Empire's Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form by Mark Quigley (review) (original) (raw)
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One of the more conspicuous consequences of the ongoing postcolonial reappraisal of Irish literature is a recurring tendency to stress its differences from other literary traditions. Many critical considerations of Irish culture produced over the last decade and a half suggest that it does not correspond all that well to any theoretical frameworks. Ireland appears to be neither completely postcolonial nor entirely Western european, neither fully part of the developed world nor separate from it, a "First World country, but with a Third World memory," in Luke Gibbons's influential formulation (Transformations 3). Whatever the differences among them, such critics as Gibbons, Declan Kiberd, David Lloyd, Joe Cleary, and others share the presupposition that Irish literature is fundamentally distinct. This is especially true of recent considerations of Irish modernism and-even more specifically-the Irish modernist novel. While the fiction of Irish writers like James Joyce or Samuel Beckett is central to any canon of transnational modernism, many critics influenced by a postcolonial understanding of Irish culture have argued for a "discrimination of modernisms" that recognizes the unique qualities of Irish modernism. 1 What is it that makes Irish modernism distinct? The specificity of Ireland's colonial history, which, in the words of Francis Mulhern, "by virtue of its sheer duration is more like a history of colonization itself" (24), proves to be an inevitable precondition for answering such questions. While it is possible-as Perry Anderson claims in the classic essay "Modernity and revolution"-to identify shared general conditions that foster the emergence of modernism in a number of different locations in europe at the end of the nineteenth century, recent scholarship has demonstrated that such social and political qualities were notably absent in Ireland during this time period. 2 exactly how do the particularities of Irish history affect the narrative form of the Irish modernist novel? I benefited greatly from the advice of a number of generous readers; I want to thank in particular Jed esty, P.J. Mathews, Catherine robson, Mike rubenstein, and David Simpson for their help. This essay is written in honor of ryan Dobbins and is dedicated to him. 1 The phrase "discrimination of modernisms" is Kiberd's: "[I]t is time for a discrimination of modernisms, a recognition that Irish modernism may be not at all the same thing as english modernism (which characteristically, as in Forster, attempts to pour the experience of modernity into the forms of a nineteenth-century novel). And French and American modernisms may be something else again" (Irish Writer 247). 2 Anderson argues that the three necessary prerequisites for the emergence of modernism throughout europe are the dominance of a canonical and academic sense of aesthetic propriety in the arts, the rapid emergence of the new technologies of the second industrial revolution,