Empire's Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form

By Mark Quigley

Shedding new light on the rich intellectual and political milieux shaping the divergent legacies of Joyce and Yeats, Empire’s Wake traces how a distinct postcolonial modernism emerged within Irish literature in the late 1920s to contest and extend key aspects of modernist thought and aesthetic innovation at the very moment that the high modernist literary canon was consolidating its influence and prestige.

By framing its explorations of postcolonial narrative form against the backdrop of distinct historical moments from the Irish Free State to the Celtic Tiger era, the book charts the different phases of 20th-century postcoloniality in ways that clarify how the comparatively early emergence of the postcolonial in Ireland illuminates the formal shifts accompanying the transition from an age of empire to one of globalization.

Bringing together new perspectives on Beckett and Joyce with analyses of the critically neglected works of Sean O’Faoláin, Frank McCourt, and the Blasket autobiographers, Empire’s Wake challenges the notion of a singular “global modernism” and argues for the importance of critically integrating the local and the international dimensions of modernist aesthetics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Release date: Dec 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9780823245468

Book preview

Empire’s Wake

Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form

Mark Quigley

Fordham University Press 

New York 

2013

This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Quigley, Mark.

Empire’s wake : postcolonial Irish writing and the politics of modern literary form / Mark Quigley. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-4544-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. English literature—Irish authors—History and criticism. 2. Postcolonialism in literature. 3. Modernism (Literature) I. Title.

PR8755.Q54 2013

820.9’9415—dc23

2012026633

First edition

For Elsa, who waited for me to tell her

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Rerouting Irish Modernism: Postcolonial Aesthetics and the Imperative of Cosmopolitanism

1. Modernity’s Edge: Speaking Silence on the Blaskets

2. Sean O’Faoláin and the End of Republican Realism

3. Unnaming the Subject: Samuel Beckett and Postcolonial Absence

4. Postmodern Blaguardry: Frank McCourt, the Celtic Tiger, and the Ashes of History

Conclusion. Dispatches from the Modernist Frontier: European and Asiatic papers please copy

Notes

Works Cited

Acknowledgments

Despite heroic visions of the author working alone in a musty garret or the distilled silence of a library, all books are the products of a communal labor. My keen awareness of how many acts of generosity, faith, hospitality, and labor of all sorts have gone into the making of this book has sustained and driven me as I have worked on it over the years. A sense of this communal investment has brightened many a lonely hour of work while also creating some anxiety that any book could ever prove worthy of all the kindness and sacrifice that helped bring it to fruition. I am fortunate that there is no accounting method that can reveal how extensive my debt is to so many.

The earliest ideas for this project took root in the rather disparate spaces of Tipperary, Los Angeles, and Dublin and came to fruition in the equally disparate climes of Nevada, Oregon, Galway, and California. In Tipperary, my uncle Rodge’s warm Welcome Home always made me feel like I had never left, and as we sat and talked by the fire I learned more than he may have ever realized. His insightful analysis of Irish and world affairs delivered with a masterstroke of wit in the brief moment he stopped to relight his pipe provided early examples of critical acuity and linguistic compression that were a continuing inspiration and challenge as I strove to find a language for my own ideas. His only rival was our cousin John Joe Quigley, whose gentle teasing and virtuosic turns of phrase always kept me on my toes and who, with his wife, Mary, extended a rich hospitality to me more times than I can count as I worked on this book. My cousins Maura and Tony and my oldest friend, Michael Gleeson, and his wife, Marion, have likewise made me welcome on many nights and helped me realize how the deepest connections endure amid all of the dislocations of contemporary life.

At UCLA and many late nights across the City of Angels, Tracy Curtis, Dave Martinez, Danise Kimball, Mike Miller, Genaro Sandoval, Theresa Delgadillo, Dave Kamper, Tarik Abdul-Wahid, Jim Lee, Edwin Hill, Joanna Brooks, and Mo Lee supported me through good times and bad and kept me thinking and laughing all the way. Val Smith was an especially important source of inspiration and guidance while Joseph Nagy, Cal Bedient, and Joel Aberbach were continually generous in sharing their expertise and time. William Prescott provided me the benefit of his clarifying wisdom, and Saul Friedlander provided generous advice and timely encouragement, the significance of which I’m sure he never knew. Wendy Belcher has been a faithful friend whose consistently perceptive comments played a key role in helping me to focus the argument of this book. Carole Fabricant likewise sustained me with her unstinting support and sharp wit and taught me much by her example of a rigorous and committed scholarship.

I was extremely fortunate to be a part of the Notre Dame Irish Seminar over three summers in Dublin, where I was the beneficiary of the kindness of Chris Fox and the immense intellectual hospitality of Kevin Whelan, Luke Gibbons, and Seamus Deane. It is hard to overstate the richness and vitality of the intellectual community they created during those summers or to credit adequately the influence it has had on my thinking about modernism and postcolonial Irish writing as a result of the conversations in and around the seminar and those that have continued over the years since. I am especially grateful to Luke Gibbons and Kevin Whelan for the ways they shaped some of my initial thoughts about the Blasket texts. I am equally thankful to Joe Cleary for the ongoing exchanges we have had about Sean O’Faoláin’s intellectual politics and to Conor McCarthy, Heather Laird, and Kariann Yokota for sharing their warm fellowship and thoughtful insights as we have sustained the conversation across the years and miles.

One of the greatest pleasures of regularly visiting Dublin was the opportunity it afforded to spend time with my aunt Constance. She was the person who first stoked my love of literature, and her encyclopedic knowledge of Dublin and of the succession of its twentieth-century cultural and social scenes has been an invaluable resource. Her willingness to throw open her house to me and to offer her support in every conceivable way whether I was in Dublin or the United States enabled a number of research trips that would otherwise not have been possible. My time in Dublin has likewise been brightened by the warm hospitality and stimulating company of Melisa Halpin, Peadar O’Grady, Mary Kate Halpin, and Terry and John Fitzpatrick.

In Galway, I have gained much from the rich intellectual community of the USAC Irish studies summer school and the wide-ranging expertise of Méabh Ní Fhuartháin, Anne Ní Choirbín, Alison Harvey, and Deaglán Ó Donghaile, who was especially generous with his insights about republicanism and the nineteenth-century novel. I am grateful to Angus Mitchell for sharing his deep knowledge of twentieth-century Irish history and for the unfailing sense of humor and solidarity he has maintained over more than a decade of friendship even in the face of more than one ill-fated trek down the back roads of the Burren. Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin has likewise been a treasured friend whose keen critical sensibility and thoughtful commentary on Ireland’s early postcolonial period have continually challenged and inspired me. My summers in Galway have also been richly illuminated by the immense learning, laconic wit, and warm hospitality of Tadhg Foley and Lillis Ó Laoire.

At the University of Nevada, Stacy Burton, Michelle Cobb, Nancy Beach, and Carmelo Urza were consistently supportive while Jen Hill’s discerning eye helped me render my ideas with greater precision. At the University of Oregon, I have been fortunate to be surrounded by a wealth of stimulating colleagues who have likewise been generous with their ideas and support, especially Lara Bovilsky, Karen Ford, Sangita Gopal, David Li, Enrique Lima, Alex Neel, Priscilla Ovalle, Bill Rossi, George Rowe, Lee Rumbarger, Deborah Shapple, Dick Stein, Cynthia Tolentino, David Vázquez, Melissa Walter, Molly Westling, Mark Whalan, and George Wickes.

Sustaining the dynamic intellectual atmosphere of the Oregon English department in both big and small ways has been the hard work of Harry Wonham, and it is difficult to imagine how I would have been able to complete this book were it not for his thoughtfulness and support. I am equally grateful to Tres Pyle for reading earlier drafts of chapters and offering illuminating comments about my approach to literary form. A stalwart friend, Paul Peppis has also been remarkably generous as a reader of my work and as a frequent lunchtime companion eager to help me develop incipient ideas and willing to share his vast knowledge of modernist art and literature. My ideas about modernism have been transformed by participating in the ongoing discussions of the Oregon English department’s Modernism Group and by working with a number of talented graduate students. I am particularly grateful to Jenny Noyce and Bill Fogarty for all that I have learned from their engaging work.

As this book unfolded, I have been fortunate to be able to discuss its ongoing development with David Lloyd. His generosity with his ideas in conversation and in comments on drafts contributed immeasurably to my thinking and helped to clarify the stakes of my argument. His friendship and encouragement have sustained me through the project’s long gestation. Jed Esty was also an exceedingly generous reader whose thoughtful suggestions and probing questions helped me to situate Irish modernism more fully within a wider array of modernist studies initiatives.

My most long-standing intellectual debt, however, is to Michael North, who helped shape these ideas in their earliest form and who has been unfailingly generous with his time and support. His remarkably unassuming and good-humored dedication to both scholarship and teaching continue to inspire.

I count myself very lucky to have been able to work with Helen Tartar and Fordham University Press. Tom Lay has been a particular pleasure to work with at Fordham, and his kindness, patience, and incredible efficiency have kept the project moving and saved me much trouble and anxiety along the way. I am also grateful to the Oregon Humanities Center and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon for their support and particularly their help in underwriting the costs associated with preparing the index for this book.

Sustaining me over the long haul has been the faith and humor of dear friends and family. Matthew Fraleigh has seen me through more challenges than either of us can remember, and David Sarabia has been an unshakable comrade. Brian Quinn, John O’Brien, Steve Martinez, William Ruller, and Sr. Fabian Quigley have likewise been a constant source of encouragement while not letting me take things too seriously. Roberta Gillerman and Joe Gillerman zt"l welcomed me into their family and taught me much about the meaning of faith, especially in the past year.

Amid much wandering on two western coasts, my home and my hopes have been with Sharon and Maya. Though they have endured many absences, the bright beacon of their love and support has never dimmed. Their presence permeates these pages.

Infusing these pages, too, is the faith and the labor of my parents, Sean and Elsa, who sacrificed much to enable my education and have been unwavering in their support and love. I am humbled by their devotion to family and their care for others and have been equally humbled by my brother, John’s, and sister-in-law, Julie’s, quiet selflessness and loving attention to my parents during my mother’s long illness. My mother was so involved in bringing this book to life and eagerly following its progress that it is quite bittersweet to see it published after she has gone. I hope it may be a worthy testament to her fierce love.

An earlier version of a portion of chapter 1 previously appeared as an essay in Interventions and is reprinted by permission from Taylor & Francis; an earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as an essay in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, and grateful acknowledgment is also given to Rodopi for permission to reprint material here.

Introduction

Rerouting Irish Modernism

Postcolonial Aesthetics and the Imperative of Cosmopolitanism

As we consider the complex energies animating Irish literature in the wake of empire, some initial insight into the challenges faced by the generation of Irish writers emerging in the 1920s and 1930s and the unique value of the body of literature they produced may be gleaned from a rather unlikely source. In the Introductory Note to the English translation of Muiris Ó Súillebháin’s Blasket Island autobiography, Twenty Years A-Growing, published in 1933, E. M. Forster remarks admiringly on the odd document (v) the book constitutes as a text at once framed by the legacy of the Irish Literary Revival and one representing a radical new departure from the terms of the Revival’s overarching aesthetic. Grasping for a language capable of conveying this somewhat contradictory position, Forster says of the book: [I]t is worth saying ‘This book is unique.’…[The reader] is about to read an account of neolithic civilization from the inside. Synge and others have described it from the outside, and very sympathetically, but I know of no other instance where it has itself become vocal, and addressed modernity (v). Gregory Castle has suggested this description by Forster indicates that the anthropological modernism he so insightfully elucidates in Modernism and the Celtic Revival has become available, by 1933, to mainstream European intellectuals (256). I want to propose, however, as part of a larger argument about modernism and postcoloniality very much indebted to Castle’s analyses, that Forster’s portrayal of Twenty Years A-Growing points us instead toward the emergence of a distinct variety of late-modernist practice which the more long-standing accounts of modernism and its place within Irish literary history have tended to obscure. Indeed, this late modernism can be seen to arise from the internal rupture of the anthropological object that Castle sees taking different forms in Synge, Yeats, and Joyce and that recurs in the primitivism and ethnographic privilege anchoring the syncretic ambitions of high-modernist aesthetics more generally.

As we shall explore, much of the value of Ó Súillebháin’s odd document lies precisely in its oddness and the ways it unsettles modernism’s ontological and aesthetic categories. For, as Forster’s note recognizes, Twenty Years A-Growing does not merely offer a more informed ethnography of the Gaelic periphery from the inside that simply reiterates or improves upon the earlier versions offered by famous outsiders like Synge. Ó Súillebháin’s text instead shatters the division between anthropological object and observing subject that organizes the artistic consciousness of the earlier generation of modernists shaped by a late-imperial age. As Forster continues, his mention of Ó Súillebháin’s love for the movies and his acknowledgment that key portions of the book recount Ó Súillebháin’s experiences away from his Blasket Island stronghold as he travels to Dublin and Galway stand at odds with Forster’s initial emphasis on a pristine neolithic civilization (v–vi). Rather than a lapse on Forster’s part, however, the contradictory impulses marking his preface might be best understood as registering a transition within modernist thought wherein an anthropological language of the neolithic continues to resonate even as it proves increasingly inadequate to address an emergent postcoloniality.

The Blasket Islands have now been mostly forgotten by the wider body of modernist studies scholars. They once loomed large, however, in the imagination of John Millington Synge, who referred to them in a letter to Lady Gregory as being probably even more primitive than Aran and described himself as wild with joy at the prospect of visiting them (Letters, 1: 120).¹ As E. M. Forster’s preface underscores, the Blasket Islanders themselves produced a literary sensation in the late 1920s and early 1930s that became an important touchstone for an era of Irish literary and intellectual culture in addition to drawing such notable attention from a member of the Bloomsbury circle. But their importance to modernist studies ultimately lies less in their associations with famous figures from London or Dublin than in the ways that the texts written by the Blasket Islanders reveal how as early as the late 1920s, modernist practice and thought had already begun to be reframed by the emergence of a postcolonial modernity. These shifts, which remain relatively unremarked within modernist studies, prefigure in significant ways the more well-known versions of late modernism such as we see from Beckett by midcentury.

Most immediately, the Blasket texts provide a means for examining and reevaluating the primitivism of a more classic high modernism, a topic that has generated much illuminating scholarship over the past two decades and promises to take on a new importance as the new modernist studies directs increasing attention to so-called global or transnational modernism.² In addition to interrogating the positions and politics underlying modernist primitivism, however, the Blasket texts—along with other early Irish postcolonial texts—reveal deceptively simple late-modernist narrative forms whose very plainness ironically intensifies their antimimetic character. We thus encounter new forms of modernism less reliant on pyrotechnic effects and the notion of a visionary artist capable of transmuting the quotidian into the symbolic so as to orchestrate the symphony of a wider order from the disparate fragments of a shattered modernity. The eclipse of a heroic artist figure and of a sense of an underlying or incipient order connects, in turn, with a critique of subjectivity that becomes increasingly pronounced with a new generation of modernist writers that begins to emerge by the 1930s. In addition to filling in the picture of modernism’s historical development—especially in relation to the passing of empire—the late-modernist features of postcolonial Irish writing help to clarify the political investments and limitations of the different varieties of high and late modernism that unfold over the first half of the twentieth century. What these texts begin to reveal in both stark and subtle ways is the loss of a privileged artistic consciousness and a turning of modernist scrutiny upon itself.

The far-reaching implications of this shift become increasingly clear as we look at the work of other Irish writers from this generation such as Sean O’Faoláin and Samuel Beckett, whose greater critical sophistication and prominence within Irish and European intellectual networks enable a more explicit account of the shift under way in modernist aesthetics. Beckett’s role as a late-modernist writer and thinker obviously looms large in any discussion of the development and decline of modernist literary modes. O’Faoláin also makes a significant contribution to the elaboration of a late-modernist aesthetic, however, with extensive essays during the 1930s and 1940s that complement and occasionally overlap with Beckett’s insights. Indeed, Beckett’s own acknowledgment of O’Faoláin’s importance in shaking off what he perceives as the dead hand of the Revival underscores the value of considering their work in relation to each other and, perhaps more broadly, impels us to consider anew the ways that Beckett’s work connects with a strain of late modernism emerging from a distinctly postcolonial problematic. At the same time, O’Faoláin’s deployment of an anachronistic realism as an alternative to the insufficient aesthetic radicalism and excessively naturalistic tendencies he diagnoses in the previous generation of Irish modernist writers alerts us to the potential for a late-modernist practice to express itself in forms other than the pyrotechnic stylistic displays and inscrutable fragmentary arrays that typically characterize a high-modernist mode.

In this regard, we might understand the late-modernist aesthetic being articulated by early postcolonial writers such as the Blasket writers, O’Faoláin, and Beckett as one positioned between the anthropological modernism Castle identifies in Joyce and the Revivalists and a different sort of anthropological modernism that Jed Esty traces in the later writings of English modernists such as Woolf and Eliot. Describing how an anthropological method shapes the modernist aesthetics of the earlier generation of Irish modernists in divergent ways, Castle writes: While Yeats chose to revive an autochthonous folk tradition by evoking it using methods borrowed from anthropology and ethnography, Joyce chose to create a national literature by engaging in an immanent critique of revivalism in which colonial and anthropological discourses are appropriated and criticized.…In both cases, an ethnographic imagination comes into play, either as a method of cultural preservation and authentication (as with Yeats) or as a strategy of cultural critique (as with Joyce) (175). This culminates, according to Castle, with Joyce’s anti-mimetic modernist aesthetic that draws on the minutely detailed accounts of anthropological observation to revel in "inauthenticity rather than the premodern authenticity that the Revival might propose as part of a project to disrupt the elaboration of a singular imperial modernity (179, 176). Saikat Majumdar has recently offered a parallel account of Joyce’s treatment of the banal object as a vehicle for undermining imperialist epistemology and what he refers to as the dominant consciousness of the subject" (221, 230). Perhaps even more helpfully, Rebecca Walkowitz proposes in Cosmopolitan Style a concept of triviality as a conscious stylistic feature that allows Joyce to maintain the tension between what she calls two, somewhat different models of national culture: a fixed culture that can be described through the collection of minor details; and a transient culture for which minor details mark the principle of inexhaustible, proliferating characteristics (30).

The postcolonial writers I examine effectively build on that underlying antimimetic tendency while developing a more thoroughgoing critique of the modern subject that we can see early on in the texts from the Blasket Islands and that significantly accelerates by the time we encounter Beckett’s novel trilogy at midcentury. We can apprehend this work as helping to elaborate a distinctly late modernist aesthetic in two primary ways.

Firstly, these writers emerge in the midst of the historically later moment of postcoloniality, which in the Irish case begins in the very same year as modernism’s annus mirabilis of 1922 and largely coincides in its first major phase with literary modernism’s own major phase as it comes to a close by the late 1940s. Even as Yeats and Joyce continue to write and produce some of their most important work during this period, and, indeed, even though each, respectively, forms a significant association with O’Faoláin or Beckett, they nonetheless occupy a very different historical plane as writers who came to artistic maturity in a late-imperial context and who in very different ways had contributed significantly to modernism’s emergence. The later generation, by contrast, labors in empire’s wake and in the shadow of a modernist aesthetic phenomenon already well under way. As a result, as James McNaughton has illustrated through his discussion of Beckett’s letters and fiction from the 1930s, high modernism was a significant presence within the intellectual and cultural discourses of early postcolonial Ireland and had, indeed, already begun to get a bit stale (63).

This strange combination of contemporaneity and historical disjuncture obtaining between these two generations of Irish writers thus produces a late modernism that is in many ways temporally and stylistically out of phase with the more established modernist practices with which it coincides. In particular, we encounter work from a variety of early postcolonial writers that is decidedly not avant-garde or evidently difficult and instead appears quite archaic and accessible in its forms and structures. Indeed, the extent and complexity of the modernist dimensions of much of this work only becomes fully apparent as we have begun to reexamine the bases of what constitutes modernist thought and aesthetics under the auspices of the new modernist studies. The result, as Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz note in their introduction to Bad Modernisms, is that many writers hitherto seen as neglecting or resisting modernist innovation are shown to be quite significantly engaged with developing or refining a modernist project in ways that at turns parallel, challenge, or build upon the more familiar expressions of modernism (1).

The extent to which these early postcolonial writers actually make use of their significant formal or stylistic departures from conventional modernism in order to pursue a critique of its shortcomings and find a means of extending the impact of its antimimetic approach through more prosaic forms thus marks the second way that we can understand these texts as part of a late modernist project. In other words, these writers not only compel us to attend to postcoloniality as a distinct historical framework within modernism but alert us to the variety of forms that a second-generation modernist thought can take as it turns inward to critique both the heroic artistic consciousness of high modernism and the stability of the anthropological objects against which that consciousness would seek to define itself.

Jed Esty’s astute account of a parallel late modernism unfolding in English literature during roughly the same period helps set in relief the late-modernist features I am tracing in postcolonial Irish writing. Charting the effects of imperial contraction and demetropolitanization on English modernism, Esty argues in A Shrinking Island that the later works of modernist writers such as Eliot and Woolf tend to elaborate a new sense of cohesion and groundedness within a more localized English culture that differs markedly from a previous emphasis on a British and imperial metropolitan perception that "registered an attenuated or absent totality at the core (7). Eloquently capturing the shift within English modernism in this era, Esty observes: If the metaphor of lost totality is one of the central deep structures of imperialism and modernism, it follows that the end of empire might be taken to augur a basic repair or reintegration of English culture itself. Such a turn of geopolitical events would therefore reinflect those aspects of modernist style that were based on lost social totality with a new—or newly imagined—sense of spatial and cultural consolidation (7). This sense of consolidation and a turn toward more precisely defining the core" starkly contrast with the late-modernist practices that we see marking the emergence of the postcolonial in Irish writing at the same moment. Rather than consolidation and definition of a stable, localized core, we find an effort to push against such confident assertions and get beneath the surfaces of a defined national object.

Most immediately, we might understand this opposite tendency in early Irish postcolonial writing as a complementary response arising from being on the other side of this epochal process of imperial contraction. Having been the object of imperial knowledge and what Esty describes as the synthesizing universalism (7) of an imperial modernist consciousness, Irish writers can experience postcoloniality and imperial contraction as phenomena affording considerable relief from a quite relentless round of definition. We thus see the concept of a more defined or fixed core being undermined by an Irish late modernism expressed at different moments through adaptations of archaic realist modes or through the more dramatically antirepresentational mode for which Beckett is famous.

Fundamental to Irish late modernism are the ways it extends an earlier modernist critique of the colonial state to the postcolonial state so as to address the newly invigorated discourses of tradition and modern subjectivity. If we understand such overwhelming insistence on tradition in terms of the sterile formalism (204) and outworn contrivances (224) that Frantz Fanon links with a bourgeois official nationalism sustaining an atmosphere of historical arrest and counterrevolution in the early postcolonial era, we can more easily see why Irish late modernism might be driven to unsettle at once the ethnographic object of high-modernist aesthetics and the reified object of an official nationalist hegemony that is its rather drab doppelganger.³ Indeed, the extent to which the essentialism and primitivism of Revivalist modernism has increasingly been overtaken by the rank commodification of tradition in the postcolonial era serves as an important impetus for late modernism’s critique. At the same time, the postcolonial context of Irish late modernism also impels its challenge of modern subjectivity as a key political, ontological and artistic framework whose seeming indispensability and naturalness is ironically reinforced by the shared primitivism of high modernism and populist tradition. Both rely on the perceiving consciousness of a normative modern subjectivity in order for the nonsubjective primitive to become visible and, perversely, to be mourned for its inevitably imminent demise.

While calling into question the notion of a consolidated modern subjectivity as the inexorable consequence of Irish postcoloniality’s integration into a broader global modernity, Irish late modernism simultaneously rejects the mimetic impulses driving both official nationalism’s Revivalist inheritance and a disillusioned postcolonial naturalism that would seek to repudiate it. Indeed, the failure to discern the difference between the modified realist modes of Irish late modernism and a more straightforwardly mimetic naturalism has been the primary reason that critics have tended to frame the bulk of early postcolonial Irish writing as aesthetically retrograde or naïve. Lost in this standard critical account of a dour Counter-Revivalist skepticism is the rich texture and complexity of Irish intellectual life in the decades immediately following 1922. Lost, too, in the shadows of this stark critical contrast are the contours of a distinctly postcolonial late modernism that is the aesthetic complement of the English late modernism Esty discerns at empire’s erstwhile core. Rather than turning the anthropological gaze homeward via demetropolitanization to fill in and repair the void at the imperial center, a postcolonial late modernism implodes the ethnographic project structuring the ambitious effort of aesthetic integration common to both high modernism and the iteration of late modernism charted by Esty.

This understanding of the late modernism produced by early postcolonial Irish writers usefully complements and complicates the critical accounts of alternative, peripheral, and postcolonial modernisms that have become a growing focus within modernist studies in