Strange country - Seamus Deane

This book traces the emergence of a self-consciously national tradition in Irish writing from the era of the French Revolution and, specifically, from Edmund Burke's counter-revolutionary writings. From Gerald Griffin's The Collegians to Bram Stoker's Dracula, to Joyce, Synge, and Yeats, Irish writing is dominated by a number of inherited issues--those of national character, of conflict between discipline and excess, of division between the languages of economicsand sensibility, of modernity and backwardness. Almost all the activities of Irish print culture - novels, songs, typefaces, historical analyses, poems - take place within the limits imposed by this complex inheritance. In the process, Ireland created a national literature that was also a colonial one. This was and isan achievement that is only now being fully recognised.