Daniel Corkery's Cultural Criticism: Selected Writings

Introduction: Daniel Corkery as Postcolonial Critic

Introduction: Daniel Corkery as Postcolonial Critic Daniel Corkery – writer, language activist, teacher and painter – was born in Cork in 1878 and died in the same city in 1964. He was educated at the Presentation Brothers, Cork, and at St Patrick’s College of Education, Dublin. He worked as a primary school teacher in Cork, taught art for the local technical education committee and was Professor of English at University College Cork from 1931 to 1947. Corkery was a mentor to younger writers and artists; Frank O’Connor, Seán O’Faoláin and Seamus Murphy were amongst his most celebrated protégés.1 He was an active member of the Gaelic League2 and a prominent proponent of the Irish Ireland movement.3 He was also involved in a number of local organisations, most notably the Cork Dramatic Society. In his later years, he served in the Seanad and on the Arts Council. He was a republican in politics and a close friend of Tomás MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney, successive Lord Mayors of Cork who died in tragic circumstances during the War of Independence.4 He was one of the foremost Irish cultural critics of the 1920s and 30s. Corkery began his writing career at the turn of the twentieth century in the columns of D.P. Moran’s polemical nationalist weekly, The Leader. An Irish-language enthusiast who was not a native speaker, he wrote primarily, though not exclusively, in the English language. His literary writings are comprised of four collections of short stories; a number of plays, including the Irish-language play, An Doras Dúnta; a novel and some poetry. His nonfiction writings, which are the focus of this publication, include two major critical studies, The Hidden Ireland (1924) and Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931); writings on the Irish language and on the Irish-language movement; newspaper articles on a wide range of cultural issues; and reviews of Irish-language and English-language literary works. While the contemporary response to his critical writings was mixed, by the late 1990s Corkery had been firmly established in Irish scholarship, particularly amongst those who worked on English-language material, as, in Declan Kiberd’s words, a ‘whipping boy for all right-on pluralists’.5 A 1969 article by the historian L.M. Cullen, now considered a foundational text in Irish revisionism, was fundamental in assigning that role to Corkery. In this article, ‘The Hidden Ireland: Re-assessment of a Concept’, Cullen argued that Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland ‘simplifies Irish history’ and ‘seems to impoverish Irish nationality and sense of identity, seeing it in the context of settlement and oppression and not in the rich, complex and varied stream of 1 identity and racial consciousness heightened in the course of centuries of Anglo-Irish relations’.6 In this and subsequent critiques of Corkery’s critical writings, Corkery is depicted as the chief spokesman for a narrow, repressive and backward-looking Gaelic nationalism from which ‘modern’ Ireland is struggling to escape. In Volume III of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, for example, Corkery is described by Terence Brown as an ‘able polemicist’ for an Irish Ireland movement which ‘insisted that the only authentic Irish identity was the rural Gaelic/Catholic one’. Corkery’s influential critical writings, Brown states, ‘gave intellectual sanction to an attitude that in its less refined form often expressed itself as a strident xenophobia or a bigoted social triumphalism’.7 More sympathetic accounts of Daniel Corkery, such as Patrick Maume’s critical biography of 1993 and Colbert Kearney’s writings on Corkery’s short stories, have, in the main, accepted this interpretation of Corkery’s cultural criticism, arguing, however, that this was only one facet of a Daniel Corkery whose early writings and/or literary works reveal a more complex and contradictory figure than such an interpretation suggests.8 Irish-language scholarship has been more divided in its response to Corkery’s cultural criticism. Breandán Ó Buachalla’s ‘Ó Corcora agus an Hidden Ireland’and Seán Ó Tuama’s ‘Dónall Ó Corcora’, both published in a 1979 special edition of Scríobh in honour of Daniel Corkery, largely represent the opposing viewpoints held by Irish-language scholars on his writings and legacy. Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland is referred to in both of these essays as a ‘leabhar ann féin’ [unique book],9 but the scholars’ understanding of the nature and significance of the book differs substantially. For Ó Tuama, The Hidden Ireland, written...