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Revivalism and Modern Irish Literature |
May 8, 2019 |
Reviewer:
Philip O’Leary Boston College from USA
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It will make an important, groundbreaking book. I certainly read it with the same sense of excitement and discovery that I experienced when first reading works like Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland, John Wilson Foster’s Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival, or Máirín Nic Eoin’s Trén bhFearann Breac: An Díláithriú Cultúir agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge. If Irish Studies ever does come to full maturity as an academic discipline it will be because of books like this - broad and original in scope, theoretically sophisticated, based on meticulous research across several disciplines (history, literature, philosophy, psychology, language, post-colonial studies, utopian studies, to name some). Also, this work takes for granted a fact regularly overlooked by many scholars, that is that Ireland has long been characterized by cultural and literary bilingualism (even if today Irish has little place in the everyday life of the country). Without such an openness to the Irish language, it is all but impossible to comment with any authority on the 16th, 17th, and 18th century developments that make up much of the subject matter of this book. (And by the way, the fact that this book is in English makes it both a particularly rich research and a challenge to those who would write of these topics from a purely Anglophone perspective.
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