Donald E. Morse, Csilla Bertha, and István Pálffy, A Small Nation’s Contribution to the World. [Irish Literary Studies, 45] (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe/Lajos Kossuth Univ. 1993), 248pp.

CONTENTS: Preface [xi]; Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse, Introduction: A Small Nation’s Contribution to the World [1]; Donald E. Morse, Starting from the Earth, Starting from the Stars: the Fantastic in Samuel Beckett’s Plays and James Joyce’s Ulysses [6]; Aladar Sarbu, Romantic and Modern: Vision and Form in Yeats, Shaw and Joyce [19]; Csilla Bertha, ‘The Harmony of Reality and Fantasy’: the Fantastic in Irish Drama [28]; Patrick Burke,’”Both Heard and Imagined”: Music as Structuring Principle in the Plays of Brian Friel [43]; Bernice Schrank, ‘Death is Here and Death is There, Death is Busy Everywhere’: Temporality and the Desire for Transcendence in O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman [53]; Maria Kurdi, The Ways of Twoness: Pairs, Parallels and Contrasts in Stewart Parker’s Spokesong [61]; Maurice Harmon, Ancient Lights in Austin Clarke and Thomas Kinsella [70]; Eoin Bourke, Poetic Outrage: Aspects of Social Criticism in Modern Irish Poetry [88]; Istvan D. Racz, Mask Lyrics in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon and Derek Mahon [107]; Marius Byron Raizis, Yeats’s Preoccupation with Spiritualism and his Byzantium Poems [119]; Ruth Fleischmann, Knowledge of the World as the Forbidden Fruit: Canon Sheehan and Joyce on the Sacrificium Intellectus [127]; Andras P. Ungar, Ulysses in Ulysses: what the Nolan Said [138]; Joseph Swann, Banville’s Faust: Doctor Copernicus; Kepler, The Newton Letter and Mefisto as Stories of the European Mind [148]; Ruth Niel, Speech and Silence: Beyond the Religious in Brian Moore’s Novels [161]; Werner Huber, Myth and motherland: Edna O’Brien’s Mother Ireland [175]; Veronika Kniezsa, ‘Proper Words in Proper Places’: Jonathan Swift on Language [182]; Martin J. Croghan, Maria Edgeworth and the Tradition of Irish Semiotics [194]; Thomas Kabdebo, Anglo-Irish and Irish Poetry in Hungarian: the Literary Offshoot of an Historical Parallel [207]; Notes [213]; Notes on Editors and Contributors [242]; Index [245]

‘In Ireland the world of the Shee [Sidhe], that is, of the faeries and of all those spirits which are elemental and have never been human, was called the Middle Kingdom, a satisfactory and expressive term. In ancient times, and almost up to this very age, this world of ‘faerie’ has been as much an accepted reality to the country people as has the normal material world around them. But today [ 1959], though belief still remains widespread, the old knowledge of the organiseation, of the ordered hierarchy of the classes and castes that compose the spirit world has almost disappeared.’ (Dermot MacManus, The Middle Kingdom [1959] Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1973, pp.15-16.; Morse, pp.7-8.)

Seamus Deane on Synge’s plays; ‘[each] story of fantasy […] is, first, rebuked by fact and then, in the next instant, legitimized as belonging or contributing to a higher truth than mere fact could ever reach’; (Celtic Revivals, 1985, p.57); ‘Mesmerized by an eloquence which begins in illusion but which continues after the destruction of illusion, we are forced to concede to the imagination a radical autonomy. It insists on its own truth not by ignoring fact but by including it and going beyond it. The imaginary, overtaken by the real, becomes the imaginative. The dynamic force which makes this possible is language.’ (Ibid., pp.57-58.). Note use of ‘rebuke’ and ‘legitimise’] (Bertha, p.36).

score for The Communication Cord written by Keith Donald with Friel’s approval.

Minnie, ‘Helen of Troy come to live in a tenement.’ (Plays, 1969, p.130).

JULIAN: Look at yourself. Hunkered down in this... blocked-up latrine of your own memories. That’s what memories are, big brother, that’s what the past is, history, the accumulated turds of human endeavour. I don’t like it, I’m a cleanly fellow. It has to come down, the whole edifice, brick by brick. Wiped. Flushed.

FRANK: Have you not learned anything at all? You are your own past, kid. You’re the sum total of its parts. Hate it and you hate yourself. No matter how calamitous it may have been, either you master it or die (pp.60-1)

Maria Kurdi, Bibl.: Ciaran Brady, Mary O’Dowd, Brian Walker (eds.), Ulster: An Illustrated History (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd.,1989); Christopher Murray, ‘Irish Drama in Transition 1966-1978’, Etudes Irlandais No. 4 (1979), p.306; Elmer Andrews, ‘The Power of Play: Stewart Parker’ s Theatre’, Theatre Ireland No. 18, April-June 1989, p.24; Philomena Muinzer, ‘Evacuating the Museum: The Crisis of Playwriting in Ulster’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. III No. 9, February 1987, cp.49; lmer Andrews, ‘The Will to Freedom: Politics and Play in the Theatre of Stewart Parker’, in Okifumi Komesu and Masaru Sekine, eds., Irish Writers and Politics (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989), cp.268; Michael Etherton, Contemporary Irish Dramatists (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 23; Claudia W. Harris, ‘From Pastness to Wholeness: Stewart Parker’s Reinventing Theatre’, Colby Quarterly Vol. XXVII. No. 4, Dec. 1991, cp.240.

Spokesong ‘tries to isolate what is at the heart of the turbulence in Ireland at the moment. But I decided against writing a play about Protestants an Catholics. … That would only be dealing with the srface, anyway. I wanted to go underneath all that and look at the core.’ (Quoted in Robert Berkvist, ‘A Freewheeling Play About Irish History’, The New York Times, 11 March 1979, p.4; Kurdi, p.61); [the play] ‘ends on an ambiguous note, but not a pessimistic one’ (8 Berkvist, op. cit. p.8; Kurdi, p.64.)

‘[I aimed] to construct a working model of whole-ness by means of which this society can begin to hold up its head in the world.’ (Quoted in Claudia W. Harris, ‘The Flame That Bloomed’, The Irish Literary Supplement, Spring 1989, p.4; Kurdi, p.62.

‘an unconscious impulse to express the most ancient element in playacting - the instinct for play itself.’ (Stewart Parker, ‘ State of Play’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. VII No. 1, June 1981, p. 9.

‘faithful bicycle’ (Stewart Parker, Spokesong, NY: Samuel French 1980, p.11.

Cites Patrick Galvin, We Did It for Love (1975), in which the central metaphor is a merry go round.

‘Always in terror of Olympic doom, / He climbed, despite his will, the spiral steps / Outside a building to a cobwebbed upper room. / There bric-a-brac was in a jumble / His forehead was distending, ears were drumming / As in the gastric fevers of his childhood. / Despite his will, he climbed the steps, stumbling Where Mnemosyne lay in dust.’ (Mnemosyne, cited in Harmon, p.74).

‘Robed in spattered iron / At the harbour she stands, Productive Investment, / Andbeckons the nations through our gold half-door: / Lend me your wealth, your cunning and your drive. Your arrogant refuse; / / Let my people serve them / Bottled fury in our new hotels, / While native businessmen and managers / Drift with them, chatting, over to the window / To show them our growing city, give them a feeling / Ot what is possible; our labour pool, / The tax concessions to foreign capital’ (Nightwalker; Selected Poems; cited in part in Harmon, p.79; also in Bourke, p.98.)

‘Vertical Man’ (on O’Riada) : That for all you have done, the next beginning / is as lonely, as random, as gauche and as unready / as presumptuous as the first, / when you stripped and advanced timidly / toward nothing in particular.’; Harmon p.84.

Thomas Kinsella does not write the complete poem in the traditional sense. The unity he seeks is larger, even larger than the unity of a particular sequence. As these sequences appear it is clear that a total work is accumulating. There is an accomodating openness at work, a precise sureness of touch in specific detail a stylistic flexibility, an ability to contol the rhythms of line, structure and form, an ability to keep going, and a trust in the availability of creative readers to complete the act of communication. (Harmon, p.86.)

Clarke bibl [provided by Eoin Bourke:] Augustine Martin, ‘The Rediscovery of Austin Clarke’, in Studies, Winter 1965, cp.418; Donald Davie, Review of Ancient Lights, in Irish Writing, XXXIV, Dublin, p.57.

Fintan O’Toole, ‘not only has the Northern Question not been answered, it has not, officially, been asked.’; ‘socially and economically, the Republic of Ireland is more divided, has alientated more of its population, even to the extremes of exile, and is a worse failure as a political entity than almost any other in Europe.’ (The Southern Question, Dublin 1987, p.8; p.20; Bourke, p.89.)

[…] Rita Ann Higgins speaks from […] inside the corporation flat, the shirt factory, the TB ward, the dole-office. She is rapidly becoming the Sansculotte of Irish poetry, the most prominent spokesperson of the economically redundant part of the working-class, the so-called long-term unemployed. Her sometimes sardonic, sometimes angry and sometimes roguish perspectives prove two things: firstly, that the so-called ‘poor’ of Ireland are certainly not always poor in spirit but can be amazingly resilient, imaginative and self-willed. Secondly, her repartee makes nonsense of the socio-linguistic theory that the speech of the ‘lower’ classes is restricted in scope. Hers, which she draws from the people around her, is highly inventive, ludic and pungent, even when describing the [104] monotony and regimentation of factory drudgery and its throttling of the desire for self-expression and adventure.’ (Bourke, pp.104-05.)

Michael Smith, ‘The Contemporary Situation in Irish Poetry’, in Douglas Dunn, ed, Two Decades of Irish Writing (Cheadle: Carcanet Press 1975), p,156.

‘[…] technically, Muldoon has learned from his Ulster predecessors, as well as from international influences. An heir to alienation as well as roots, he can criticize from both inside and outside the catholic community. Heaney’s richly created early world (a genuinely prelapsarian vision) has a boundless self-confidence which seems no longer possible without running into the barbed-wire of ideology. What is physical in Heaney becomes metaphysically problematic in Muldoon.’ (Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars, Bloodeaxe 1986, p.206; Racz, p.111.)

‘Interestingly, the quest for the self - rendered as pursuit and flight - is currently a growth point in Irish literature North and South. But the theme involves painful physical probing, not external questions of national identity. Indeed one question asked is whether identity can be national. (Longley, op. cit., p.224-25; Racz, p.113).

Seamus Deane: ‘Many Irish writers, sensitive to the threat of provincialism, have tried to compensate for it by being as cosmopolitan as possible. In consequence, they become citizens of the world by profession. Denis Devlin and Sean O’Faolain are two outstanding examples. For them, the cultivation of the intellect is not only a goal in itself but also a means of escape from besieged and rancorous origins. Others - Joyce, Beckett, Francis Stuart, Louis MacNeice - although they also seek in the world beyond an alternative to their native culture, have come to regard their exile from it as a generic feature of the artist’s rootless plight rather than a specifically Irish form of alienation./Derek Mahon occupies a middle ground between these choices.’ (Celtic Revivals, p.156; Racz, p.113).

Gerald Dawe [on Longley and Mahon:] ‘Longley, I would suggest, has accepted his past (the Protestant city, the cultural ‘duality’, the shaky identity), whereas Mahon rejected his. MacNeice’s spiritual sons have gone their different ways: one has remained at home, the other has left.’ (Across the Roaring Hill, 985, p.227; Racz, p.113.

Paulin on Mahon: ‘intransigent aesthete who rejects life almost completely and considers only the flotsam and jetsam along its fringes’

while Maurice Riordan emphasizes that Mahon has accumulated a kind of ‘counter-myth’ by projecting his poems into the future rather than into the past. The main characteristic of his poetic diction is pointed out by Eamon Grennan:

Eamon Grennan on Mahon: ‘The strangest impression made on me when I read any poem by Derek Mahon is the sense that I have been spoken to: that the poem has established its presence in the world as a kind of speech. In addition, [113] I am aware that its status as speech is an important value in itself, carrying and confirming those other, more explicit values which the poem endorses as part of its overt ‘meaning’. What I hear in these poems is a firm commitment to the act of civil communication enlivened, in this case, by poetic craft.’ (‘”To the Point of Speech”: The Poetry of Derek Mahon, in ed. James D. Brophy and Raymond J. Porter, eds., Contemporary Irish Writing (Boston: Iona College Press, 1983), p.15; here pp.113-14.]

Deane on ‘Disused Shed in Wexford’: ‘Mahon has here inverted his usual procedure. The lost lives are not lived beyond history, but before it. Their fulfilment is in history. This is a conceit and a figure in which he captures the central significance of his opening poem, ‘Afterlives’. In one sense, he is saying that the only life which can produce art is one that is engaged with history, even (especially?) if it is the history of the victims, the lost, the forgotten.’ (CR, p.163; Racz, p.116;

Note that Racz challenges this interpretation, pointing to Maurice Riordan’s as ‘the correct analysis’: ‘The disused shed is also a version of Plato’s cave, and the loss expressed is metaphorical: ‘Let the god not abandon us / Who have come so far in darkness and in pain’. Ultimately, the poem speaks perhaps for all that is supressed in consciousness, for those impulses, desires, instincts, which, denied the light of actuality for whatever historical reasons, maintain their own weird and secret life. The poem, then, would seem to suggest a confrontation between the civilized self, the ‘we’ of the poem (‘You with your light meter and relaxed intinerary’) and the repressed self, what the civilized mind has denied.’ (‘An Urbane Perspective: The Poetry of Derek Mahon’, in The Irish Writer and the City, ed. Maurice Harmon, 1984, p.173; Racz, p.117.)

Canon Sheehan: ‘The Church must always be in advance of the world. The priest must lead the flock. And his spiritual instructions will carry all the more weight when it is understood that the pastor is a man of culture and refinement, and that his condemnation of new and fanciful theories comes *om his belief founded on fair and exhaustive reading, that they are utterly untenable. […] Men will reverence knowledge wherever found, and the natural abilities of the scholar may lead many souls to acknowledge the supernatural mission of the priest.’ (‘Free Thought in America: The Sects and the Church’, in The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Sept. 1884; p.730; Fleischmann, p.135.)

Walter McDonald, ‘[Revolution] which the official guardians of our relifion willnot see coming, or will endeavour to keep out with their broomsticks.’ (Reminiscences of a Maynooth Profesosr, ed. Denis Gwynn, London 1925; Mercier Press 1967, p.269.); ‘History … porvoves that laws have been better made and better observed since subjects became free to criticise them ... and there would be ever so much less for history to record, with shame and tears, if there had been more criticism, reverent but fearless, of those who occupied high places, even in the Chruch, in the past.’ (op. cit., p.227; Fleischmann, p.136. )

Bibl. Incl. Patrick A. Sheehan, ‘Religious Instruction in Intermediate Schools’, in Irish Eccles. Record, Sept. 1881, p.528, 531; Terence Brown, ‘Show Me a Sign: The Religious Imagination of Brian Moore’, in Irish University Review, 18, 1 (Spring 1988), pp.37-49; Brian Cosgrove, ‘Brian Moore and the Price of Freedom in a Secular World’, in Irish University Review, 18, 1 (Spring 188), pp.59-73; eamus Deane, ‘The Real Thing: Brian Moore in Disneyland’, in Irish University Review, 18, 1 (Spring 19988), pp.74-82; Also David Leon Higdon, ‘Brian Moore, I Am Mary Dunne’, “memento ergo sum”, in Higdon, ed., Shadows of the Part in Contemporary British Fiction (Athens GA: Georgia UP 1984); Anne-Marie Conway, ‘Brian Moore: The Colour of Blood’, in ILS Oct. 2-8, 1987, p.1073; Michael Paul [sic] Gallagher, ‘Religion as Favourite Metaphor: Moore’s Recent Fiction, in Irish University Review, 18, 1 (Spring 1988), pp.50-58.

Edna O’Brien; Notes and Bibl. By Werner Huber.

Denis Donoghue, review of Mother Ireland, by Edna O’ Brien, New York Review of Books 23 (14 Oct.1976), p. 12; Roy Foster, rev. of Mother Ireland, by Edna O’Brien, Times Literary Suppliment, 4 June 1976, p. 673; and Edna O’Brien, ‘The Vision of Edna O’Brien’ interview with Charles E. Claffey, Boston Globe 27 Nov. 1988, B1.

3 Thus the late John Broderick, speaking for many, was able to write in his review of Mother Ireland ‘One would think that Miss Edna O’Brien would be content with telling her experience in childhood and youth over and over again in her novels. But no such luck. Here she comes again with her version of Ireland, and the effect it had on her development.’ (Review of Mother Ireland, by Edna O’Brien, The Critic, 35 (Winter 1976), pp72-73.

Darcy O’Brien, ‘Edna O’Brien: A Kind of Irish Girlhood’ in Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, ed. Thomas F. Staley (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Nobel, 1982), pp. 179-90.

Kevin P. Reilly, ‘Irish Literary Autobiography: The Goddesses That Poets Dream Of’, Eire-lreland 16.3 (Fall 1981), pp. 57-80.

Richard Eder, review of Motherlreland, by Edna O’Brien, New York Times Book Review, 19 Sept. 1976, p. 6.

‘In a lot of ways I feel a cripple. The body was sacred as a tabernacle and everything a potential occasion of sin. It is funny now, but not that funny - the body contains the life story just as much as the brain.’ (Philip Roth, ‘A Conversation with Edna O’Brien’, New York Times Book Review, 18 Nov. 1984, pp. 38-40.

QUOT, ‘It would need more than a fleet of mobile libraries to change Ireland. It would need a hundred Sigmund Freuds to unravel the Gordian knots of guilt and anger darkness and torturous sex.’ (Edna O’Brien, Vanishing Ireland, Texts by Edna O’Brien, photographs by Richard Fitzgerald NY: Potter-Crown 1987, p. 21.)

Peggy O’Brien, ‘The Silly and the Serious: An Assessment of Edna O’Brien’, Massachusetts Review 28.3 (Autumn 1987), p. 486.

‘I thought that ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder, and a land of strange, throttled, sacrificial women’ (‘A Scandalous Affair’, in A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987, p. 265.)

James M. Haule, ‘Tough Luck: The Unfortunate Birth of Edna O’Brien’, in Colby Library Quarterly 23.4 (1987), pp. 216-24.

Martin Croghan: Essay on Irish Bulls (London: J. Johnson 1802).

Swift, ‘On Barbarous Denominations in Ireland’, in D. Davis, Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. IV (London: Blackwell 1957): ‘whereas what we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despise; and from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders and follies.’ (p.281.)

G. R. Neilson, The Book of Bulls. Being a Very complete and Entertaining Essay on the Evolution of the irish and other “Bulls”. With which is Included “Essay on Irish Bulls”, by the Edgeworths, published Early in the Century (London: Simkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Lt., and George Tucker 1898). Omits aspects of the Edgeworth text which he considers ‘censorious - even ill-natured’ and publishes only its stories - not its comments or moralising’, adding fifty pages of fresh bulls ‘to bring the collection made my Dr. and Miss Edgeworth up to date’. (p.147).

Essay on Irish Bulls: [Attacks principle] ‘that there exists among the natives of Ireland an innate and irresistible propensity to blunder.’ (p.3-4); ‘That species of monopolising pride, which inspires one nation with the belief that all the rest of the world are barbarians, and speak barbarisms, is evidently a very useful prejudice, which the English, with their usual good sense, have condescended to adopt from the Greeks and the Romans.’ (p. 19); ‘Impute a peculiar incurable mental disease to a given people, show that it incapacitates them from speaking or acting with common sense, expose their infirmities continually to public ridicule, and in time probably this people, let their constitutional boldness be ever so great, may be subjugated to that sense of inferiority, and to that acquiesence in a state of dependance, which is the necessary consequence of the conviction of imbecility. (p. 20); ‘It was formerly in law no murder to kill a merus Hibernicas; and it is to this day no offence against good manners to laugh at any of this species’. (p.57); ‘It is a thousand thimes more consequence to have the laugh than the argument on our side …’ (p.58); ‘We need not in imitating them have any scruples of conscience.’ (p.58); ‘[…] the Irish, if they be not blunderers, must continue to be thought absurd and ridiculous, from the unchangeable nature of the association of ideas.’ (p.191); ‘whenever we hear the tone (brogue), we expect the bluder’ (p.192); ‘To many people the most stale and vulgar Irish bull would appear more laughable bcause it was Irish’ (p.232). [Cited in Martin J. Croghan, ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Tradition of Irish Semiotics’, in Donald E. Morse, et al., eds., A Small Nation’s Contribution to the World, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993, pp.194-206.]

‘The Essay on Irish Bulls on the whole is a powerful tour de force against symbolic violence, but it is forced to admit at the end that it is not able to cope with the national characteristics model, the model which is usually used to generate inter-group symbolic violence, whether the distinction between groups is based on ethnicity, religion, nationality, or sex. But the Edgeworth acceptance of the model —and their adoption of the model could hardly be regarded as enthusiastic—is hardly surprising when it is still commonly accepted, at least implicitly, in many areas of academia, and when it is realized that this same framework is entrenched in popular cultures in Westernized societies and in many Western languages. / Perhaps the most surprising deficiency in the Essay is that the Edgeworths ultimately failed to come to terms with brogue-write. They seemed to want to persist in a mode of thinking which assumes that there can somehow be an absolute correlation between a graphic and a phonic medium, despite the fact that in the ‘Little Dominic’ episode, the Edgeworths worked with the principle that brogue-write is an index of deviancy. The Edgeworth failure to come to terms with the objective purpose of the brogue is also surprising for another reason. Swift, who was the inspiration for the Edgeworth Essay on Irish Bulls, had explicitly stated that it is the brogue which makes the deliverer ‘ridiculous and despised’ and that the brogue and the bull can only be understood as expressions of stage-Irishism; it was this quotation of Swift which the Edgeworths adapted in the Essay. (p.200.)

In conclusion: The Essay on Irish Bulls was the first major study in book length of stereotyping, and the first single study of stageIrishism. The Essay is still an important work because of the innovatory concepts used in the analysis of stereotyping, its uses of examples to illustrate theory, and its readiness to experiment with genre in order to communicate with the reader and to win the argument. The quality of the empirical research meets the requirements of present day academic studies though the use of more than one genre of writing and the explicit display of anger would make the work unacceptable to academic publishing today./[204] The first noteworthy concept in the Essay is the complete rejection of any type of innatism which often accompanies symbolic violence; this dismissal came at the beginning of the century which was to adopt such thinking wholeheartedly, a type of thinking which, in turn, would contribute to multiple genocide in Europe in the twentieth century. The second important concept in the Essay is the stress on the relationship between symbolic violence and identity; a group defines itself as superior by defining the other as inferior. The third critical concept is the role of humour in symbolic violence, and the Edgeworth readiness to use humour to win the argument, even when the humour is the stage-Irish humour of the bull. The second and third concept are also seen as acting together in the relationship of laughter and superiority (Essay on Irish Bulls, p. 89). It might be said in criticism, that the Edgeworths fail to provide any classification of bulls and therefore any detailed taxonomy of how the Irish are portrayed by such humour; in could be said in defense that since the Essay was published, there has been no study of bulls which provides any such classification or taxonomy. / The most difficult problem for the conclusion is to explain how someone who could write such a passionate critique of symbolic violence could also write stage-Irishism; the reference is to the intellectual dilemma not to any moral issue. The answer to the quandry of the ‘unjustly neglected Maria Edgeworth’ may be found in Castle Rackrent, the novel published two years before the Essay on Irish Bulls. In Castle Rackrent and The Rose, Thistle and Shamrock, Edgeworth uses the phrase ‘plain English’ for, what she considers, the authentic code, and any alternative can be considered a symbol of non-authenticity.’ So Thady, the principal character of Castle Rackrent, is said by the author to speak in his ‘vernacular idiom,’ and Edgeworth would similarly depict Irish characters in her other writings by this tactic of linguistic marking. / Maria Edgeworth did not have a Somerville and Ross competence in Hiberno-English, but she was a linguist and stylist of great ability, and it would be far-fetched to claim she did not realise in some way that she was marking for deviancy when she wrote, for example, the pseudo-naturalistic language which is used by Irish characters who were not rogues or comic figures such as the Widow Larkin in The Rose, Thistle and Shamrock, and Thady in her novel Castle Rackrent. It was this novel which played an important part in the development of what is sometimes called the regional novel; from a linguistic point of view, it was this novel which inspired a whle tradition of novel writing which uses so-called dialect writing. It is also reasonable to argue on the evidence of the Preface and Epilogue of Castle Rackrent that she knew what she [was] doing when she used langauge to mark certain characters or ethnic or national groups, as other than normal. Unfortunately, many of the writers who copied Maria Edgeworth’s regional writing were linguistic innocents who thought that their so-called dialect writing was an authetic expression of regional speech; many literary critics hav been equally innocent, unfortunately, including many who write about Irish literature. [END] NOTE, in a footnote, Croghan calls the Essay ‘possibly the most original intellectual work of international relevance which has appeared in Ireland over the last two centuries’ - with reference to the analysis of ‘symbolic violence’ in it’ and further refers to his own Demythologising Hiberno-English (Boston: Working Papers, Northeastern Univ. 1990). A disparaging comment is directed towards R. Wall, ‘Dialect in Anglo-Irish Litreature’, the Hermetic Core’, in Irish University Review, 20, 1 (1990), cp.18.