Literacy, Language and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland ed. by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, and Muireann O'Cinneide (review)

For countries that were formerly part of the British Empire, the cultural politics of language remain a persistent topic of debate, especially in contemporary English-language writing. Brian Friel notes in his dramatic masterpiece Translations (1980), which could serve as a companion to this valuable scholarly collection, that language and literacy do not merely describe the world but in fact help to create it, establishing both a set of possibilities and limits. Just as Friel's play complicates our sense of Irish literacy practices in the decades before the Irish famine, this collection up-ends many assumptions about nineteenth-century Ireland as it grappled with literacies in both English and Irish during a century that witnessed tremendous change. Importantly, the authors examine languages and literacy practices within global frameworks wider than empire, such as European politics and classical and Continental language learning.

Published under the auspices of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Literacy, Language and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland is a cause for celebration and a strong indicator of the maturation of the field. The authors examine a diverse array of reading and writing practices, exploring "discourses surrounding literacy" including "new literacies" engendered via new technologies, print culture, orality, visuals, and trends such as palmistry (3). Organized sensibly into sections on literacy and bilingualism, periodicals and their readers, translation and transnational literacies, and visual literacies, this collection showcases some of the best theoretical and methodological approaches to Irish studies today.

The lead chapter by print historian Niall Ó Ciosáin complicates the once dominant narrative of Irish language loss over the course of the nineteenth century. Ó Ciosáin examines Irish census data, which provides far more nuanced analysis of literacy and its distribution than British census data, demonstrating that literacy in English in fact stimulated rather than suppressed Irish literacy and ushered in an era of considerable bilingualism. Máire Nic an Bhaird and Liam Mac Mathúna's chapter on the linguistic development of Douglas Hyde, founding president of the Gaelic League and the first professor of Modern Irish at University College Dublin, reveals additional dimensions of his multilingualism. The authors analyze Hyde's teenage diary, where he records his growing mastery of Irish using anglicized transcriptions and diacritical marks from French, to uncover how his coming-of-age narrative conveys important insight into his experiments in learning and writing Irish.

For periodicals scholars, this volume offers a rich array of new work that examines both well-known and understudied publications that delineated and facilitated national and religious identity. James Quinn's careful study of the Nation, founded by radical Young Irelanders in 1842, highlights the transformative power of a nationalist newspaper to enact cultural and social changes for the populace. Quinn traces the paper's nationalist educational crusade (which included encouraging Irish readers to gain literacy in English) and notes how this early effort to promote nationalist history influenced nation-wide educational programming—from a marked growth in nationalist reading rooms to the launch of an influential book series "Library of Ireland," which sold inexpensive books of nationalist history, fiction, and poetry. Whereas Quinn sheds new light on a well-known paper, Elizabeth Tilley expertly illuminates the under-examined Dublin Penny Journal, which reshaped antiquarian history along nationalist lines in the 1830s. Tilley's chapter reminds scholars of the surprising riches in miscellany publications like the penny magazine, especially when edited by a prominent member of the Royal Irish Academy like George Petri. Petri was an artist and activist who systematically worked to translate the ancient chronicles of Ireland to a general audience. Nicola Morris explores the Irish Methodist press, which charts the theological and political shifts in Irish Methodism (distinct from that being promoted in England) during the nineteenth century.

Chapters in the section on translation and transnationalism explore how readers...