,' writers. He prods the cultural production of a place he had once 'shown a clean pair of heels.' The first of the sixteen essays in Foster's collection, 'The Topographical Tradition in Anglo-Irish Poetry' (1974), relates late eighteenth-century prospect poems about Killarney and Ulster to the 'improvement' topos of English topographical poetry. Joseph Atkinson's 'Killarney' (1798), for example, proposes bringing English workers to teach the Irish industry, part of the continuing colonialist mythos found in Hewitt's poen1, though Atkinson's prospect of the Irish as 'a renovated race' is absent from Hewitt's freehold landscape. Foster's suggestive notation of the displacement and settlement that were part of the effects of eighteenth-century ordinance surveying pushes back chronologically the investigation of cultural mapping in his Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art (1987). In Fictions Foster explores the years from 1880 to the 1920s, the Revival period associated with Lady Gregory, Yeats, Synge, James Stephens, and AE (George Russell). The Revivalist hegemony of dusky cultural vision, constructed out of the failing political power of the Ascendancy, proceeded from Yeats's ostensibly anti-materialist mapping of Irish culture and aesthetics, using as triangulation stations the aristocrat, the artist, and the peasant. Stephens supplied the Mount of Transfiguration and the Hill of Vision. Vision of the twilightist variety, the reahn of faery, veil, and revelation, is the basis for Yeats/s putative HUMANmES 173 connection between aristocratic and peasant systems of belief, an association provoked .by the decline of the Ascendancy. The Revivalists' alternative to empire and orientalism was an occidentalism composed of nobility and PQ (Peasant Quality) - the noble peasant was best in the west. This was a desperate seeking of new identities. Foster quotes Jack E. Reese on Breton ethnic minority nationalism to explain his sense of those mostly Protestant Irish intellectuals faced with the collapse of the old order and the growth of a middle class challenging their interests: [TJhese intellectuals may extricate themselves from their dangerous situation by following either of two courses of action. They may seek affiliation with one of the various groups that are struggling to dominate the emergent social order or, through scrutiny of their social moorings, they may seek to rise above their particular class interests and forge a new mission for themselves as the detached guardians of the moral and material objectives of the people as a whole. The Revivalists employed the tropes of change (reincarnation, transfiguration , transcendentalism) in the forging of new identities for themselves. Foster links their anti-modern Revivalism and cultural nationalism to their political predicament. Reheated Blakean philosophy, romantic folklorism , nostalgia, utopianism, and primitivism contributed to that entropion which revealed news of the invisible world. The 'geography of revival delusion,' as Foster calls Revival Dublin headquarters and its field laboratory in the...