Irish Literature in Transition, 1880-1940 ed. by Marjorie Elizabeth Howes

Reviewed by: Irish Literature in Transition, 1880-1940 ed. by Marjorie Elizabeth Howes Erika Mihálycsa (bio) IRISH LITERATURE IN TRANSITION, 1880-1940, edited by Marjorie Elizabeth Howes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 381 pp. $120.00 cloth, $96.00 ebook. The period between 1880 and 1940, comprising the rise of the Revival and the heyday of modernism, has determined the affirmation of a distinctly Irish canon. Hence the present volume, edited by Marjorie Elizabeth Howes, occupies a central place in the Irish Literature in Transition series as a representative survey of the changes in literary history and Irish studies impacted by decades of archival scholarship. The interventionist role such transitioning [End Page 716] academic discourses have on our (re)reading of that canon is fittingly documented by Peter Kuch, in "Retrospective Readings: The Rise of Global Irish Studies," who traces the emergence and global rise of Irish Studies, including, thus implicitly, the uncoupling of Irish from other Anglophone literatures and moving back to the establishing of chairs of Celtic, later Irish, studies from Oxford University through New York's Fordham University to the University of Sydney, starting in the late nineteenth century (356). One of the volume's underlying insights is that criticism and academic discourses have actively molded modern Irish writing and its projection of a national future, constituting the premise rather than the secondary codification of its literary practices. Gerry Smyth saliently investigates the interpenetration of literary production and politicized critical reception in the history of the Revival, for whose ideological battles "[c]riticism provided both the arena and the weapons" (353), as Oscar Wilde's idealist, Kantian-Goethean, supranational conception of criticism was gradually relinquished in favor of the Gaelic League's harnessing of criticism in the service of racial and cultural identity. Brian Ó Conchubhair contributes a radical reassessment of the foundation of Irish cultural nationalism, revisiting the political and aesthetic debates around the revival of Irish against the background of contemporary linguistic disciplines. Ó Conchubhair reveals the shifts of emphasis in the struggle to obtain cultural validation for the Irish language, first on account of its ancient written tradition, but later by recognizing the cultural capital of the spoken language with its dialects—previously relegated to the turf of ethnography and considered a degeneration of language as the essence of nationhood, but in a "Pauline conversion to dialects" (29) inspired by post-Romantic German language philosophy and endorsed as the guarantee of the language's vitality. In elevating real or fictionalized dialectal forms of rural speech to the rank of a representative literary language, "the Gaelic League played the role of Martin Luther, providing the intellectual rigor needed to make heresy respectable" (25). In one of the volume's most interesting essays, "The Hugh Lane Controversy and the Irish Revival," Lucy McDiarmid reassembles the history of the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and the bequest of the aesthete and philanthropist Hugh Lane—one of the key cultural institutions of early-twentieth-century Ireland alongside the Abbey Theatre or the National University of Ireland. In something that looks like a cautionary tale of modernism's institutionalization, the quarrels about the building to house the Gallery show the changing appraisal of a public persona who, William-Morris-fashion, believed in the transformative potential of art and sought to influence his native city through his own tastes. [End Page 717] One long-standing thesis that is significantly revised in the book is the watertight separation of revivalism from modernism. In Irish theater, this would largely correspond to the agendas of the Abbey and Gate Theatres, but Paige Reynolds brings to light a partial overlap in the two institutions' avant-garde practices in "Theatrical Ireland: New Routes from the Abbey Theatre to the Gate Theatre": their opposition to the English and American theatrical mainstream, together with their ambiguous attitude toward the effects of encroaching modernity in Ireland before and after Independence. Karen Steele addresses the pre-Independence autobiography, soon to become a privileged genre of the Free State's official culture, showing how far these texts stray from the prescribed "celebra[tion]" of "individual achievement in the service of the nation" (115) to reflect modernist sensitivities. Unsurprisingly, Steele points...