Description
This collection looks at some of the tensions created when Anglo-Irish writers reflected upon their preferred subject matter, Ireland and their unhyphenated Catholic contemporaries. Tracey shows how Anglo-Irish writers founded modern Irish literature in English, identifying themselves with their native country and its people. Yet they often felt themselves surrounded and watched by an "Unappeasable Host", a population that resented them.Some of the topics and authors covered in the essays, more than half of which are new, include: the colonial novel, Edgeworth, the Banim Brothers, Roger O'Connor, Le Fanu, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, and Bowen. Robert Tracey, Professor of English and Celtic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, has been a leading scholar in Irish studies for four decades.
The cracked looking-glass of a servant - inventing the colonial novel
Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan - legality versus legitimacy
fiery shorthand - the Banim brothers at work
self-fashioning as pseudo-history - Roger O'Connor's "Chronicles of Eri"
Sheridan Le Fanu and the Unmentionable
that rooted man - Yeats, "John Sherman" and "Dhoya"
long division in the long schoolroom - among school children
intelligible on the Blasket Islands - Yeats's "King Oedipus", 1926
merging into art - "The Death of Cuchulain" and the death of Yeats
living in the margin - Synge in Aran
words of mouth - Joyce and the oral tradition
Mr Joker and Dr Hyde - Joyce's politic polyglot polygraphs
in the heart of the Theban necropolis - mummyscripts and mummiescrypts in "Finnegan's Wake"
the burning roof and tower - identity in Elizabeth Bowen's "The Last September"
Elizabeth Bowen - rebuilding the big house
a ghost of style
exorcising the Anglo-Irish past.
"The Unappeasable Host is a treasure trove of scholarship, a series of 16 essays, each and all marked by a vast knowledge of Ireland and its writers, by penetrating insights, and perceptive analysis"
The Boston Irish Reporter, Feb 1999
"What is immediately enthralling about the critic Robert Tracy is that he is not peddling the well trammelled list of references purveyed by various cliques."
Books Ireland April 1999
"With its abundant references to just about everything Irish, this scholarly yet eminently readable volume encourages and advances Irish studies. Tracy includes much for everyone, and readers are in his debt for sharing 30 years of study in this book."
F. L. Ryan, Stonehill College Choice March 1999
"Tracy is making the even more urgent contemporary claim for shared imaginative possessions between the hyphenated and the unhyphenated Irish, the hybrid and the so-called native. For, while concentrating on the writers of the Protestant minority, Tracy's analysis takes its direction from those crisis points where the two cultures draw near and confront one another. This book studies that process, with imaginative sympathy and scholarly detachment; it is a work to challenge prejudice and enlarge understanding."
Dr Anthony Roche, UCD Irish Times Sept 1998
"the pieces in this book are well-grounded, widely read, astutely comparative and intellectually stimulating ... determinedly addressing continuity and context before theory and hypertext."
Times Literary Supplement Nov 1998
"a useful contribution to Anglo-Irish scholarship, positing many new ideas, laying old ghosts and challenging the reader to engage with contemporary criticism and theory."
Irish Literary Supplement Fall 1999
"This volume is a fitting summation to nearly four decades of work on Irish literature and culture."
Matthew Campbell, University of Sheffield Irish Studies Review 7 (3) 1999
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