The views of a public intellectual

Literary Criticism: The publication of The Irish Writer and the World, a collection of essays that first appeared between 1979…

Literary Criticism: The publication of The Irish Writer and the World, a collection of essays that first appeared between 1979 and 2003, involved some authorial courage. 

Declan Kiberd's provocative criticism is almost universally praised - even by those who disagree with his political or social framework - for its illuminating analyses of particular texts. Both in his groundbreaking Inventing Ireland (1995) and his encyclopedic Irish Classics (2001), Kiberd fleshed out his political or social conclusions with detailed and always rewarding close readings.

But in this gathering of almost a quarter-century's shorter takes, many of them anticipating or developing central themes in those two major volumes, Kiberd's concern with social, economic, and pedagogical matters appears ever more pivotal. Read chronologically - unfortunately not the order in which they are printed - these essays offer the material for an intellectual biography of one of Ireland's liveliest public intellectuals.

Several essays anticipate Kiberd's rescue of the late 19th-century literary revival from revisionist attacks on nationalism - a theme that was to shape Inventing Ireland and has since influenced virtually all readings of revivalist culture. In his introduction to this volume, Kiberd describes his youthful resistance to assertions about irreconcilable Anglo-Irish and Gaelic traditions, a gloomy analysis that dominated some of the worst years of the crisis in the North. Against FSL Lyons's reading of a bifurcated national culture, Kiberd contrasts his own commitment to the pluralist vision of the nation that revivalist writers had shaped. Douglas Hyde and John Millington Synge emerge as central and heroic figures throughout these essays, offering not the separatist view of national identity that revisionists were ascribing to Irish nationalism, but rather the possibility of a genuine hybridity in which two traditions interacted to shape an inclusive and bilingual culture.

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Kiberd is well aware, as he puts it, of the cruel irony that the attempt to restore the Irish language in the late 19th-century coincided with the greatest English language writing that Ireland ever produced. But he insists that the close interaction between two traditions during the revival made such achievement possible. The Irish education establishment's artificial partition of these traditions in the classroom, he suggests, evolved from the language movement's falling into the hands of pedants and puritans who rejected Hyde's more inclusive ideals of the original Gaelic League.

In an early essay Writers in Quarantine, Kiberd describes, for example, the absurdity of studying the works of Liam O'Flaherty, Flann O'Brien, or Brendan Behan - all fully involved in Irish - in an exclusively English rather than a bilingual classroom. And if, as this authority on Irish language writing demonstrates in a recent essay, the Gaelic bardic tradition shaped the work of Synge, Yeats and other Irish poets, the pedagogical separation of two fused traditions short-changes all students seeking to comprehend the richness of the national literature. A key disappointment amid the pervading optimism of The Irish Writer and the World becomes the resistance of Ireland's educational establishment to teaching a bilingual culture.

Recent essays continue Kiberd's rapid-fire release of social observations, as in The Celtic Tiger: a Cultural History (2003). Here, the nation's current economic success becomes both a fulfillment of the revival's commitment to self-help and the final rejection of the elite colonist's contempt for entrepreneurship and commerce - an attitude disastrously taken over by the new state for much of the 20th century. The promise of Sinn Féin, in other words, is finally being fulfilled in the Celtic Tiger.

Characteristically undermining received assumptions, Kiberd also argues that postcolonial Ireland, typically viewed as one of the West's most traditional societies, was one of its most forward-looking. Plunged into modernity by its role as Britain's testing ground for new social agendas, by the estranging trauma of the Famine, and by its willing embrace of the English language, Ireland produced strikingly experimental high-modernist literature in the early 20th century.

But Kiberd searches in vain for panoramic social novels responding to a contemporary Ireland of the new century. He finds Irish writers too often mired in the past, unable to transcend a time warp that would still identify their country's unsentimental embrace of the future with cultural loss. In such moments he moves seamlessly into an Emersonian language of inspiration: "The current affluence, far from threatening art, imperiling identity or killing the Celtic soul is a great opportunity for a second national flowering, this time in film perhaps as well as literature, in religious life as well as economics." The literary critic has become the public intellectual.

Vera Kreilkamp has written The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House and recently contributed essays on the Irish novel to Oxford University Press's Ireland and the British Empire (ed. Kevin Kenny) and to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (ed. Jack Foster). She teaches at Pine Manor College and Boston College in the US

The Irish Writer and the World, By Declan Kiberd, Cambridge University Press, 331pp. £14.99