‘The work of revisionist literary history has just begun ... cannot be assimilated to conventional views of Irish literary tradition ... discusses ‘Irish literature’ and locus of particular ideological pressures limiting it to literary expression of Irish national aspiration or problematic psyche ... evokes notion of ‘minor literature’ coined by Kafka and explored by David Lloyd; hypothetical continuities ... resistance mythology passes over into post-colonial orthodoxy, viz Tanzania ... the moderate nationalist view of Irish litertature ... traces the Irish literary genius from pre-Chrisian Celtic origins in the Mythological Cycle and the Ulster Cycle through a series of occlusions and suppressions (usually attributable to England) into the nineteenth-century rediscoveries and renewals culminating in the literary renaissance ... late Victorian and Edwardian Anglo-Irish literary enterprise which self-consciously annexed itself to a selective version of Gaelic culture compounded of heroic myth, legendary history, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lyric poetry and the oral traditions of the peasantry was never satisfactorily representative of the cultural interests and heritage of either the anglo-Irish socio-economic elite or of the increasingly urbanised, English-speaking Irish people. Nor did it do justice to the range and variety of the Irish cultural past in which Irish writers in Latin and Norman-French as well as English and Gaelic had played a [9] part.
On the identification of Keating’s trans. with Dermot O’Connor - as in OCIL - see the following notice:
An English translation [of Keating’s history] was published in 1723, ostensibly by Dermot O’Connor though there are grounds for ascribing the project to the notorious Donegal deist and learned adventurer, John Toland; [also] an English version owned since before March 1689/90 by Sir Robert Southwell, Secretary of State for Ireland; another translation apparently made by Timothy Roe O’Connor for Lord Orrery about 1668; though this version seems to have disappeared it is possible that it survived unidentified in Marsh’s Library; the MS translation ‘A Defence of the True History of Ireland ... by Jeffry Keating’ preserved there bears no resemblance to Dermot O’Connor’s published text. Bibl., D. Berman and A Harrison, ‘John Toland and Keating’s History of Ireland (1723)’, in Donegal Annual (1984), p.25-29; Diarmaid Ó Catháin, ‘Dermot O’Connor, translator of Keating, Eighteenth Century Ireland 2 (1984), pp.25-29; Marsh’s Library, MS Z3.1.17. [Vance, p.22.]
Norman-French literature of Ireland includes ‘The Entrenchment of New Ross’, celebrating Sir Piers de Bermingham. (Cited in Vance, op. cit., p.26).
Account of Bedell’s scheme to produce a composite language (p.29) - his ‘universal character’ project, shared with Rev. John Johnston of TCD, to be called ‘Wit-Spell’, known and encouraged by Hartlib; manuscript, complete in 1641, torn up by suspicious Franciscans, and plates used by tinkers; rough draft brought to Oxford by Johnston’s widow, c.1650. Bibl. James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France 1600-1800 (Toronto UP 1975), pp.9f., 76-86;
On Ussher: According to some sources, he was intensely hostile to Bishop Laud and died a Catholic. See however Norman Vance, Irish Literature: A Social History (Basil Blackwell 1990), p.34: Protestant episcopalian counterclaims to continuity with ancient Irish and British Church independent of Rome [was] one of Ussher’s major scholarly projects.
Ussher bibliography to his conservatism, which is blazoned in Trevor-Roper’s contribution on him, in ‘James Ussher’, in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, (Secker & Warburg 1985) [twice noticed in RX]. Also, the unnamed Jesuit with whom he conducted a controversy in Dublin Castle was a Henry Fitzsimon, distant relative.