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represented by Strongbow himself may well result from the workings of Irish individuals. Yet, as with Longsword , the novel's conclusion leaves all such optimism in doubt, casting the rehabilitation of both Irish culture and the British nation itself in terms of potentiality. Indicatively, the novel's twice removed narration of Strongbow's tale – told first to a seventeenth-century prisoner kept in Chepstow Castle and then read, in manuscript form, by an eighteenth-century tourist – implies that the cause of Strongbow's continued haunting of his former home remains
indicative of Roche's nationalist intent. Identifying The children of the abbey as the first national tale, Miranda Burgess reads Amanda Fitzalan's ‘wanderings’ as a sign of her dispossession as well as an early vindication of Irish culture, partially by way of a concentration on English depravity. 111 Diane Long Hoeveler similarly called Amanda's movement ‘a sort of endless hyper-nationalistic loop’, in which the heroine searches ‘for a home that eludes her until the end of this long novel’. 112 Far from parochial or inward-looking, as suggested by Hoeveler
removal of its English hero, Horatio Mortimer, to the horrors of Ireland, a country he expects to find both ‘semi-barbarous’ and ‘semi-civilized’. 26 Instead, he learns to appreciate Irish culture through exposure to its people and their ways, under the tutelage of the amazingly learned Irish princess, Glorvina, and her family and friends. He then cements his cultural ‘conversion’ through his marriage to
Desolate Places’ indicated, it was in Uncle Silas, In a Glass Darkly and a few other scattered pieces by Le Fanu that Swedenborg finds temporary refuge in Victorian Irish culture. The central section of the present book attends in detail to the fiction which constitutes that second intervention. Yet one may still ask – why Le Fanu, why not (for
renewed awareness of historical consciousness in Le Fanu’s most prolific period – the 1860s. This is not so much a matter of the novelist’s individual consciousness, as of the historical quality of Irish culture in those years. Yeats is naturally to the fore in this argument, but in the final three chapters (15 to 17) a detailed examination of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day
Protestantism lurks’ 18 It would be scandalous to end on this sectarian note, scandalous in my own terms because I have striven to eliminate from discussion of contemporary Irish culture a terminology which is husk only. Yet it may serve a purpose or two. If the generation of Bowen, Beckett and MacNeice can be described as post-Protestant in that their thought is still coloured and
credentials, its Stygian setting needs no gothic tradition. With the political crisis of 1880-91, a new fractured and spectral ‘class’ came to monopolise the term ‘Anglo-Irish’. By this exercise in ethnogenesis another item is added to the crane-bag of Irish cultures, traditions and tribes. Ulster Unionism, and with it a new sense of political
). It seems that although the ghost estates echo the history of the failed home, they may also point with some prescience towards the future. The circularity of the narrative of the ruin in contemporary Ireland reveals the frightening possibility that these ghost estates may not be the last in a long line of gothic failed homes in Irish culture. References
civilised culture. For Horatio, living alongside Glorvina and learning about Irish culture allows him to become ‘another, better self’. 46 In Lord Mortimer’s case it is Amanda who draws him to Ireland and marriage with her that prompts him to renounce his long-term absenteeism. 47 Fatal revenge constructs a similar relationship between Ippolito and his page, Cyprian. Although the latter has no apparent
Fanu with an Anglo-Irish culture, nevertheless echoes Killeen’s assessment that the culture is characterised by a hesitancy that excludes realist forms of writing, rather as the focus on the spectral army in ‘The Spectre Lovers’ registers a confusion about political and military legacies. For McCormack there exists a need ‘to address the persistent suspicion that something fundamentally unreal