Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture by Terry Eagleton - Cork, 260pp, £14.95

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Terry Eagleton introduces this collection of essays on Irish culture by referring to what he terms "two kinds of narrowness in contemporary Irish cultural studies". The first of these is the dominance of issues of gender and racial stereotyping over less fashionable areas of scrutiny such as religion and education. The second is the exclusive emphasis on Joyce, Yeats, Synge, Beckett, Flann O'Brien and Northern Irish poetry.

One might expect that a broadening out from the emphasis on these writers would embrace literature in Irish, but this is not the case. What Eagleton is calling for is the inclusion of figures such as Isaac Butt, Susan Mitchell, George Sigerson and Arthur Cleary: for this particular post-colonial critic the only Irish literature is the literature resultant on colonialism.

This blindness to literature in Irish is something shared by Eagleton with many of the historians he attacks here in "Revisionism Revisited", a polemical essay which claims that "the British can now confidently rely on the Irish themselves to produce the kind of anti-Irish sentiments which they had previously to disseminate themselves".

He offers the emphasis placed by certain historians on native gombeenism as a cause of the Famine as an instance of such obsequiousness, declaring it a current fashion. If it is a fashion, it is a remarkably persistent one, dating back to William Carleton's 1847 novel, The Black Prophet, which blamed the Famine of 1845 on "a class of hardened wretches who look forward to a period of dearth as one of great gain and advantage . . ." Resort to evidence is not a pronounced feature of this particular essay - in contrast, it might be said, to the generally well researched nature of the book - and it is not clear which historians are under attack. However, it is difficult not to conclude that the essay's central implication is that the Irish are so warped by history as to be incapable of writing any.

He sees what he believes to be the incapacity of Irish liberals to recall the history of Irish nationalism without feelings of unease as symptomatic of "how negatively dependent they remain on a history they believe they have transcended". The entire essay is populated by neurotic stereotypes, bomb victims, "spiritually mutilated women . . . emotionally autistic men" and Dublin advertising executives permanently fearful of returning to a life "unemployed and sexually guilt-ridden at the country crossroads".

The essay divides the world into liberals and radicals and "it is embarrassingly easy to say who on the whole is in the right and who is not". Only the triumph of radicalism (as defined by Eagleton) could bring about the adjustment in the relationships of base to superstructure which would create a politics capable of allowing conflicts between modernisers and traditionalists, revisionists and nationalists to be resolved and history to be written.

For someone insistent on the materialist basis of his analysis, Eagleton appears remarkably blind to the class basis of the decline in nationalist self-assurance of which "revisionism" is an aspect. Twenty-nine years of the Northern "Troubles" have made it apparent to historians and everyone else that the northern Protestant working class has its own identity and that this identity has a basis in its self-interest as a social class. The skilled artisans of the north-east refused their consent to a united Ireland because they wished to maintain Belfast's place among the advanced industrial cities of the United Kingdom. It was this analysis which gave them and their employers a common aim, one on which Unionism was to be based. In all of this they were neither deluded nor duped.

The title essay refers to John Toland and Bishop Berkeley, and further essays deal with William Dunkin, a poet born in Dublin in 1709 whose comic and poetic merits are demonstrated; Frederick Ryan, another forgotten figure, is discussed in the context of both socialism and the Literary Revival.

There is a discussion of Francis Stuart (Stuart's appeal to the political left is remarkable) and an essay entitled, "Cork and Carnivalesque" which deals with Cork culture in the 19th century. However, one of the few references to Cork's Gaelic tradition is misleading: the Blarney court of poetry had dissolved by 1760 and had no 19th-century importance. Besides, it was a school of poets, not for poets, as the essay claims.