Terry Eagleton has become a regular and, at times, controversial contributor to Irish cultural debate over the last number of years. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995) and Crazy John and the Bishop (1998) he self-consciously set out to widen the parameters of Irish studies beyond what he saw as a narrow concern with literary greats like Yeats and Joyce. His latest book continues the focus on neglected minor figures and cultural movements to complete the trilogy.
In Scholars and Rebels, Eagleton sets out to explore "the extraordinary ferment of intellectual life" in 19th-century Dublin across a range of scholarly pursuits including politics, medicine, science, economics and literature. Here, figures as various as Thomas Davis, Jane Elgee (Lady Wilde), Isaac Butt, W.E.H. Lecky and George Sigerson, who are normally consigned to the prehistory or the footnotes of the literary revival, are given the fuller treatment they deserve.
As one would expect, this is not a "conventional" history of ideas or cultural survey of the period. Eagleton, as ever, is keen to lay bare the politics underlying the production of knowledge and, in this case, makes use of Antonio Gramsci's important distinction between "traditional" and "organic" intellectuals to explore the social function of the intelligentsia. Surprisingly, for such an accomplished theorist, the nuances of argument are not always conclusively delineated in this pivotal section.
In one of the most interesting chapters of the book Eagleton makes a comparison between the intellectual set which gathered around the Dublin University Magazine and the Bloomsbury group. Both of these coteries became "informal academies in themselves, complete with tutors and students, masters and acolytes, scientific uncles and philosophical cousins". But if Bloomsbury espoused "a liberal progressivism" in protest against Victorian constraint, the Dublin set advocated "a radical conservatism" in order to remind its own class "of its civic responsibilities" in the face of political crisis.
Such a strong civic imperative, argues Eagleton, encouraged many "traditional" intellectuals not only to venture beyond their own academic borders but also to become more engage. This, in part, explains why in Victorian Ireland medics were led into archaeology, "lawyers into political economy, political economists into education, historians into law and art critics into musicology". It also explains why the scholarship of so many 19th-century Irish scientists, medics and economists is characterised by a "generous-spirited humanism" which refuses abstract theorising at the behest of "general human welfare".
Despite Eagleton's grudging regard for such intellectual humanism he ultimately dismisses it as the expedient response of an Anglo-Irish gentry, on the wane and seeking to connect with an equally expedient Catholic middle class on the up. Yet such a critique, it seems, can only be arrived at by excluding some of the more progressive currents of the Irish revival, like Horace Plunkett's co-operative movement which, curiously, receives no attention here.
Scholars and Rebels will not endure as the author's most considered engagement with Irish cultural debate: as the preface states, the book "has its fair share of skimmings and exclusions". Yet it will contribute usefully to the burgeoning debates surrounding 19th-century Ireland, not least by drawing attention to the interplay between power and knowledge during this period.
P. J. Mathews lectures in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin and is the editor of New Voices in Irish Criticism, which will be published in April