Declan Kiberd

[ top ]

Bibliographical details
Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape 1995), 719pp. CONTENTS; Acknowledgements, [xi]; Introduction [1]; 1: A New England Called Ireland? [9]; IRELAND - ENGLAND’S UNCONSCIOUS?: Interchapter, 29]; 2: Oscar Wilde - The Artist as Irishman [33]; III; John Bull’s Other Islander - Bernard Shaw [51]; ANGLO-IRELAND: THE WOMAN’S PART: Interchapter [67]; 4: Tragedies of Manners - Somerville and Ross [69]; 5: Lady Gregory and the Empire Boys [83]; YEATS: LOOKING INTO THE LION’S FACE: Interchapter [99]; 6: Chilhood and Ireland [101]; 7: The National Longing for Form [115]; RETURN TO THE SOURCE?: Interchapter [133]; 8: Deanglicization [136]; 9: Nationality or Cosmopolitanism? [155]; 10: J. M. Synge - Remembering the Future [166]; REVOLUTION AND WAR: Interchapter [191]; 11: Uprising [196]; 12: The Plebeians Revise the Uprising [218]; 13: The Great War and Irish Memory [239]; WORLDS APART? [289]; 14: Ireland and the End of Empire [251]; INVENTING IRELANDS: Interchapter [263]; 15: Writing Ireland, Reading England [268]; 16: Inventing Irelands [286]; 17: Revolt Into Style - Yeatsian Poetics [305]; 18: The Last Aisling - A Vision [316]; 19: James Joyce and Mythic Realism [327]; SEXUAL POLITICS: Interchapter [359]; 20: Elizabeth Bowen - The Dandy in Revolt [364]; 21: Fathers and Sons [380]; 22: Mothers and Daughters [395]; PROTESTANT REVIVALS: Interchapter [413]; 23: Protholics and Cathestants [418]; 24: Saint Joan - Fabian Feminist, Protestant Mystic [428]; 25: The Winding Stair [438]; 26: Religious Writing: Beckett and Others [454]; UNDERDEVELOPMENT: Interchapter [471]; 27: The Periphery and the Centre [481]; 28: Flann O’Brien, Myles, and The Poor Mouth [497]; 29: The Empire Writes Back - Brendan Behan [513]; 30: Beckett’s Texts of Laughter and Forgetting [530]; 31: Post-Colonial Ireland - “A Quaking Sod” [551]; RECOVERY AND RENEWAL: Interchapter [565]; 32: Under Pressure - The Writer and Society 1960-90 [580]; 33: Friel Translating [614]; 34: Translating Tradition [624]; REINVENTING IRELAND [639]; 35: Imagining Irish Studies [641]; Notes [655]; Index [701]. See extracts under Quotations, infra; see also the chapter-notes [qua Bibliography] in RICORSO > Bibliography > Scholars - via index or direct [as attachment].

Irish Classics (London: Granta 2000), 704pp. Acknowledgements [ix]; Introduction [xi]. Gaelic Ireland: Apocalypse Now? [1]; Bardic Poetry: The Loss of Aura [13]; Saving Civilization: Céitinn and Ó Bruadair [25]; Dying Acts: Ó Rathaille and Others [39]; Endings and Beginnings: Mac Cuarta and After [55]; Jonathan Swift: a Colonial Outsider? [71]; Home and Away: Gulliver’s Travels [86]; Nostalgia as Protest: Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ [107]; Radical Pastoral: Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer [124]; Sheridan and Subversion [137]; Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill: The Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire [161]; Brian Merriman’s Midnight Court [182]; Burke, Ireland and Revolution [203]; Republican Self-Fashioning: The Journal of Wolfe Tone [221]; Native Informants: Maria Edgeworth and Castle Rackrent [243]; Confronting Famine: Carleton’s Peasantry [265]; Feudalism Falling: A Drama in Muslin [287]; Love Songs of Connacht [302]; Anarchist Attitudes: Oscar Wilde [325]; George Bernard Shaw: Arms and the Man [340]; Somerville and Ross: The Silver Fox [360]; Undead in the Nineties: Bram Stoker and Dracula [379]; Augusta Gregory’s Cuchulain: The Rebirth of the Hero [399]; Synge’s Tristes Tropiques: The Aran Islands [420]; W.B. Yeats - Building Amid Ruins [440]; Ulysses, Newspapers and Modernism [463]; After the Revolution: O’Casey and O’Flaherty [482]; Gaelic Absurdism: At-Swim-Two-Birds [500]; The Blasket Autobiographies [520]; Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice [543]; Kate O’Brien: The Ante-Room [556]; All the Dead voices - Cré Na Cille [574]; Underdeveloped Comedy: Patrick Kavanagh [590]; Anglo-Gaelic Literature: Seán Ó Riordáin [602]; Irish Narrative: A Short History [617]. Notes [633]; Index [691]

The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge UP 2005), 354pp. Contents: 1. Introduction: the Irish writer and the world; 2. The fall of the stage Irishman; 3. Storytelling: the Gaelic tradition; 4. Writers in quarantine? - The Case for Irish studies; 5. Synge, Yeats and Bardic Poetry; 6. George Moore’s Gaelic Law Party; 7. The Flowering Tree: Modern Poetry in Irish; 8. On National Culture; 9. White Skins, Black Masks: Celticism and Negritude; 10. From Nationalism to Liberation; 11 . The War against the Past; 12. The Elephant of Revolutionary Forgetfulness; 13. Reinventing England ; 14. Museums and Learning; 15. Joyce’s Ellmann, Ellmann’s Joyce; 16. Multiculturalism: The Strange Death of Liberal Europe ; 17. The Celtic Tiger: A Cultural History; 18. The City in Irish Culture; 19. Strangers in their Own Country: Multiculturalism in Ireland.

[ top ]

Commentary
[See separate file, infra.]

Quotations
[See separate file, infra.]

[ top ]

References
RIA Announcements (March 2003): Professor Declan Kiberd (UCD) is internationally recognised as one of the leading contemporary authorities on Anglo-Irish literature. He brought to the study of the subject a training in both English and Irish literatures which has been of crucial importance to his grasp of the area, as shown already in his first pioneering monograph Synge and the Irish Language (1979). But he has been able to place Irish writing in English also in the wider context of other postcolonial literatures, and this is the notable feature of his hugely successful and influential book Inventing Ireland (1995). This work has made a major impact in the academic understanding of its subject. (See Royal Irish Academy website, online.)

[ top ]

Notes
Inventing & Remembering: ‘Inventing Irelands’, Crane Bag, 8, 1 (1984), pp.11-25, a proto-type of the argument in Inventing Ireland (1995), chapter: ‘J. M. Synge: Remembering the Future’. The adjacent essay in the Crane Hart is Seamus Deane, ‘Remembering the Future’. For an early version of the ‘inventing’ trope, see Eric Hobsbawn, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in Hobsbawm & T. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge UP 1983).

Credit given: Seamus Heaney explicitly acknowledges that he is conducting his reading of Reading Gaol in the light of ‘some recent post-colonial readings of Wilde by critics like Declan Kiberd and Terry Eagleton,’ [...; see under Eagleton, infra], and remarks: ‘As it turns out, Eagleton’s Oscar has had his wish granted [“that my jury should be composed of my peers”], at least partially. Criticism of Wilde has entered a phase of relish and extravagance which he would surely have approved of. Declan Kiberd in his 1984 Field Day Pamphlet Anglo-Irish Attitudes, has just the right kind of verve [quotes “Wilde saw that the image of the stage Irishman tells us more about English fears than Irish realities ...”].’ (See Heaney, ‘Speranza in Reading’, in The Redress of Poetry, OUP 1995, p.86-87.)

More cred: Joseph Valente coins the term metrocolonial in essays such as ‘Between Resistance and Complicity: Metrocolonial Tactics in Joyce’s Dubliners ’ (Narrative, Fall 1998, pp.215-30) - but credits Declan Kiberd with ‘map[ping] the condition’ in Inventing Ireland (1995).

Contradictions?: ‘the extraordinary capacity of Irish society to assimilate new elements through all its major phases’ (Inventing Ireland, Introduction, [p.6]); cf. ‘the evidence of recent centuries all points to the capacity of the Irish themselves to be assimilated.’ (p.651.) Cf. also, ‘the old canard that “the Gael must be the element that absorbs” was never seriously entertained by the writers: indeed, those who actually wrote in Irish were often more open to foreign (especially continental) influence than some who worked in English’ (p.156.) Note also that Kiberd compares the ‘protestant parliament for a protestant people’ offered by Northern unionists with de Valera’s ‘theocratic state’ on p.360, but cites the Protestant parliament alone in his final chapter. And cf: ‘art is too potent a force to be left entirely in the hands of its creators, and politics to pervasive […] to be left in the sole control of politicians’: in Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland.)

Caveat: Mark Abley, reviewing James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Harvard UP [1997], quotes the author: ‘It’s worth pointing out the fallacy that “culture (singular) equals language (singular)”. This equation, implicit in nationalist culture ideas, has been thoroughly unravelled by Bahktin, for whom a language is a diverging, contesting, dialoguing set of discourses that no “native” - let alone visitor - can ever control.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 25 July, 1997, pp.5-6; p.6.)

Resigned islanders?: Declan Kiberd first came to notice for the general readership with a letter to Hibernia [magazine] (Feb. 1974) taking Leo Daly to task for remarks on John Messenger’s book [about] Inis Beag suggesting that Maurya’s final speech in Riders to the Sea was untypical of the Aran Islanders in its unquestioning resignation to fate. (See under Synge, infra.)

Nation-watch: In their essay in Ben Tonra & Eilís Ward, eds., Ireland in International Affairs, Interests, Institutions and Identities (Dublin IPA 2002), Declan Kiberd and Michael D. Higgins argue that it is through exile that nationality is born, ‘given that no people can ever fully define itself from within’. (See Paul Gillespie, review, in The Irish Times, 16 Nov. 2002, “Weekend”.)

“A Novel Choice” [Irish Times /James Joyce Centre lect. series]: Declan Kiberd selects Amongst Women by John McGahern [‘It’s a signature novel for a generation of Irish people who lived through the last century. It takes the energies and trends of the time and gives them back to the reader in a recognisable form’]; The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien [‘Again, it reflects the experience of a lot of people who grew up in the countryside and later moved to the big city. It has a certain freshness to it and it made a big impact at the time’]; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis [‘Children’s literature is very under-rated but hugely formative for so many young people and this is one of the best and written by an Irish author. You could speculate that the virtual world is not unconnected to fairy stories of the oral tradition told in the Irish countryside. There would be no Harry Potter without Narnia.’] (See The Irish Times, 27 Sept. 2003, aAnnouncing a lect. series based on the ten 10 most voted for novels on a list provided by the commissioned lecturers to be hosted by The James Joyce Centre, 23 Oct. - 27 Nov. 2003.)

Cross-dressing?: See Kiberd’s interpretation of the 1594 portrait of Sir Thomas Lee in the bare legs of an Irish kern which he takes to be a symbol of the ‘physically as well as spiritually hypenated man’ [i.e., Anglo-Irishman] and a sign of Lee’s belief that ‘that he might lapse into utter saveragy unless the erasure of Irish culture was completed.’ (Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation, London: Jonathan Cape 1995, p.10; see further under Thomas Lee, infra.)

Celtic Shakespeare?: Joyce’s famous remark to Yeats, ‘We have met too late ...’, is echoed in Kiberd, ‘Yeats and Criticism’, The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats, ed. Howes & Kelly (Cambridge UP 2006): ‘Joyce’s rereading of Shakespeare [...] is embedded in Ulysses, with the result that few Yeatsians have noticed just how much support it offers to the man who the more youthful Joyce said was too old to be helped.’ (p.126.) The attendent footnote points to Kiberd’s own Inventing Ireland, 1995, pp.269-81, in which pages he conducts a discussion of Dowden’s imperialist study of Shakespeare and Joyce’s - arguably Irish or Celtic - counterpart: ‘Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney’s Arcadia and spatchcocked onto a Celtic legend older than history?’ (here p.270.) Kiberd quotes Dedalus’s answer and relates the question-and-answer form to the inadequacies of the contemporary examination board: ’Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare what the poor are not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book.’ (Ulysses, Penguin 992, pp.271, 272.) [The passage in Inventing Ireland makes no mention of ‘we have met too late’.]

Kith & Kin: Damien Kiberd, a brother of Declan, studied Economics at TCD and worked for the Irish Press at Burgh Quay during 1979-87 and again in 1989, establishing a reputation as a leading pundit. In 1989 he co-founded The Sunday Business Post which was sold for a large sum in 2001. Afterwards appt. Station Editor at Newstalk 106.

[ top ]