Ciaran Brady, ed., Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938-1994 (Irish Academic Press 1994), 348pp.

Contents (Sel.): ‘Introduction: Constuctive and Instrument’: The Dilemma of Ireland’s First ‘New Historians’ [3]; T. W. Moody and R D Edwards, pref. to Irish Historical Studies [35]; T. W. Moody, A New History of Ireland [38]; R D Edwards, An Agenda for Irish History, 1978-2018 [54]; T. W. Moody, Irish History and Irish Mythology [71]; F. S. L. Lyons, The Burden of Our History [87]; Oliver MacDonagh, Ambiguity in Nationalism: The Case in Ireland [105]; Roy Foster, History and the Irish Question [122]; Ronan Fanning, The Great Enchantment: Uses and Abuses of Modern Irish History [146]; Steven Ellis, Nationalist Historiography and the English and Gaelic Worlds in the Late Middle Ages [161]; CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES: Desmond Fennell, Against Revisionism [181]; Brendan Bradshaw, Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland [191]; Kevin O’Neill, Revisionist Milestone [217]; Brian Murphy, The Canon of Irish Cultural History: Some Questions concerning Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland; Seamus Deane, Wherever Green is Read [234]; Hugh Kearney, The Irish and their History [246]; Alvin Jackson, Unionist History [253]; Cormac O Grada, Making History in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s: The Saga of The Great Famine [269]; Anthony Coughlan, Ireland’s Marxist Historians [288]; M A G O Tuathaigh, Irish Historical ‘Revisionism’: States of the Art or Ideological Project? Select Bibl. [327]; Index I [337]; Index II [347]. Also Francis Shaw, The Canon of Irish History: A Challenge’, in Studies, lxi (1972), pp.113-57; Roy Foster, History and the Irish Question’, in Trans. RHSoc., 5th ser., 1988, pp.169-92; here 122-45.

Bibl. F. S. L. Lyons, ‘T.W.M’, in Lyons and RAJ Hawkins, eds., Ireland under the Union: Varieties of Tension (OUP 1980), pp.1-33; Helen F. Mulvey, ‘Theodore William Moody (1907-1984), An Appreciation’, in IHS, xxiv (1984-85, ppp.121-30; R W Dudley Edwards, ‘T W Moody and the origins of Irish Historical Studies, IHS, xxvi (1988-89), pp.1-2; Aidan Clarke, Robert Dudley Edwards (1909-1988), IHS, xxvi (1988-89), pp.121-27.

Moody’s valedictory testament, delivered to the Trinity College History Society in 1977, was not greatly troubled by theoretical sophistication. It is possible to discern in its argument some influence of tehanti-idealism espoused by earlier theorists, such as Karl Mannheim and Karl Popper, in their critique of historicism. But there is no sign that moody was responding [7] to - say - Levi-Strauss, then at teh height of his influence in Ireland, for whom such a simple distinction between hsitory and yth ould have been absurd. But despite its old-fashion character, Moody’s statement nevertheless provided the central focus of an unexpectedly rancorous debate that took palce in the decade that followed, serving as a rallying cry for many academic historians who, followign in the great man’s path, were ready exlicitly to assert the contemporary cultural relevance of their craft, and for their critics, both within and outside the academy, who identified it as a calear expression of the ideological arrogance and/or innocence of an entire generation of historians.’ (pp.8-9) Bibl. Moody, ‘Irish History and Irish Mythology’, Hermethena, 124 (1978), pp.7-24; here 71-86.