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This innovative collection of essays views Irish culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, covering a wide range of Irish topics and authors. Bishop Berkeley, Thomas Moore, Oliver Goldsmith, Francis Hutcheson, Laurence Sterne, Richard Steele, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, James Stephens, Charles Lever, Austin Clarke, Kate O'Brien, and Francis Stuart are among the more familiar writers, but the author also sets out to retrieve a range of valuable yet neglected Irish writers including William Dunkin, John Toland, Frederick Ryan, Father Prout, William McGinn, Shan Bullock, Canon Sheehan, and George Birmingham.
The book's topics range from eighteenth-century satire and sentimentalism to the modern Irish novel, and from the carnivalesque in early nineteenth-century Cork to the philosophy of Toland and Berkeley. In moving from celebrated reputations to some lesser-known writers, the book also breaches the boundaries between literary criticism, and intellectual and political history. It concludes with a vigorous intervention into the ongoing debate surrounding revisionism in Irish Studies.
"Readers who know the brilliance of the author will find him here at his high-powered best, the thought of the world seemingly at his fingertips. Eagleton’s focus goes from closeup (Yeat’s poetic form and its difference from Eliot’s; Thomas Moore’s self-conflicted verse; the point of Beckett’s apparent pointlessness) to wide-angle (Augustan concepts of ‘sensibility’ and ‘benevolence’; Irish novelists from Maria Edgeworth to Francis Stuart as ‘cultural emigrés’; Gaelic grouchiness in the work of Steele, Goldsmith, Sterne, and Burke). Eagleton enthusiastically reclaims poet William Dunk and socialist ideologue Frederick Ryan from near oblivion, and his long title essay—which praises John Toland’s philosophic thought as a challenge to Berkeleyan idealism—glitters with sweep and authority. The concluding essay chides revisionist critics for extremism but ends by admitting its necessity in order to achieve human freedom. One can make only a poor pass at suggesting the depth, wit, learning, and elegance of Eagleton’s new work.” —Choice
Terry Eagleton is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. He has published widely on the subject of literary theory. His most recently published books include Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1996) and Saint Oscar and Other Plays (1997).