CONTENTS, Introduction; ‘Pap for the Dispossessed’: Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity [13]; Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism and the Colonial Subject [41]; The Poetics of Politics: Yeats and the Founding of the State [59]; Adulteration and the Nation [88; centrally on Joyce]; Violence and the Constitution of the Novel [125]

While in part still subject to a dissimulated colonialism, and which continues [2] to lose up to 30,000 people annually to emigration. With peculiar intensity Irish culture plays out the the anomalous states of a population whose most typical experience may be that of occupying multiple locations, literally and figuratively. [3]

the continuing anti-colonial struggle in Northern Ireland [3] the gradual transformation of a counter-hegemonic concept within an oppositional nationalism into a hegemonic concept within a new nation state, a tansformation which is … written already into the precepts of bourgeois nationalism. [3]

There can scarcely be a writer more devoted than Beckett to the thorough and elegant elaboration of the insurmountable contradictions of identity. [4]

To the monopoly of violence claimed by the state, then, corresponds the monopoly of representation claimed by the dominant culture. [4]

Yeats’s later poetry [constitutes] in its very extremities a profound interrogation of this process of foundation by which states come into being, a process predicated on a performative violence which his own poetry dramatically appropriates. Though Yeats seems mostly unable in his own writing to move beyond performative violence, he does constantly, if a little perplexedly, invoke those moments of disintegration which open the space for another history and another sexuality. [5]

.. despite the invaluable work of cultural retrieval undertaken by successive nationalist movements, one principal and consistent dynamic of identity formation has been the negation recalcitrant or inassimilable elements in Irish society. [5]

The politics of style of Ulysses and this popular [colonial ballad] tradition are recalcitrant to the emerging nationalist as to the imperialist state formation precisely in refusing the homogeneity of ‘style’ required for national citizenship. [6]

The insurrectionary rural movements of the period … not so much an expression of ‘endemic Irish violence’ .. as the record of forms of social organisation and resistance inassimilable to either the legality of the British state or the political desire of nationalism which is for the state. [6]

Without recovery and interpretation of such occluded practices as an expansion of the field of possibilities for radical democracy and the state formation remains more or less formatist. [7]

A nationalist politics of ethnic identity finds its limits as soon as it must be articulated within the discourse of civil rights or wherever it confronts the inevitable hybridity of internally colonised cultures. [8]

Dialogic relation to traditions … restore such writers to their function in relation to the cultural dynamics that are invisible to the metropolis … [8]

The state formation is the locus of ‘Western’ universalism even in decolonising states. [9]

The constitutive paradox of what have become known as ‘post-colonial studies’, namely, the paradox that though they name amoment historically ‘after colonialism’, their insistence object has been less the Utopian project of decolonisation than the spaces and processes of colonised cultures tha were always already outsideof, or marginal to, dominant representations. This paradox is not, however, a fault, but rather the implicit acknowledgement that the ‘post-colonial’ is only a moment, and one that takes place in a specific space, that of the state, and within a specific history, that of a mdernity that would relegate incompatible cultural forms to its own pre-history.

It is within the matrix of British romanticism that the question of Irish identity is posed, with the result that the critique of imperialism already apparent in the intial formulations on literature and identity of Yourn Ireland’s ideologists in the 1840s which in fact present the predicament they would pretend to be resolving.

Quotes D F MacCarthy (‘nationalist critic’) as saying that no knowledge of the people’s genius can be reached ‘unless it can be based upon the revelations they themseles have made, or the confessions they have uttered’ and that [as RX].

The Nation: ‘saturated with Irish feeling … sympathising in every beat of an Irish peasants pulse’ (Recent English Poets, 15 Feb. 1845; Lloyd p.15.)

The identity of the individual, his integrity, is expressed by the degre to which that individual identifies himself with and integrates his differences in a national consciousness. [15] … it is the function of the writer to mediate the continuity of the national spirit.’

Cites ‘The Individuality of a National Literature’ (Nation, 21 Aug. 1847, postulating that such a literature would form a ‘social bond’. [15]

‘Paradoxically, in adopting such a model of cultural identification, whose complement is the development through literature of a feeling of nationality in the citizen, Irish nationalists reproduce in their very opposition to the Empire a narrative of universal development which is fundamental to the legitimation of imperialism.’ (p.46; quoted in Alex Davis, ‘Irish Poetic Modernisms: A Reappraisal’, in Critical Survey 8, 2, 1996, pp.186-97.)