The Irish Story
Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Roy Foster is one of the leaders of the iconoclastic generation of Irish historians. In this opinionated, entertaining book he examines how the Irish have written, understood, used, and misused their history over the past century.
Foster argues that, over the centuries, Irish experience itself has been turned into story. He examines how and why the key moments of Ireland's past--the 1798 Rising, the Famine, the Celtic Revival, Easter 1916, the Troubles--have been worked into narratives, drawing on Ireland's powerful oral culture, on elements of myth, folklore, ghost stories and romance. The result of this constant reinterpretation is a shifting "Story of Ireland," complete with plot, drama, suspense, and revelation.
Varied, surprising, and funny, the interlinked essays in The Irish Story examine the stories that people tell each other in Ireland and why. Foster provides an unsparing view of the way Irish history is manipulated for political ends and that Irish misfortunes are sentimentalized and packaged. He offers incisive readings of writers from Standish O'Grady to Trollope and Bowen; dissects the Irish government's commemoration of the 1798 uprising; and bitingly critiques the memoirs of Gerry Adams and Frank McCourt. Fittingly, as the acclaimed biographer of Yeats, Foster explores the poet's complex understanding of the Irish story--"the mystery play of devils and angels which we call our national history"--and warns of the dangers of turning Ireland into a historical theme park.
The Irish Story will be hailed by some, attacked by others, but for all who care about Irish history and literature, it will be essential reading.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This engaging collection of 12 essays challenges what the author calls the penchant of the Irish to use overly simplistic techniques, such as nostalgia and cliche, as a means of understanding their history. Skewering Ireland's writers, historians and its popular culture alike, Foster, a history professor at Oxford and a biographer of W.B. Yeats, takes aim at the "popularization of history...which has more to do with packaging and marketing." By emphasizing a romanticized mythology of Ireland, the writer maintains, storytellers sanitize the complexities of the Irish experience and accentuate "victimhood and tyranny." Frank McCourt and Gerry Adams are two memoirists whom Foster unflinchingly targets for their soggy and formulaic notions of Ireland. "Both...turn Irish childhoods to very particular purposes and both exemplify narratives skewed through selective 'evidence' and a manoeuvred memory." On the other hand, Foster is quick to praise writers such as Elizabeth Bowen and Hubert Butler for their idiosyncratic voices. Foster's writing, which is lively and unsparing, has already inspired much commentary in the UK and in Ireland, and his tome will likely make a modest splash in the U.S.
