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  • New Edition on Irish Fiction & Drama
  • Brian W. Shaffer
Margaret Hallissy. Understanding Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016. 206 pp. $45.00

MARGARET HALLISSY'S Understanding Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama provides an engaging overview of its subject. It is particularly valuable for its discussions of the various contexts out of which Irish fiction and drama of the past century arose and by which it should be understood. Hallissy's nine chapters tackle major themes of Irish history—the struggle over Irish land, the fate of the Irish language, the Great Famine, and the 1916 Easter Rising, for example— and then offer close readings of selected novels, stories, and plays of the past half century through the prism of these issues. What unifies and stands behind all of these themes (and hence behind much of the literature discussed) is the crucial fact of Britain's political, economic, and cultural subjugation of Ireland for centuries and Ireland's intermittent struggles to free itself from this bondage.

The first chapter, "'Nothing can happen nowhere': A Place in the World," explores an idea with which the author in the introduction opens her book: "It all begins with the land." Geographical and demographic tensions within the island coupled with centuries of struggle over land ownership (between and among various competing British and Irish nationalist and religious groups) are broached as a means of exploring three fictions: "Pastorale" by Patrick Boyle, "Kathleen's Field" by William Trevor, and Wild Decembers by Edna O'Brien. If the hunger for land is an essential topic in Irish literature, so is the phenomenon of storytelling itself, the subject of the second chapter, "Just Tell Them the Story: Tradition Bearing." Here Hallissy traces the stereotype of the Irish "gift of gab" and love of narrative to the tradition of the seanachie, the itinerant storyteller, entertainer, and transmitter of folk-wisdom who told tales that put the past and present into a dialogue. The author then discusses a century-old short story by J. M. Synge, "An Autumn [End Page 285] Night in the Hills," and a contemporary play by Conor McPherson, The Weir, as a means of exemplifying the prevalence of (and the variations within) the storytelling tradition in Irish literature.

The third chapter, "'The abuse of language': Irish, English, American," explores what might be called the language wars in Irish history and society: the systematic supplanting of Irish Gaelic by the English language over centuries of British colonization, followed by the more recent (but far less contested) inroads into Irish culture made by American English. Hallissy fleshes out this struggle over language by discussing the single most provocative Irish play to interrogate British linguistic imperialism—Brian Friel's Translations—and one of the most popular Irish novels to explore the impact of American English (and music) on Irish society, Roddy Doyle's The Commitments. Chapter four, "An Gorta Mor: Hunger as Reality and Metaphor," opens with the claim that "the Great Famine, beginning with the blighted potato crop of 1845, is the pivotal event in Irish history." While this event has been much studied over the years there is little consensus in the scholarship as to the precise contours of British culpability in bringing about the "Irish Holocaust." What is clear is that the British government, in its handling of the crisis, made a bad situation far worse, and that some 2.5 million Irish people either died or emigrated. Hallissy's literary touchstones in this chapter are a Trevor story, "The News from Ireland," and a Joseph O'Connor novel, Star of the Sea, at once "a historical analysis of the landholding system that led to the Irish dependence on the potato; a painfully detailed description of the Famine's ravages; a sociological explanation of the relationship between the classes in Ireland; a story of thwarted love and failed marriage; and a murder mystery."

In chapter five, "'Terrible beauty': The Easter Rising," the author turns to the single most iconic event in Ireland's long history of resistance to British rule, the 1916 Rising. Iconic and much-scrutinized though it is—and timed to strike when Britain was busy fighting the...

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