Any new anthology raises two immediate questions: what criteria lie behind it, and what is the intended audience? In his introduction, David Pierce lays down a useful range of judgments based on inclusiveness, unfamiliarity and location. But it is prefaced by a personal memoir to tell us where he is - in more than one sense - coming from. Thus, the editor manages to anthologise himself. Since this contribution evokes the rural 1950s Irish life of the " disenfranchised", seen from the visitingemigrant perspective, it may also be intended to provide boreen-cred. "In Britain of course it is unacceptable to talk too much about your origins unless you are `superior'," he tells us: but this preliminary autobiographical excursion is provided since "you or your tutor may want to explore attitudes towards Irish writing from a personal angle". There are a number of assumptions here that deserve decoding. The reference to "your tutor" indicates that this hefty book is intended as a "workbook and resource tool" for Irish Studies courses - supplementing, or perhaps outflanking, the vast and invaluable Field Day Anthology, blessed by many of us who want our classes to read long-inaccessible essays by Samuel Ferguson or D.P. Moran, but know that students are disinclined to go further than the open shelves. Pierce's collection is, unlike Field Day's, restricted to the 20th century, but, again unlike Field Day's, it is affordable. It is nonetheless nicely produced, and well proof-read (though there are some slips in spelling, and the index is not always reliable). Yeats is well and widely represented. It is marred by a large chunk of missing Joyce extracts, thanks to a silly and querulous point of copyright law: doubly a pity, since Pierce has already written a notably imaginative, insightful and accessible book about Joyce, and his choices would have held a particular interest. But there is plenty more for you to be getting on with, whatever about your tutor.
It is also, of course, about defining a canon. This is both bold and imaginative; only as one reads do the reservations crowd in. First, the bonuses. Pierce is determined to include obscure material from periodical literature, especially about literary controversy. John Eglinton, the forgotten man of the Revival, receives his due. We are reminded what a good critic John Jordan was, and what a gap was filled by Hibernia. Once-fashionable novelists like George Moore are treated properly, and unjustly neglected writers such as Teresa Deevy and Blanaid Salkeld snap sharply into focus. Shaw's John Bull's Other Island is rightly hailed as masterly, and rightly given in full (as are other dramatic masterpieces such as Synge's Playboy, Barry's Steward of Christendom and Parker's Pentecost). The well-chosen extract from Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls whets the appetite for more of the same (though that seems to be a lost cause). Pierce's broad approach to "critical and documentary" writing brings in Hugh Brody's anthropological classic Inishkillane (though not Arensberg's Irish Countryman), and some devastating extracts from the recently-compiled Northern Ireland record, Lost Lives. His determination to recover forgotten fiction reminds us of the quality of Paul Smith's The Countrywoman, and lures into the net writers whom we might not readily think of as "Irish".
But these virtues, when let run riot, turn into faults. Sometimes the inclusion of transient journalism is brilliantly illuminating, as with Seamus Deane's riveting 1977 interview with Seamus Heaney: but too much useful space is devoted to a repetitive interview with William Kennedy, or the much-quoted meditations of Bono on Irish identity. Philip Hobsbaum's condescending memories of the "Belfast Group" could have been replaced by more from Mahon, Longley or Heaney themselves (or Tom Paulin, under-represented in comparison to some of his contemporaries). Mystifyingly, Colm Toibin (described as "journalist and novelist") is represented only by a piece of journalism, his review of Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland (a choice made all the stranger by, regrettably, including nothing of Kiberd's). Earlier, George Birmingham is represented by a hack 1907 article on the literary revival, instead of something mordant from An Irishman Looks At His World, or The Red Hand of Ulster. Elizabeth Bowen comes in with a fairly slight piece from the Listener on `Going to London', instead of her supercharged evocation of Dublin in Seven Winters. (For imaginative writing, she is surprisingly represented by `Mysterious Kor' rather than one of her wartime short stories about Irish neutrality, or The Last September - maybe to steer clear of Field Day.) Domhnall MacAmhlaigh provides an article from the Tablet, instead of Dialann Deorai/The Irish Navvy. Obscure pieces are all very well, but why choose them when they are duller than classics by the same authors?
Then there is the question of the all-embracing diaspora. Since Pierce believes that imprisonment is as central to the Irish experience as emigration, middle-class writers such as Joyce Cary, Kate O'Brien and Mary Lavin are paid less attention than the outcast or disinherited. At the same time, putatively "Irish" writers who show the right socio-psychological qualifications are hauled enthusiastically in. Scott Fitzgerald shows up twice. William Kennedy is at least self-consciously Irish, and there are strong reasons for including Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah (I would also argue for the ignored George V. Higgins's sublime The Friends of Eddie Coyle); but there is nothing from Maeve Brennan, who moved from Ireland to America and wrote marvellously about both. "Diaspora literature" in Britain is far less expansively treated: James Ryan's luminous Home from England goes unmentioned, and so do J.M. O'Neill's Open Cut and Duffy is Dead. Yet they have been elbowed out by too many second-rate extracts from writers with a thin claim on Irish identification and influence.
This raises questions about other exclusions. Why is there room for John Gregory Dunne and Arthur Conan Doyle, and a Mayfair sermon from Father Bernard Vaughan (on the strength of a mention in Ulysses), and the Scots poet Iain Crichton Stuart, and Cecil King's Pooteresque diary - while Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger is allowed only a few lines (and there is nothing from Tarry Flynn)? Why is Tom Barry's problematic and ill-written Guerilla Days in Ireland preferred to Ernie O'Malley's masterpiece On Another Man's Wound? Why is Brian Moore represented only by an extract from one of his lamer novels, The Mangan Inheritance? Does the editor have shares in Joseph Campbell, who appears, unimpressively, under four different headings? Why is a short story by Dorothy MacArdle here, except as an awful warning? Of more recent writers, the exclusion of Colm Toibin and James Ryan has already been mentioned; they are joined by Anne Enright, Glenn Patterson, Michael Collins, Neil Jordan, Dermot Bolger, Frank McGuinness, Joseph O'Connor, Bernard O'Donoghne (looking at this list, the unworthy thought strikes me that being cited for a major literary prize may act as a disqualification).
It would be unfair to take this game of ins-and-outs much further; anthologists must follow their opinions. But it is fair to point out that this is an extremely opinionated "reader", especially as it is aimed specifically at creating a canon for students. The introductory notes to each extract, usually lively and perceptive, rise further questions. Sometimes they are distinctly loaded (referring for instance to the "so-called resurgence" in Irish poetry from the 1970s). Usually detailed, they occasionally give no information about a writer at all. There are odd glitches: strangely, the 1924 editorial for To-Morrow, though known to have been written by Yeats, is attributed only to the editors, Francis Stuart and Cecil Salkeld; while the note to Cathleen Ni Houlihan makes no mention of Augusta Gregory's contribution, though she claimed to have written "all but all" of it and recent scholarship bears her out.
On other levels, however, the editor issues firm instructions on how to read. Current debates are partially indicated; Terry Eagleton is given at length on "revisionism", though there are no extracts from any "revisionists". Two paragraphs from Edward Said's `Yeats and decolonisation' are not enough to situate that particular thorny discussion-point; the subsequent addition of an essay by Colin Graham on post-colonialism, written in response to something else, gives the sensation of a half-heard argument.
Still, the introductions try to keep you and your tutor up to the mark. "How do you respond to the use of dialect" in Somerville and Ross? (A question not asked about Finley Peter Dunne, or Marina Carr.) Note that Paul Muldoon's `Ireland' "can be used as an icebreaker at the beginning of a course in class". "You might reflect on what (Lee Dunne's A Bed in the Sticks) contributes to an understanding of the larger question of Irish identity." "Here is the first Act [of Marina Carr's The Mai]; as an exercise in composition, you might consider writing the second Act yourself." Why not consider reading it? Anthologies, after all, set you on a track of exploration. Despite the obeisances to Van Morrison and Mary Coughlan, the itinerary offered here leaves the odd impression of being at once unfamiliar and old-fashioned, with signposts which point down eccentric dead ends, or suggest that the quickest way to Olympus is via Cobh and Holyhead.
Roy Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford. His forthcoming book, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up In Ireland, will be published by Penguin in October