Representing Ireland

BOOK REVIEWS rive at a fair assessment of Woolf s intentions. Maze stresses throughout the book that Woolf s feminism was far from fanaticism or uncritical blindness, that she despised attitudes not sexes, and was against the love of power and authoritarianism, "cloaked as morality," in either men or women. Justyna Kostkowska Middle Tennessee State University Representing Ireland Susan Shaw Sailer, ed. Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. xv + 224 pp. $49.95 THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES of this collection of essays originated in its history. Susan Shaw Sailer used papers from a regional Irish Studies conference with the "organizing theme" of "Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Ethnicity" and papers from a national Irish Studies conference, organized presumably upon an even more general theme, as "the base for a significant cross-section of studies on the representation of gender, class, and ethnicity in Ireland during the past several centuries." Explaining that "eventually nationality came to seem a more helpful marker than ethnicity for the issues being explored, she replaced "ethnicity" with "nationality" in the title of the collection. Conference themes are created to be inclusive in order to accommodate as many of the best submissions as possible. However, essay collections, like books, need a careful and precise focus if the individual parts are to cohere and illuminate significant new perspectives and arguments. Despite Sailer's efforts to provide a complex theoretical framework for the essays with a seven-page preface, a twelve-page introductory essay entitled "Representation: Responsibility/Ideology/Power/Difference," and a three-part structure with carefully configured titles, the ten essays and an interview by Irish and American writers in Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality would have been equally effective as individual journal articles. The topic of "class" in the collection's title is absent in Part I: "Constructing Irish Identities: Nationality, Gender, Language," where Sailer added "language" to the already extensive scope of the collection so she could include an eloquent essay on Irish by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. The lead essay in this section, Declan Kiberd's "From Nationalism to Liberation " provides a post-colonial framework for the collection, although it is not particularly relevant to discussions of Irish that dominate the other 99 ELT 42 : 1 1999 two pieces in this section. After trying to decode the theoretical density of Sailer's preface and introductory essay, the lucidity of Kiberd's essay is most welcome. Leslie Williams's interview with Eiléan Ni Chuillean áin offers insights into the roles that family, language and gender play in her poetry. Ni Dhomhnaill's essay, "Why I Choose to Write in Irish, the Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back," explores the "enormous elasticity and emotional sensitivity" and "the constant tension between reality and fantasy" in Irish and defends its "unique and unrepeatable way of looking at the world." Ni Dhomhnaill's observation that "in Ireland it was religion rather than language that mostly colored nationalism " reminds the reader that religion is notably absent as a topic in this collection that purports to explore the construction of "Irish senses of self." Sailer says Part II: "Reconstructing Irish Identities" shows "Irish senses of self in the process of being made and remade." However, the three essays focus on how a mid-nineteenth-century English newspaper depicted the Irish, on one of W. B. Yeats's attempts to construct an identity for the Irish, and on the impact of contemporary economic forces on Irish identity. Leslie Williams's essay, "Irish Identity and in the Illustrated London News, 1846-1851" demonstrates how the paper's depictions of the Irish and the potato famine "both reflected and generated a view of Ireland for its English readers." Williams's careful analysis of how the paper's text and illustrations conveyed "a strange narrative that vacillates from intense sympathy to dismissive antipathy" presents some of the most important scholarship in the collection, but it has little to do with Sailer's stated focus for the collection, how the Irish, who did not read this paper, constructed "national senses of self." Similarly, John Rickard's essay "Studying a New Science: Yeats, Irishness, and the East," while interesting, has little to do...