Joe Cleary’s two new engrossing books are vital references to Irish literature

In a John Updike short story from 1962, A Madman, the American narrator experiences a telling reaction to arriving in England. Everything seems “too authentic to be real, too corroborative of literature to be solid”.

His response has affinities with the incredulity of the narrator in Anne Enright’s The Gathering, as she looks out at the English countryside from a train. She feels difficulty believing that “this land” actually exists: “names so silly and twee they must be made up”.

Irish modernism contains its own comment on the fictionality, or stupefying reality of England in Samuel Beckett’s riff on London place names from Waiting for Godot: “Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham”.

Joe Cleary, a professor at Yale University and previously a professor at NUI Maynooth, has been an authoritative and stimulating guide to modernism, and to 20th-century Irish literature and culture generally for the last two decades. His work was shaped by the alignment between Irish studies and postcolonial studies in the 1990s.

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The emergent methods and concerns of postcolonial cultural and literary theory were given systematic and compelling articulation for a wide audience by Prof Cleary’s teacher at Columbia University, the eloquent Palestinian writer and critic Edward Said, author of the groundbreaking analysis of western perceptions of the Middle East and Asia, Orientalism (1978).

Prof Cleary’s first book compared the context of greatest importance to his mentor with his own country’s experiences of the consequences of imperialism: Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (2001).

In Modernism, Empire, World Literature, Prof Cleary argues that the end of the first World War saw the beginning of a development fully realised after the conclusion of the second: the displacement of London as a centre for Anglophone literary production by the innovations of Irish and American literature, a shift that transfigured, in Ezra Pound’s resonant phrase, “a language that was English”.

The second book of Prof Cleary’s reviewed here, The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization, itself performs such a displacement, leaving to other studies the examination of the considerable body of Irish literature set or produced in Britain to focus instead on the United States, Asia, continental Europe and the “global south”.

Modernism, Empire, World Literature

Modernism, Empire, World Literature aims to make historically concrete a transition in Anglophone literary culture overlooked by an influential theory of world literature, Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des Lettres (1999).

For Casanova, the productions of the cultural “centre” are modified or revolutionised by writers who move there from the “periphery”.

Despite its declared historical aim, Prof Cleary’s book traces the displacement of London as Anglophone literary centre principally on the level of the ideas and forms of the works he analyses.

The interpretations proposed are persuasive and illuminating: the fascism of Pound and of the older WB Yeats is seen to have its roots in an imperialist French and English liberalism; Henry James and TS Eliot feature in different guises as prophets of the “soft-power” management of a decrepit Europe by the United States; a chapter about the lecture on Shakespeare delivered by Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses makes fascinating connections with competing Irish views of Shakespeare at the time of the Gaelic revival.

We also hear the fraught story of how The Great Gatsby became an American classic. A concluding chapter explores the ways in which Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros exhibits the tensions affecting a postcolonial writer’s absorption into a new (American) imperial context.

Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization

Prof Cleary’s study of the Irish Expatriate Novel takes a similar approach, with the styles and structures of the works he examines registering sometimes in contradiction to their ostensible themes, foundational or current features of contemporary global capitalism: cultural homogenisation (Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn); Anglo-Saxon hegemony (Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland); the self-enclosure of native English speakers (Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times); brutal class and racial inequality (Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist and Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch).

The two studies address, for the most part, distinct epochs and material. (Both have sections on Yeats, a commonality made possible by that poet’s eclectic sources of inspiration.) But they can in many ways be considered complementary.

Facts marginalised in the modernism study – Irish writers’ frequent migration from “periphery” to “centre”; the repressive official culture of the Irish Free State; the enduring importance of London as a locus for the dissemination and recognition of Irish literature – receive acknowledgement in The Irish Expatriate Novel.

The final section of the latter book confronts an implicit failure of the Irish novel to engage with contemporary Europe. Prof Cleary’s concluding call for the promotion of a new “internationalism” on the part of today’s writers looks back to the multilingualism and extensive literary knowledge of the major modernists.

His own work contributes to this internationalism, and in addition to being a vital reference for anyone involved in the scholarly study of Irish literature, offers something not always found in academic books: an engrossing read.

Catherine Toal is dean of Bard College, Berlin