Benedict Kiely's Criticism in the Nineteen Forties (Critical Essay‪)‬

The middle decades of the twentieth century have been to a large extent overshadowed by a recent critical emphasis on the Revival and contemporary periods and the way in which Irish literary history has linked them. Obviously, there are a number of individual writers who are exceptions to this generalization: so, for example, Samuel Beckett's reputation has steadily increased, and Kate O'Brien can stand as an example of a writer from the mid-century who has emerged from relative obscurity into deserved critical attention. However, the broader point about an absence of concerted cultural analysis of the period, equivalent to that afforded in recent decades to the Revival and the contemporary moment, remains true and can be illustrated simply by noting the declining attention to writers such as Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor, and Liam O'Flaherty since roughly the 1970s. As a result of this lack of attention, there is a consensus (if only by default) about the mid-century: as Joe Cleary has recently put it: '... however much cultural critics might be at odds about the discourses of modernization, some broadly homologous conceptualizations of the Irish twentieth century seem nonetheless to prevail across these various intellectual formations. They might disagree on other matters, but feminists, revisionists and postcolonialists would seem at least to agree that the society that emerged in (southern) Ireland between independence and the 1960s was overwhelmingly disappointing and unattractive'. (1) Cleary ascribes this consensus to ideological and confessional biases, but we should also acknowledge that it is partly founded on the ways in which political turmoil and violence in Northern Ireland allowed for a magnetic attraction between the period of the Revival and the contemporary moment, thus effectively excluding the mid-century from literary and cultural history. A survey of literary and cultural criticism and history from recent decades suggests a reversal of Yeats's post-Parnell formulation: it seems that after the Treaty there was a vacuum in culture. Whatever reasons we may propose for this, what remains surprising about such inattention is that this was the period of Partition, Civil War (itself subject to specific forms of inattention), state formation (and re-formation) and modernization in both North and South, and the 'Emergency'; in addition to such socially and politically momentous events we should add those aspects of modernization which stop it from being an abstract process and make it a much more nuts and bolts affair involving, for example, electrification, the establishment of broadcasting institutions, and the rise of (and arguments about) forms of welfarism. We should also remember that large-scale developments in education were also in train in the midst of these events, not the least of which, for present purposes, is the increasing institutionalization of literary studies.