IRISH STUDIES: The Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in IrelandBy David Dwan Field Day, 232pp. €25 - 'THERE WERE times in the 1980s," wrote Colm Tóibín in 1995, "when it was hard not to feel that Field Day had become the literary wing of the IRA." It is hard to believe now, a decade after the signing of the Belfast Agreement, that the stakes in the Irish culture wars were ever raised to this high a pitch.
But raised they were, and those associated with Field Day were seen by some as Republican bogeymen.
Beginning life as a ground-breaking theatre group, Field Day has always had a publishing side. In the 1980s this took the form of a number of pamphlets by figures as diverse as Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin, Robert McCartney and Marianne Elliott. The Deane-edited Field Day Anthology appeared in three volumes in 1991, followed by two supplementary volumes in 2001. For a number of years the Field Day Monograph series was published by Cork University Press. The current incarnation of the publishing enterprise, known as the Field Day Files, is associated with Notre Dame University. David Dwan’s The Great Community is number five in this new series.
There is certainly no whiff of Provisionalism off this book. Indeed, one would be hard put to say what the book’s politics are, and that is to its credit. Nonetheless, it is a work profoundly informed by political science, with starring roles for Bentham, Hegel, François Guizot and, most prominently, Edmund Burke. Burke and his reputation have long been preoccupations of Field Day and its supporters, and the battle over Burke – with Conor Cruise O’Brien on one side and Seamus Deane on the other – is one of the more intriguing Irish intellectual jousts of the past 20 years.
Though presented under one overarching title, The Great Community is not so much a sustained thesis as a series of essays, beginning with a definition of cultural nationalism and concluding with an 11-page consideration of Charles Stewart Parnell’s aloofness.
Structurally, the book is broken into three parts, which look respectively at Young Ireland; WB Yeats and cultural nationalism; and journalism, nationalism and Yeats. While Part Two follows on logically from Part One with an interesting reappraisal of Yeats’s indebtedness to, and subsequent rejection of, Young Ireland ideology, Part Three reads like a separate set of ideas and observations.
The book, clearly, is written for a specialised, academic audience: it is learned and replete with lengthy, discursive footnotes. Those who will gain most from reading it are students of Young Ireland, that most ambitious, and often most anomalous, of nationalist organisations, which was marked on the one hand by its indebtedness to the ancients, and on the other by a bloodthirsty fascination with war as a poultice for corrupt society. Young Ireland’s newspaper, The Nation, still the most understudied and underutilised window onto mid-19th-century Ireland, is used by Dwan to good effect to focus on the curious mix of influences and contradictions within the ideology that drove Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy, John Mitchell and their associates.
While Yeats presides over this book, as is evident from its title, it has little to say about literature besides an interesting attempt to reassert the excellence of The Wanderings of Oisín and some thoughts on Yeats’s reaction to 1916.
In this, it follows a pattern discernible in much literary criticism of the past 10 years. While philosophy – particularly of the French variety – dominated literary criticism through the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s, history and politics have now become the favoured lenses through which to read and interpret literature. Yeats would not be pleased. At an early point in The Great Community, Dwan quotes Yeats on the place of literature which, he argued, should be enjoyed “for her own sake and not as the scullery maid of politics”.
For now, in the Irish academy at least, she has surely, on the evidence of this book, become something of a servant.
Frank Shovlin is senior lecturer of Irish Literature in English at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. He is author of The Irish Literary Periodical 1923-1958(Oxford, 2003).