Uncertain Futures: Essays About the Irish Past for Roy Foster review: history as a tasting menu

Uncertain Futures: Essays about the Irish past for Roy Foster

Author: Edited by Senia Pašeta

ISBN-13: 978-0198748274

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Guideline Price: £60

Roy Foster, the recently retired professor of Irish history at Oxford University, likes to cook. Thus this slim but rich volume in his honour should appeal to him as a sort of history tasting menu. Uncertain Futures consists of 22 essays by those who have worked with Foster, studied under him, and been influenced by the sheer exuberance and electricity of his writing and his ideas. The essays are of high quality – hardly surprising, since doubtless the book could have been three or four times its length, with scholars queuing up to pay tribute to possibly the finest historian-writer of his generation.

The undercurrent flowing through this collection is, of course, the validity and legitimacy of what is known as the “revisionist” movement in Irish history, a term that has become pejorative and frequently abusive. While Foster was just only one of its initiators, he has perforce become its bellwether, its lightning conductor.

No bad thing, maybe. Foster has always had the intellectual nimbleness and capacity to soak up what the critics throw at him, and to answer them persuasively and courteously. His influence in this regard is well brought out in Matthew Kelly's "Sense and Shite" – Roddy Doyle, Roy Foster, and the Past History of the Future, in which "the broad cultural reach of historical revisionism" is demonstrated in an original and entertaining way.

The historical record

Foster, a Waterford Protestant, has spent his entire career as an historian in England, first at London and then at Oxford. The latter is where his teaching and seminars brought the study of modern Irish history into a serious and accepted space. Indeed, Foster himself has become part of the historical record, of the historiography of the Irish in Britain.

It is appropriate, then, that of the three “Life” essays here, two deal extensively with Roy’s influence in “Hibernia’s Other Island”. Marianne Elliott writes of Foster from the perspective of the Irish emigrant, whereas Toby Barnard looks the other way, at Foster’s contribution to Oxford and to Hertford College in particular.

Along with Tom Dunne's comprehensive RFF: A Writing Life, these essays colour in Foster, and go a long way towards explaining what moves and grounds him, and what makes him the historian, writer, teacher and public intellectual that he is.

Foster, too, has spent much of his historical life excavating what makes people tick. Colin Reid's illuminating essay on Denis Gwynn complements Foster's 2014 examination of the pre-Rising revolutionary generation (Vivid Faces), while Caoimhe Nic Dhábhéid on the post-revolutionary generation counterpoints it.

Ultán Gillen co-opts one of Foster's favourites, Hubert Butler, into a discussion of identity through the prism of Theobald Wolfe Tone and the Common Name of Irishman in 1960s Ireland. Erika Hanna, speaking to Foster's sense of the significance of place, evocatively dissects modern urban identity in terms of Dublin's built environment, and what it says about Ireland's "uncompleted and unexpected future".

Historian as recoverer

As Felix Larkin has pointed out elsewhere, the so-called revisionist movement of the 1970s and later has been as much about the recovery of historical knowledge as the reinterpretation of that already known. Many of the essays here are "recoverist", reflecting the influence of Foster's first book, Charles Stewart Parnell: The Man and His Family (1976). The challenge he faced was the "complete dearth" of Parnell family papers, necessitating forays into wider territory, especially literary sources.

Here, this adventurous trope is notably present in essays on Elizabeth Bowen by Hermione Lee, on Synge and Yeats as a distorted mirror to Ireland's pre-revolutionary soul by Ben Levitas, and Lauren Arrington's fascinating Feeding the Cats: Yeats and Pound at Rapallo, 1928.

Other essays are forensic examinations of lesser-known aspects of modern Irish history. Vincent Comerford's analysis of the impediments to freehold ownership of land is historical salvage at its best, with its emphasis on the centrality to the Land War of the 1880s and early 1890s of legal and economic considerations. It is matched nicely with Marc Mulholland's Land War Homicides.

Similarly, Tim Wilson's The Strange Death of Loyalist Monaghan, 1919-1921 retrieves the history of a frontier community stranded just on the wrong side of the tracks, one of the "outposts of Ulster" according to Edward Carson in 1913. Charles Townshend continues this recoverist theme with an erudite examination of Force, Law and the Irish Revolution. Paul Bew's contribution marries recovery and revision in subjecting Foster's books on Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill to a penetrating elaboration.

Historian as writer

Tom Dunne’s introductory essay captures Foster’s true essence, which is as a writer who happens to be a historian. Foster was fortunate in his generation. Although Ranke’s “scientific history” had heavily influenced Irish history research and writing from the foundation of the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences in 1938, by the 1970s, when Foster learned his trade, style and language had not been entirely suppressed by rigid rules and the box-ticking of the PhD industry.

David Fitzpatrick's idiosyncratic essay is a fitting nod to Fosterian flair. Words and Irish History: an Experiment is a wild and wonderful exploration of "tendentious terminology", or how Irish history can be distorted into shapes that owe more to preconception than reality. A piece of fun with serious intent, it demonstrates the dangers posed by the polemical, and how difficult it actually is to corral Irish history within a linguistic demilitarized zone.

Foster has successfully attacked most forms of literary prose, from a magisterial multivolume work (the Yeats biography) to short semi-journalistic commentary pieces. In one area, though, he excels: the essay, where he can use to full effect his acumen for words, a genius for research, and an insatiable curiosity about life. As Paddy and Mr Punch (1993) and The Irish Story (2001) demonstrate, a historian can seldom be neutered or ignored, if he can write.

In this collection of tribute essays, it is clear that the authors have striven to pay their respects to the genre in which Roy Foster moves so easily by the quality of their writing as well as their historical research.

Ian d’Alton writes on the history of southern Irish Protestantism. He a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin.