Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society (review)

The continuous negotiation and renegotiation of the past has been a defining feature—in many respects perhaps the defining feature—of Ireland's modernity as a nation. At the close of the twentieth century, however, economic, political, and cultural developments seemed to signal a seismic shift in Irish national identity and, with it, an apparent adjustment of Ireland's long-standing tendency to move forward by looking back. The economic boom of the 1990s, coupled with the signing of the Belfast "Good Friday" peace agreement, and the ready symbolism of a dawning new millennium appeared to presage a future in which Ireland's modernity could be measured in the new currencies of market innovation and global influence instead of in relation to the old legacies of the colonial past: political oppression, poverty, and partition. As Kevin Whalen has put it, "[i]n the 1990s, there was an audible collective exhalation of the national breath: with the advent of the Celtic Tiger, the IRA cessation, the public disclosure of long-hidden abuses within the political system and the Catholic Church, there was a palpable sense that modern Ireland was at last shucking off a baleful historical inheritance."¹

The essays collected in Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society provide one indicator of history's continued resonance and relevance within contemporary Irish culture. Indeed, the evidence amassed here suggests that Ireland remains very much a culture and society steeped in memory—and that this fact is not in any sense at odds with the country's progressive and evolving modernity. Contemporary Ireland, Liam Harte notes in his introduction, has been the site of a significant flowering of autobiography and memoir, genres that, despite their focus on personal and individual experience, have, in fact, paced Ireland's collective engagement with its past throughout the modern period. From Theobald Wolfe Tone to Frank McCourt, autobiography has been a crucial, if overlooked, presence in modern Ireland's dialogue with its past. This volume investigates autobiography's recent prominence in relation to a longer historical perspective and introduces readers to the forms of autobiography and the various analytical approaches to it that have proliferated in modern Ireland.

The essays Harte collects here cover a broad expanse of analytic, historical, and literary territory. Because the book's primary aim is to open a critical dialogue on Irish autobiography, the emphasis is appropriately placed on giving voice to a diversity of perspectives, rather than on locating critical common ground among them. While the contributors share autobiographical writing in Ireland as their common point of focus, they pursue largely distinct lines of inquiry. For this reason, the collection provides little sense of an emerging critical consensus or of a particular analytical agenda. Instead, the volume elects to approach its destination by several routes, leaving an overall impression of Irish autobiography as a rich subject well served by the diversity of voices, perspectives, and methodologies surrounding it.

The differences among them notwithstanding, the eleven essays included share a common orientation, signaled by the volume's subtitle, Self, Nation and Society. In the Irish context, autobiography is a form subtended by both individual and collective identities as well as by the rich and often complex relations between the two. While all of the contributions address in some fashion the relation between self-expression and Irish experience, they fall, broadly speaking, into two general thematic camps: those that address autobiography as a neglected genre in the historical development of Ireland's collective identity as a nation, and those that explore its role in the expression and formation of more narrowly defined individual and personal subjectivities: Irish women, émigrés, protestants, Gaelic-speakers, prominent political figures, and so on.

The volume opens with a cluster of essays addressing autobiography's overlooked role at the historical meeting point between self-fashioning and nation-forming. This section focuses not on offering a dramatic new reading of nationalism's development at the turn of the twentieth century...