Writing Modern Ireland, ed. by Catherine E. Paul (review)

In an era when publishers are imposing stricter limits on the number of previously printed essays they will allow to be included in essay collections, one has to wonder about the decision-making behind Writing Modern Ireland, published by the Clemson University Press and edited by Catherine E. Paul. Sixteen of the nineteen essays in the collection have been previously published, also by the Clemson University Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, in a special issue of the South Carolina Review, "Ireland in the Arts and Humanities."¹ This is a colloquia issue, derived from papers given at the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Southern Regional American Conference for Irish Studies, held at Clemson University. In addition, the complete issue is available online, since the South Carolina Review is digitized, through the EBSCO subscription service.

So why a book? There is nothing thematically or theoretically linking these essays cohesively together, other than that they are all about Irish literature. To apply the term "modern" is a bit disingenuous for essays covering the work of W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Kate O'Brien, Mary O'Donnell, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Seamus Heaney, Michael Coady, Keith Ridgway, Anne Enright, the Cuala Press, and the challenges of editing Irish poetry in America. It is not enough to state that all of the essays are about twentieth-century Irish literature, nor is it convincing to claim, as Paul does in her introduction, that the "volume takes up questions of what it means to write modern Ireland" or that the essays are united by themes of nationhood or national identity (vii). Virtually all twentieth-century Irish literature deals with national identity in some form, either explicitly or implicitly, constructively or deconstructively, so as an organizing principle it means little at this point. Paul more accurately concludes that "even as we identify thematic strands among the contributions, it becomes clear that no one essay belongs to a single strand" (vii). In other words, the volume is a hodge-podge.

Nevertheless, there are many fine essays here that deserve reprinting. In particular, there are eight strong discussions of Yeats, not organized in any apparent order but mostly focusing on his late work, beginning with Ronald Schuchard's beautifully written "Yeats in Extremis," in which the author considers Yeats's lifelong association of death with "tragic joy and ecstasy," from his earliest essays on magic through his elegiac ennobling of "Pearse and Connolly … Robert Gregory, and others" to his final "dream visions of Cuchulain" (4, 11). We also learn much about the aged Yeats from Jonathan Allison's "'The Old Moon-Phaser': Yeats, Auden, and MacNeice." After a brief biographical opening, Allison explicates several late poems before turning to Auden's and MacNeice's evolving attitudes toward the master from the 1930s to the end of their lives. Wim Van Mierlo challenges several critical truisms about Joyce and Yeats, first by separating the historical facts from the iconic fictions of their first meeting, then by examining the prosody and diction of Chamber Music and minimizing the perceived Yeatsian influences; Van Mierlo concludes that the true "affinity" between Joyce and Yeats lies in "their conceptions of art and artist" (55).

Two essays discuss Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer from different critical approaches, both contributing in interesting ways to an understanding of that play.² Alexandra Poulain analyzes the theatrical strategies Yeats employs to embody Cuchulain's absence onstage: the doubling of his mask, his representation through Emer's speech, and his restoration by Bricriu, who ironically turns Emer into a "spectator" as well as a specter, a "tragic heroine whose renouncement means a kind of death" (103). On the other hand, Ken Monteith uses disability studies to explore how Bricriu's withered arm represents not so much his evil nature but "his alterity, and his role as a bringer of truth" (105). Monteith's attempt to establish Emer's sacrifice as a form of disability is less convincing; however, he concludes with the...