Exiles of Erin

Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 The reader may assume that these sentences carry the opinion of the author on the subject of the derivation of the name of the Fir Bolg. Then comes the sentence "That, at least, is the traditional explanation of the name. . ." (29). It is not until page 30, after having discussed several critics' agreement with the derivation of the name, the connection between the Formorians and the Fir Bolg, and an item of folklore collected by Lady Gregory, that Smith tells the reader what he thinks: "It is more probable that bolg in the context of Fir Bolg does not mean 'h&g at all." Other flaws of methodology in Smith's book include his being literal to the letter of the law in one place and then offering wild speculations in another (e.g., speculating that the Tuatha De originated in Phoenicia , despite indications in the Lebor Gabála that they originated in Greece [99]) and dismissing linguistic evidence here and then arguing from it there. In discussing the derivation of the name of the Fir Bolg, for instance, Smith says, "These speculations are interesting but purely linguistic, not historical" (30); then in discussing Ogma (one of the Tuatha De), Smith says that "the relatedness of ogam, Ogma, and Ogmios seems obvious, even if the linguistic mechanics of the relationship cannot be explained" and concludes that "Ogma, then, represents the power of communication" (60). In conclusion, while Smith's idea of studying Yeats's relationship to the fairies is a good one, the book itself is a disappointment both in content and method. Carolyn Holdsworth Troy State University in Dothan_______ EXILES OF ERIN Charles Fanning, ed. The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century IrishAmerican Fiction. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987. $26.95 Most students and scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature are also aware of the steady development of AngloIrish literature during the same period. At the very least they are more than passing familiar with the extraordinary flowering of that literature in the Irish Literary Renaissance beginning about 1880. Since this literature was in English, Irish men and women who, through great waves of emigration in the nineteenth century, became Irish-American writers did not face the rigors of learning to think and write in a new tongue. On the other hand, they did encounter ques110 Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 tions of both old and new subject matter and of changing attitudes in a radically different environment. In his "Introduction" to The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (1951), Oscar Handlin observes that "immigrants were American history," notes his behef "that adequately to describe the causes and effects of immigration" was a task he could not then undertake, and adds: "In this work ... I [have] wished to regard the subject from an altogether different point of view. Immigration altered America. But it also altered the immigrants. And it is the effect of their arduous transplantation that I have tried to study." The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction, edited by Charles Fanning, includes an Introduction that briefly but authoritatively outlines the major causes of Irish immigration to America. But the anthology's major contributions to the nascent discipline of Irish-American studies are in establishing a substantial body of Irish-American fiction dating from the eighteenth century, much of it not suspected by most students of Anglo-Irish/ Irish-American literature; in demonstrating through representative fictions-both short stories and excerpts from larger works-the literary validity of Handlin's assertions about the changes the American experience worked on immigrants over the course of the nineteenth century; and in setting out for that period a number of themes that, though Fanning himself does not ordinarily seek to demonstrate this, readers of twentieth -century Irish-American fiction will find further transmuted as the immigrant experience recedes ever further. Fanning's cachet gives credibility to his achievement. An established scholar of Irish-American literature, he is also the recipient of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians for his Finley Peter Dunne and Mr. Dooley: The Chicago Years, which...