Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature 1995)

This book identifies the origin, the development and, ultimately, the success of the Irish literary tradition in English as one of the first literatures that is both national and colonial. It demonstrates the remarkable relationships between works as diverse as Joyce's Dubliners and Bram Stoker's Dracula , and the worlds of the French Revolution and the Irish famine. Deane also shows how almost all the activities of Irish print culture—novels, songs, typefaces, historical analyses, poems—struggle within the limits imposed by its inheritance. This book traces the emergence of a self-consciously national tradition in Irish writing from the era of the French Revolution and, specifically, from Edmund Burke's counter-revolutionary writings. From Gerald Griffin's The Collegians, to Bram Stoker's Dracula, from James Hardiman's Irish Minstrelsy to Synge, Yeats, and Joyce, Irish writing is dominated by a number of inherited issues - those of national character, of conflict between discipline and excess, of division between the languages of economics and sensibility, of modernity and backwardness. Almost all the activities of Irish print culture - its novels, songs, historical analyses, typefaces, poems - take place within the limits imposed by this complex inheritance. In the process, Ireland created a national literature that was also a colonial one. This was and is an achievement that is only now being fully recognised. Traces the emergence of a national tradition in Irish writing from the era of Edmund Burke's counter-revolutionary writings. The book claims Irish writing is dominated by inherited issues and the activities of Irish print culture take place within the limits imposed by this complex inheritance.