Irish Literary Revival

31:4 Book Reviews Cleopatra. Unacted parts are summoned up throughout the pageant to remind those assembled at this performance how they are different both from others and from themselves. But also how they can become, often are, fitfully, the same. Maika's analysis does not allow for such dynamic interchange or spirit-bracing identification. She ransacks Harrison's impressive work on ancient ritual practices and Greek religion for definite explanations of the novel's mythological operations. Instead of mystery, then, we get conspiracy, instead of poetic possibilities, political code words. Conspiracy seems the wrong word to describe Woolf's relation to Harrison. Neither Hanison nor Woolf depicted ritual activity in the partisan spirit that Maika brings to her reading, one that too often reduces the "thousand possibilities" of words into a single and singularly inert formula. Maika's real subject is Woolf's prophecy, her visionary anticipation of what Maika, in a belated and important insight, calls a "language of survival." This language would include a vast anay of words and accommodate a thousand possibilities of meanings. In this vision, Maika's interpretations finally appear to be consonant with Woolf's own. I would not call such consonance conspiracy, but criticism in the proper sense. Maria DiBattista Princeton University IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL John Wilson Foster. Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987. $35.00 In 1976 the Modem Language Association published Anglo-Irish Literature: A Review of Research, edited by Richard J. Finneran, a substantial volume with chapters on general studies, nineteenth century Irish literature, and postRevival drama as well as individual considerations of Wilde, George Moore, Shaw, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, "four Revival figures" (Lady Gregory, A.E., Gogarty, Stephens), and O'Casey. The general usefulness of this overview and evaluation of scholarship was obvious, but equally apparent was the rapidity with which such books become outdated: hence the need for a 1983 supplement, Recent Research on Anglo-Irish Writers, 334 pages of text that survey just six years in the field. Nor has the process ended, for the two volumes are being combined, rewritten, and updated in a Sisyphean attempt to provide students and scholars with a one-volume guide to research into nineteenth and twentieth century "Anglo-Irish" writers, by which ambiguous term Finneran and his collaborators simply mean Irish authors who write in the English language. At some point Finneran's reviewers must put their chapters in final form, mail them off, and wait a few years for the next supplement or revision before assessing a book that might well arrive a day or two after the chapter's final encounter with the word processor. It would be a shame were that to happen to John Wilson Foster's Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival, for in its fifteen 497 31:4 Book Reviews chapters readers will find analyses of Irish Literary Renaissance prose whose judgments are likely to affect scholarly opinion in the field for some time. Putting it plainly, Foster's book is the most comprehensive, original, and engrossing treatment of its subject that I have seen in a long time. That subject is the Literary Revival—an appellation Foster prefers to Literary Renaissance—itself. Foster examines the Revival's "fictions," by which he means not only its imaginative prose writings but also its sustaining ideological assumptions and the iconography that those assumptions engender. Arguing that the prose of the Revival period "was written in furtherance of, or in conscious reaction against, the Irish literary revival," Foster portrays a country whose prose engaged in a dialogue with itself over "the nature and identity of Ireland, and the extent of its legitimate power to define the nature and identity of the individual." The exploitation of Celtic mythology, the portrayal of Irish peasants, the opposition of spiritual and material values, the recunence of such metaphors as the West and the island—these and other aspects of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Irish literature may be regarded as part of an ongoing debate over national and individual identity. Foster explores that debate with a subtlety and clarity that can have developed only out of long familiarity with his subject...