A chara, – Emer Nolan's review of John Wilson Foster's Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture(Weekend Review, March 20th) is revealing, though perhaps more in relation to the reviewer than the reviewed.
Readers are given little sense of the scope and variety of the book’s contribution, still less of its originality and its broad human sympathies. Sure enough, some of the themes and interpretations will be challenging to those of a literary nationalist bent, but one might have expected a thoughtful reviewer to engage with the arguments rather than jibing at the author. This would have afforded the general reader a better opportunity to measure the scholarly import of the work and its contribution to shifting existing paradigms within Irish literary criticism. – Is mise,