Anglo-Irish literature
Anglo-Irish literature, a term used to describe Irish writing in English which helps to distinguish this tradition from English literature and literature in Gaelic. The term Anglo-Irish was applied increasingly by 19th-cent. historians of the Protestant ascendancy to register growing awareness of the political and social circumstances of British settlers in Ireland. It came into general use as a term to describe Irish writing in English only after the Anglo-Irish had ceased to be the dominant class following the Land War [see Land League]. Thomas MacDonagh, in Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (1916), argued that Anglo-Irish literature could express Irish cultural identity, and that the use of Hiberno-English would help further its distinctness. In Anglo-Irish Essays (1917), John Eglinton applied the term generally to Irish writers after John Bale. It had already gained currency as a term for modern Irish writing in English when the bibliographer Stephen Brown employed it in 1919 to describe the body of writing investigated in Ernest Boyd's Ireland's Literary Renaissance (1916). In Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931), Daniel Corkery associated it with an attitude of mind, expressed in the work of Somerville and Ross, Yeats, and Lady Gregory, which he saw as alien to Irish life.
Since then the term has been adopted for all periods in literary histories and bibliographies. In 1968 A. N. Jeffares founded the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature (IASAIL, later IASIL, where the term is dropped to refer to ‘Irish Literatures’) which has done much to promote world-wide academic study of all of Irish writing. The term cannot comfortably be applied to most Irish writing after 1922, for there is something less than satisfactory in describing Thomas Kinsella, or Seamus Heaney as Anglo-Irish writers, hence IASIL rather than IASAIL.
Anglo-Irish literature has taken as recurrent themes the country of Ireland itself, its land, government, and laws; its different and often mutually antagonistic political and religious cultures; and matters of history and society, language and tradition. As a literature of a country colonized by Britain, it has been especially preoccupied with questions of national identity.
Language was always a crucial issue, in that the history of Anglo-Irish literature was co-extensive with the substitution of English for Irish as the language of the majority. An enriching consequence of the displacement of Irish has been a questioning or comic attitude to language, leading to subtlety and nuance in the use of Hiberno-English, as well as to crude stage-Irish misrepresentation. It has been profoundly influenced by the indigenous literature in Irish, from which it derived an atmosphere imbued with ancient Celtic mythology, a love of nature's intricacy and detail, and an earthy realism. The literary revival, a late flowering of Anglo-Irish literature, drew extensively upon the variety of its sources, with Lady Gregory and Synge building upon native elements.
Bibliography
A. N. Jeffares, Anglo-Irish Literature (1982) and Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (1986).
