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This innovative collection of essays views Irish culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, covering a wide range of Irish topics and authors. Bishop Berkeley, Thomas Moore, Oliver Goldsmith, Francis Hutcheson, Laurence Sterne, Richard Steele, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, James Stephens, Charles Lever, Austin Clarke, Kate O'Brien, and Francis Stuart are among the more familiar writers, but the author also sets out to retrieve a range of valuable yet neglected Irish writers including William Dunkin, John Toland, Frederick Ryan, Father Prout, William McGinn, Shan Bullock, Canon Sheehan, and George Birmingham.
The book's topics range from eighteenth-century satire and sentimentalism to the modern Irish novel, and from the carnivalesque in early nineteenth-century Cork to the philosophy of Toland and Berkeley. In moving from celebrated reputations to some lesser-known writers, the book also breaches the boundaries between literary criticism, and intellectual and political history. It concludes with a vigorous intervention into the ongoing debate surrounding revisionism in Irish Studies.
"Readers who know the brilliance of the author will find him here at his high-powered best, the thought of the world seemingly at his fingertips. Eagleton’s focus goes from closeup (Yeat’s poetic form and its difference from Eliot’s; Thomas Moore’s self-conflicted verse; the point of Beckett’s apparent pointlessness) to wide-angle (Augustan concepts of ‘sensibility’ and ‘benevolence’; Irish novelists from Maria Edgeworth to Francis Stuart as ‘cultural emigrés’; Gaelic grouchiness in the work of Steele, Goldsmith, Sterne, and Burke). Eagleton enthusiastically reclaims poet William Dunk and socialist ideologue Frederick Ryan from near oblivion, and his long title essay—which praises John Toland’s philosophic thought as a challenge to Berkeleyan idealism—glitters with sweep and authority. The concluding essay chides revisionist critics for extremism but ends by admitting its necessity in order to achieve human freedom. One can make only a poor pass at suggesting the depth, wit, learning, and elegance of Eagleton’s new work.” —Choice
“Eagleton's ten essays in this fifth volume of the series, offering ‘Field Day Essays and Monographs,’ cover Irish and English history, philosophy, and literature from the 18th century to the present. Throughout, Eagleton tries to counteract 'two kinds of narrowness' in traditional Irish studies. Although one essay does discuss Yeats's poetics, Eagleton avoids 'the Irish literary pantheon' while including a fascinating biographical essay on Frederick Ryan, a contemporary of Yeats and Joyce, now little known. Eagleton also refuses to shape his work to the current 'postmodern agenda,' and the result is a collection of memorable insights into this important literary field." —Library Journal
“These essays, however, represent the serious play of a lively, perceptive critical mind on a wide range of subjects, and the insights and keen observations his [Eagleton] essays yield make this book sa valuable infusion of ideas into Irish atudies— an object he seems always to have in mind and acheives admirably well.” —Southern Humanities Review
“Crazy John marks the continued collaboration of Deane and Eagleton, both of whom have contributed mightily to Irish studies—and Irish culture—for more than a quarter of a century.” —Victorian Studies
Terry Eagleton is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. He has published widely on the subject of literary theory. His most recently published books include Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1996) and Saint Oscar and Other Plays (1997).