Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (review)

Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, edited by Liam Harte and Michael Parker. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 271. $49.95 cloth.

This is a collection of a dozen essays, by as many different scholars, on Irish fiction (mostly novels) since about 1960, particularly of the 1980s and 1990s, with some references back to earlier parts of the twentieth century. On the one hand, as perhaps with any such collection, it is a diverse rather than unified book, with some essays stronger and more interesting than others, as detailed below. On the other hand, more specifically than the generic title on its cover, this book slants in a particular direction and, co-published and edited by Macmillan in London, it might as well have been subtitled something like "British and Irish scholars do theory." With the sole exception of one Canadian, it appears from the contributors' notes that these are natives of Ireland and Britain (teaching mostly on that side of the Atlantic), giving the book a fairly inward-looking cast that seems slightly odd in this increasingly globalized age. Even more specifically, the editors and several of their fellow contributors seem to have emerged out of the Raymond Williams school of British cultural studies (though some contributors have different orientations). The earnest determination here to "do theory" is reflected in the book's subtitle--the word "tropes" does not invite the general reader--and the very dense,

British-styled notes attached to the essays. This is not a book destined to make contemporary Irish fiction more accessible to a wider readership; these are specialist critics talking only to other specialist critics. While they discuss quite a few authors, the editors admit in their introduction that this collection is in no way comprehensive; for example, it does not discuss William Trevor, one of the most important contemporary Irish novelists.

The feminist essays in this collection are among its strongest contributions. "Figuring the Mother in Contemporary Irish Fiction" is a detailed, searching study by Ann Owens Weekes, a pioneering scholar of Irish women writers. This essay is distinguished by the wide sweep of her historical knowledge. After outlining the relevant contexts of the misogynist Irish Free State and the points of view of such earlier authors as O'Casey, Kate O'Brien, and Somerville and Ross, Weekes focuses on Mary Lavin, Edna O'Brien, Jennifer Johnston, and Clare Boylan, working her way from Lavin's Mary O'Grady (1950) all the way to Johnston's The Illusionist (1995). She concludes that these writers "have given voice to their own, but not to their mothers' generation" (121), finding new freedom for themselves but leaving the women of the earlier Free State--which was anything but free for women--essentially voiceless.

Whereas Weekes concentrates on mothers and daughters, Christine St Peter's complementary essay, "Petrifying Time: Incest Narratives from Contemporary Ireland," is devoted to "father-daughter incest in Irish fiction" (125), showing how Edna O'Brien, for example, has become increasingly politicized in her attacks on that problem in such novels as Down by the River (1996). (Trevor may be ignored in this book, but Edna O'Brien is cited by several of the essayists.) Antoinette Quinn's chapter on Emma Donoghue examines her lesbian novels Stir-fry (1994) and Hood (1995), celebrating a fresh perspective that is politicized but not doctrinaire: Donoghue refuses to "construct a monument" either "to gay pride or to gay victimization," advocating "mutual understanding and acceptance," critiquing "lesbian separatism" and bringing "the Irish lesbian novel out of the ghetto" (164).

Gender issues in male writers are given attention in this book as well. In "Re-citing the Rosary: Women, Catholicism and Agency in Brian Moore's Cold Heaven and John McGahern's Amongst Women," Siobhán Holland concludes that both these prominent novels expose "patriarchal discourses about women." And Joseph McMinn ends "Versions of Banville: Versions of Modernism," an essay that mostly emphasizes how devoted Banville has been to "art...