The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism ed. Joe Cleary (review)

For a phenomenon as central to modern Ireland’s cultural identity and global reputation and so vital to Irish Studies, the consideration of Irish modernism and the intricacies of its production and reception as a phenomenon has been surprisingly neglected. Given how large Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett loom in twentieth-century literary culture and the growing attention being paid in broader modernist studies contexts to writers like Elizabeth Bowen and Flann O’Brien, one may be partly forgiven for taking Irish modernism for granted. The constitutive details of Irish modernism and the shifting—and sometimes clashing—ideas about what makes its elements distinctively Irish or clearly modernist, and what the relationship between the two might be, are generally left unexplored. Although it is surprising to realize that there have not been more sustained analyses of the fundamental categories, conflicts, and contours of Irish modernism, it is even more shocking to realize that the crucial need for that work had not previously been more apparent. Taking on this challenge, The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, edited by Joe Cleary, is one of those books that one reads and thinks, “Why hasn’t someone done this before?”

One can usefully dip into the volume for individual essays offering concise and thoughtful reflections on particular teaching or research topics. However, the Companion to Irish Modernism really begs to be read in its entirety. Precisely because most engagements with Irish modernism tend to be segmented and specialized, considering the volume’s wide range of essays together proves remarkably generative and will almost certainly challenge at least some of what even the most seasoned scholars of modernism and Irish cultural history thought they knew. The volume treats an array of writers working in both the English- and Irish-language traditions alongside analyses of key visual artists, patrons, and critics. Offering valuable new insight on figures like Joyce and Yeats, the collection’s structure lends those insights greater depth by weaving them into wider discussions of the critical investments, intellectual histories, and cultural and social networks shaping Irish modernism’s profile in Ireland and elsewhere.

The benefits of the volume’s fresh approach to canonical figures and their integration with a series of complementary analyses of contexts and networks is nicely illustrated by O’Connor’s discussion of Yeats and modernist poetry. Laura O’Connor addresses how Yeats was only reluctantly included in early accounts of Irish modernism and considers his poetry in relation to the more explicitly avant-garde work from Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey in 1930s Paris as well as very different poetry from Blanaid Salkeld, Louis MacNeice, and Máire Mhac an tSaoi. O’Connor’s discussion of female poets is complemented by Fogarty’s focus on the role of modernism in Irish women’s fiction and drama as she draws together frequently treated figures like Bowen, Kate O’Brien, and Lady Gregory with such often overlooked writers as George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), Katherine Cecil Thurston, Alice Milligan, and Dorothy Macardle. Those discussions are complemented in turn by Luke Gibbons’s wide-ranging exploration of Irish visual modernism running from engagements with fauvism and cubism in the pioneering work of May Guinness, Mary Swanzy, Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett to the design and architecture of Eileen Gray and Michael Scott, stage designs of Norah McGuinness, and cinema of Denis Johnston. Positioning these artists in relation to the more frequently discussed work of Jack Yeats, Louis le Brocquy, and Francis Bacon, Gibbons does a remarkable job of illuminating and addressing the influence of Irish literary modernism in shaping Irish visual modernism’s development.

Emer Nolan similarly sheds new light on Joyce by simultaneously tracking his connections to rival Irish modernist formations and an Irish novel tradition encompassing George Moore and Charles Kickham while showing how historical shifts in Joyce criticism oriented toward cosmopolitanism or colonialism reflect shifting ideas of modernity and modernism. Nolan’s account pairs especially well with Duffy’s fascinating intellectual history...