Reviews

Links & Letters 2, 1995 89-104 Reviews D. CAIRNS and S. RICHARDS, Wkting Irehnd Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture. Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1988. 178 pages. of essentialisrn, as well as conscientious and highly eloquent in their grounding of al1 kinds of writing in the conternporary cultural clirnate and material conditions. These are never ~resented as a rnere In the final chapter of Writing Ireland, Cairns and Richards clairn that since the late 1960s, as a result of the econornic developrnent of the South and the crisis of Northern Ireland. Irish writers and intellectuals North and South have becorne engaged in a renewed process of historial excavation which is no longer airned at erecting exclusive, essentialist definitions of national identity, but rather at a reappraisal of national needs and purposes, and a radical re-reading of Irish history through the past 500 years, marked by what S. Deane terrns the <ccolonial concussion)). There is no doubt that this is also Cairns and Richards's airn in Writin~ O Irehnd, so that they stand unquestionably as inhabitants of the «fif& province), they invoke in their closing chapter, the nonsectarian cultural location for the critica1 alliance of Irish artists and intellectuals, North and South. Writing Ireland is a wide-ranging, densely-packed study of the ways in which the identities of the Irish and the English, the colonised and the coloniser, have been rnade and re-rnade through dis- " course. The authors are consistent in their avoidance and denunciation of al1 forrns I backdrop, but as inforrning the writing with a specific ideological value within the current cultural struggle for the creation of a hegernonic national consciousness. Indeed, it is no coincidenfe that Writing Ireland should forrn part of the C~hral Polities series of Manchester U.P., which publishes texts written frorn a cultural rnaterialist perspective under the general editorship of J. Dollirnore and A. Sinfield. The rnain focus of the authors' exarnination is the 19th and 20th centuries, to which six out of the seven chronologically-arranged chapters are devoted. However, the opening chapter serves as a necessary prelude where the authors outline the originary rnoment of the colonial relationship between England and Ireland, the 16th century, seen as the crucial period for the cultural forrnation of a new sense of «Englishness)), at the same time as thev introduce the pararneters which forrn the basis of the interdisciplinary methodology to be used. Drawing on L. Althusser, M. Foucault, A. Gramsci, S. Greenblatt and E. Said, culture is defined as the site of the struggle for hegernony, and discourses as the primary cultural rneans through which 90 Links & Letters 2, 1995 Reviews individuals are interpellated into a parnation which would rnake it possible for ticular social or political position. This them to assume leadership while maindetermines the central concern of their taining their material and cultural dornibook: the ways in which the struggle for nance. the taking over of discourses, for the cre- Chapter 2 is devoted to a discussion ation of a hegernonic cultural clirnate, of the cultural polernic of the poet and has taken place and is taking place bet- Gaelic scholar Sir Samuel Ferguson and ween classes, nations, linguistic, cultu- of T. Davis, the leading light of the ral or ethnic collectivities in Ireland. The Young Ireland group, both of whorn subsequent analyses are not only penebelonged to the Anglo-Irish cornrnunity, trating and cogently argued, but rnost the group whose privileged position was thought-provoking for the reader intebeing threatened by Catholic rested in the critical exarnination of the Ernancipation (1 829), the 1832 Reform discourses contending for the articulation Bill and the Repeal Movernent arnong of other national identities and actualiothers. As Cairns and Richards clairn, an ties. understanding of Fergusonls cultural stra- In chapter 1 the above concepts are tegy, based on appropiating the cultural applied to the analysis of English writing products of Ireland's past for the on Ireland and writing by the Irish (both Ascendancy so as to counter the rnobili- Native Irish and Old English) in the 16th zation of the past by Catholics, is essential and early 17th centuries. Shakespeare's in order to grasp W.B. Yeats's ((Irishness)), Henry Vand The Tempest come under a question to which much attention is the authors' critical eye, as do Spenser's devoted in chapters 4, 5, and 6. On the The Faerie Queene and A View of the other hand, Cairns and Richards show Present State of Ireland, from the pershow Davis's atternpt at constructing a pective of Greenblatt's notion of «selfcross-sectarian alliance between middlefashioning~ and its concornitant class Protestants and Catholics by dis- «otherness>). Cairns and Richards are placing religion frorn its central role in equally insightful in their exarnination the production of identity inevitably led of Irish writing in the 16th and early to the confrontation between hirn and 17th centuries, which attempts to O'Connell. In chapter 3, a fascinating dernonstrate that the intellectual leaaccount of the political irnplications of dership was passing frorn the Gaelic inte- M. Arnold's creation of the discourse of lligentsia, the bards and poets, to the Celticism, predicated on an anti-derno- Counter-Reformation Catholic Church, cratic and anti-rnaterialist stance, is fowhich produced rnaterials for the supllowed by an exarnination of the task of port of Catholicism in Ireland based on S. O'Grady, the link between Arnold and refuting English assertions about the the Anglo-Irish Revival of the 1890s, Irish. The intervention of the ((Repressive who, in the context of growing Irish re- State Apparatuses)) in Ireland frorn 1641 publicanisrn and increasing pressure from makes it clear, according to Cairns and the Land League, sought to rnobilize the Richards, that the colonizer's use of the Irish literature written before the English persuasive «Tdeological State Apparatuses)) invasions for the benefit of the Ashad failed. It is in this context that the cendancy. authors place their subsequent discussion Chapters 4 and 5 are an absorbing of the Anglo-Irish intellectuals' atternpts guide-to the cornplexities of the events in the 19th and early 20th centuries to and cultural clirnate leading up to the forge a connection with the people- Easter Rising of 1916. Rather than seeing l Reviews Links & Letters 2, 1995 91 the 1890s Revival as a unified movement and rejecting the Celtic mysticism of the and as the percusor of the Rising, the Anglo-Irish writers. Similarly they argue authors' contention is that it should be that the pagan ritual of sacrifice which regarded as the culminating episode in a resonates through the Rising and in the cultural struggle for the articulation of work of the 1916 poets is firrnly groundthe people-nation, mostly formed by ed in Catholicism, thus drawing a distenant farmers and shopkeepers, fought tinction between this motif as found in between the Anglo-Irish intellectuals and the Anglo-Irish and in the Irish-Irish voices emanating from within the people- Revivals. In P. Pearse, above all, nation itself. It is argued that al1 those Cuchulain becomes a conscious imitation who would lead the people-nation were of Christ, whose death would be followinterpellated by the mutually intered by the resurrection of the Catholic dependent discourses of familism, people of Ireland. The authors highlight Catholicism and sexuality, responses to the fact that the liturgical quaiity of the which included, arnong others, D. Hyde's behaviour of the 1916 leaders, particudefinition of Irish nationality; W.B. larly Pearse, dismpted the oíd correlation Yeats's career from the 1880s to 1907, between Church and the U.I.L. by, howwhich the authors see as an attempt to ever briefly, enlisting the support of the enable the hsion of the Anglo-Irish with Church's intellectuals. The authors sirnithe people-nation by re-making the latlarly claim that the form of the Easter ter either as Arnoldian «Celts» or as noble Rising ensured the subsequent supremacy peasants, in both cases ignoring contem- of Catholicism in Ireland. porary party politics and material condi- In chapter 6, Cairns and Richards tions; and G. Moore, J.M. Synge and begin by outlining the way in which Sinn J. Joyce, whom Cairns and Richards see as Féin became the new leader of the peounited by a demand for personal ple-nation after 1916 by absorbing a host and sexual freedom which posed a of former supporters of the U.I.L. togeserious threat to Catholic nationalist ther with its dominant ideology gound- Ireland and to the discourses on which it ed on familism and Catholicism. They depended. argue that this explains why, for exam- Chapter 5 turns to the voices emergple, the consolidation of the Free State ing from the people-nation and begins took a radical form in foreign affairs, seekwith an examination of the attempts on ing to dwelop its dominion status, but a the part of D.P. Moran, A. Griffith and conservative one at home. This led to J. Connolly to offer alternatives to the a new form of colonisation, that of the parliamentarism of the United Irish spirit, manifested in an increasing submis- League (U.I.L.) after its formation in sion of the State to theocracy and in a 1898. It is argued the continuing hegepowerful equation of sex with sin, which mony of the U.I.L. marginalised al1 of was bitterly condemned by isolated voithese alternatives, just as it also marginces such as Yeats. The authors also tackle alised Anglo-Irish intellectuals, such as D. Corkery's critical works, which they Yeats. As opposed to al1 these frustrated claim were centrally important in marattempts to challenge the dominance of ginalising not only the Anglo-Irish the U.I.L., Cairns and Ridiards daim that Ascendancy, but also the urban workingthe artist-intellectuals of the 1916 Rising class of the new State. Not suprisingly, succeeded in mobilizing the people-nation then, S. 0.C-e? did not pass Corkery's by drawing upon fundamentalist princitest of 1:ishness. "~cqordin~ to Cairns and ples, namely, by invoking Catholicism Richards, who support their argument by 92 Links & lxtters 2, 1995 Reviews detailed reference to the realities of Dublin tenernent life, O'Casey's internationalist and socialist stance led him, particularly in &e Dublin trilogy, to question not nationalist politics per se, but rather the concept of the nation which had becorne hegemonic and which grossly ignored the plight of the workers. Other critical voices, such as J. Joyce's in Ubsses, S. O'Faolain's, P. Kavanagh's, F. O'Brien's, and that of The Bell, are also discussed. An objection to be rnade to Writing Ireland is that, despite the authors' highlighting the central role of the discourse of sexuality in the constitution of the Irish people-nation, there is an alrnost complete absence of the wornen's contribution to the cultural struggle the book rnasterfully explores. A similar cornplaint is made by K. Barry in a recent review of The FieId Day Anthology ofIrish Literature (1991), where he notes the ((lamentable dearth of scholarship about women's writing in Ireland)) ( The European English Messenger, (1992), 1, 3: 47). In Cairns and Richards's study, sorne wornen's names are merely dropped, none of them belonging to the contemporary scene, where they include B. Friel, S. Heaney, T. Murphy and T. Paulin among others, and only the canonical Lady Gregory and Maud Gonne are given more attention. To cornpensate for this, the reader will have to turn to other sources, such as P. Bournelha and T. Foley, In the Shadow of bis Language (1987); C.L. Innes, Women, Ireland and Literature (1989); and the anthologies A.A. Kelly (ed.), Pilkzrs of the Howe: An Anthology of Verse by Irish WornenJTom 1690 to the Present (1987); and A. Smyth (ed.), Wildish Things: An Anthology of New Irish Women ? Writing (1 989). Mireia Aragay i Sastre Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alernanya Universitat de Barcelona G. AUSTIN, Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1990. 139 pages. Starting off frorn the belief that a ferninist approach to anything rneans paying attention to women as characters, writers, readers or audience rnembers, Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism is a lucid attempt at demonstrating the usefulness as critical tools for the analvsis of drama of ferninist theories drawn frorn four areas of study: literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, and film theory. As Austin points out, the field of dramatic criticisrn has been relatively slow to acknowledge the work of feminist theorists and to incorporate it, so that her book, combining a theoreticai and a practical side, stands both as a welcome synthesis of the work done in the four selected areas of studv, and as a dernons- , . tration of its possiblities when applied to drama. It is aiso a useful cornpanion piece to S.-E. Case's feminist revision of theatrical history, Feminist Theatre (Basinptoke and London: Macrnillan, 1988). In the opening chapter, the author is explicit about the aims and lirnitations of her project. Thus, she discusses the advantages and shortcornings of the three rnajor political branches of ferninism, liberal, cultural/radical and rnaterialist, and overtly identifies herself as a rnaterialist ferninist. She also states that her purpose is not to develop a monolithic theory of feminist dramatic criticisrn, or indeed any new theory, but rather to present a number of theories in the four fields of studv since the latest wave of feminist scholarship began (approximately in 1970) and to apply some of thern to specific plays drawn from conternporary American drama, both by playwrights in the traditional canon (Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman and Sarn