Handbook of The Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891-1922 ed. by Declan Kiberd and P. J. Mathews (review)

It is a rare anthology that offers no surprising blooms in its gathering, and this commodious handbook to the Irish Revival by two distinguished scholars, with extracts from creative, critical, and political writings, is no exception. Be it Vladimir Lenin commenting briefly on the 1916 rebellion or the fascinating diary of Father Aloysius Travers and down-to-earth deposition of Sean Keegan on the same event, there are many excerpts to inform one's grasp of that extraordinary cultural revival, which, we are told with curious exactitude, took place between 1891 and 1922.¹

There is, however, method in its comprehensiveness. Among the surprises is to find Joyce listed as one of the "central players" of the Revival; later, he even becomes one of the "leaders" of the Revival (27, 239). The logic is thus: the Revival was innovative and progressive; Joyce was an innovative and progressive writer; ergo, Joyce was a Revivalist. Those who have seen in Joyce opposition to the Anglo-Irish literary Revival are here viewed as reactionary.

Four extracts by Joyce are chosen to support this version of a Revivalist Joyce. The carefully brief one from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man depicts poverty and oppressive landlordism (239-40); a Trieste newspaper article berates the Irish Parliamentary Party (and by implication constitutional nationalism—372); "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" is said in the sidebar commentary to depict paralysis and provincialism (49-50) (conditions requiring by implication a national revival; indeed, the editors see a parallel between that story and Douglas Hyde's 1892 manifesto, "The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland"²). Given the heavy-handed nationalist project that the Handbook represents, only the extract from "The Day of the Rabblement" ought to give the editors obvious trouble, with its attack on Irish populism and its reminder of the elevated solitude of the true artist and examples of European drama to be followed (164-65, CW 68-72). But these are not pursued in an anthology that marches inexorably towards the apparent "triumph" of Easter 1916, and the extract does establish Joyce's progressiveness while the Abbey Theatre actor Frank Fay's rebuttal that follows it, "The Irish Literary Theatre," gets the anthology back on its nationalist track (166).

The editors see the Revival as a rough but unitary weaving of socialism, modernism, feminism, Gaelicism, Anglophobia, paramilitarism, Catholicism, language, sports, literature, folklore, social theory, and militant politics. Extracts are selected to strengthen the warp and weft of the material. Why else include a cringe-making piece of anti-Englishness by W. B. Yeats from an interview conducted in 1904 at the end of a visit to the United States (246-47)? I assumed, wrongly, that the editors would humorously indict its affable hypocrisy—Yeats praising American democracy, populism, and commitment to universal education when at home he was a confessed elitist. The title of the extract is a quotation from Yeats, "We Are Unlike the English in All Except Language," but these words do not occur in the interview itself. They are hinted at in an unsourced sidebar quotation—presumably the New York Daily News byline—and what follows may not be Yeats's comments at all.

The warp and weft are knitted also with some blithe historical generalizations. During the nineteenth century, "[Ireland] was a dark place of almost medieval privations, which challenged even modernising leaders" (382). What part of the island are they talking about, precisely, and when, exactly? These medieval privations apparently inspired gothic literature, though the same literature seems to have been created in England, the post-medieval enemy. And because everything before the Revival was very bad, "[i]n the catastrophic disaster [of the Famine], the vengeance visited by nature was widely understood by...