Light, Freedom and Song: A Cultural History of Modern Irish Writing

by David Pierce Jr.

In this absorbing analysis of modern Irish writing, an acknowledged expert considers the hybrid character of modern Irish writing to show how language, culture, and history have been affected by the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300109946
• ISBN13: 9780300109948
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 2.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.8" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Combines specific topics with broad survey

Many collections of essays by literary critics tend to be an assortment of talks, reviews, articles, and anecdotes strung together, closely or loosely as the arranger deems. For David Pierce, of the University of York, he in his new book places within frameworks that stretch over the past century many topics perhaps temporarily orphaned, perhaps, after being presented at 'Joyce symposia and Irish conferences' across the world. But, here James Joyce's treatment of cricket finds probably its first analysis, along more familiar subjects as Yeats and the Rising, the Celtic Revival and cultural nationalism, and the Troubles or the famine from over the past 150 years in literature. These chapters, then, play off extended riffs. What need do we have, still, for another professor's compendium? Pierce pursues the game of the harp vs. the crown. Caught up in the paper chase, he charges past British and Irish fences. Pierce asks how authors stalk a quicksilver Irish colonial-postcolonial phantom. In Beckett, appropriately, Pierce finds a master of evasion and redeployment. Beckett's ambiguity as Parisian-Irish, foreign member of the Resistance, Anglo-Irish, non Irish-Irelander, Dubliner schooled in the North at Portara, satirist in English prose who chose the discipline of French: this marks a hybrid character who--as with Yeats, Wilde, and Swift elsewhere scrutinised-- becomes an emblem for Pierce. In his highly recommended anthology, Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century (Cork UP, 2000; also reviewed by me), Pierce edited a massive tome that crams in fiction, fact, oratory, travelogue, diatribe, song, and verse and combinations thereof. This stirabout, this mulligan stew, satisfies its compiler, who explains movingly in a preface that in its personal revelations exemplifies the value for a scholar to show the hand he's played rather than hold his cards close to his vest, posing with an objective sang-froid none of us can sustain. Pierce, he explains about himself, was born in post-war England but son of an Irish mother, and drawn to the summers spent in his maternal homeland and then back to his own native but not quite home turf. About another hybrid Irish-British writer, Martin McDonagh, Pierce observes this from The Lieutenant of Inishmore. 'Very few characters or situations in modern Irish literature lie outside the known or familiar. Padraic tells his distended victim: "If it hadn't been such a nice fella I would've taken one toenail off of separate feet, but I didn't, I took two toenails off the one foot, so that it's only the one foot you'll have to be limping on and not the two".' (qtd. 42) Often, as shown here, Pierce summons up from his capacious memory the right passage to make his point. Irish tendencies towards gallows humour, mordant moralism, superlatives, the speed of craic at 90: this element rears with McDonagh but then fades in Pierce's study. Pages whir by with asides to authors and their texts, many barely mentioned. Still, as