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Kiberd, Declan. The Irish Writer and the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xii + 331 pp. £45.00/$75.00 (hardback); £14.99/$24.99 (paperback). ISBN 0–521–60257–2/9–521–84163–1, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 4, October 2007, Pages 475–476, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm090
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Extract
Declan Kiberd is best known for applying post-colonial theory to Irish history and literature in Inventing Ireland (1995). But he has been writing for nearly thirty years and the essays in The Irish Writer and the World are drawn from across this long career. They range from explorations of the influence of Gaelic literature upon the Irish Literary Revival to the politics of Irish memorial preparations in 1996 for celebrating the Easter Rising of 1916. The collection begins by lamenting the failure of Ireland's universities during the 1970s to employ scholars with any understanding of Gaelic in their English literature departments, and it ends by celebrating the emergence of a multicultural Ireland in the twenty-first century. He ranges widely across Irish literature in English and in Gaelic, considering work by Synge, Joyce, Yeats, Flann O'Brien and Máirtin Ó'Cadhain, among others. These essays are linked by their thoughtful probing of national identity, for Kiberd cannot abide intolerance in imperialist colonisers or in “narrow-gauge nationalists” (p. 7). He concludes by espousing a “civic nationalism” which is confident enough to tolerate the questioning of its values by others (p. 318). A multicultural Ireland must not imitate the racism of her former oppressors.
