Julia Wright, ed. Irish Literature, 1750-1900: An Anthology. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Hardcover: ISBN: 978-1-4051-4519-0. Price: $115.95. Paperback: ISBN: 978-1-4051-4520-6. Price: $52.95

In this anthology, scholars of romanticism have a superb resource, the kind that might have been expected to emerge from Irish Studies in the thirty years since the founding of the Field Day Company in 1980, the grit in the oyster of a revisionist historicism skeptical of academic decolonization. Together these scholarly movements have encouraged scholars in North America and Great Britain, no less than in Ireland, to reconceive the long 19^th-century of Irish literature. The publication of Irish Literature 1750-1900 helpfully brings together into a manageable, easily handled (i.e. portable) but also comprehensive form the literary texts that have stabilized through those debates into a canon, even as this anthology modestly provokes its readers to continue to rethink the revivalist premises that continue to haunt the field. Wright, in reminding us through her selections that “some of the best Irish literature is either not obviously, or not at all, about Ireland” risks disappointing readers who are looking for local color; the inclusion of less familiar authors may disappoint scholars for whom the international stature of a field’s corpus sustains disciplinary (much as it sustains national) pride. What those readers gain, however, is something more compelling than mediocrity, more lasting than the occasional, and more engaging than the one-note of Irish nationalism or its denunciation. For example, to read LeFanu’s “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family,” published in 1839, is to glimpse the Gothic dimension of the quotidian in Anglo-Ireland, and also to be reminded that the autobiographical dimension of narrative is no less important for an alleged Catholic realist—William Carleton—than it is for a contemporary Irish symbolist, James Clarence Mangan. Moore’s “Lalla Rookh” becomes a more complicated example of orientalism (perhaps closer to what Joep Leerssen has helpfully called the Irish writer’s tendency to engage in “auto-exoticism”) for being situated a few pages after his “Intercepted Letters; Or, the Two-Penny Post-Bag,” published just four years earlier. And both Moore and his clear-sighted contemporary, Maria Edgeworth, might be reconsidered in this age of sense and sensibility in Ireland when read beside Mary Leadbetter and Mary Tighe, who remind us that in Ireland, as in England, this is also the age of Protestant fervor, a dimension of the Enlightenment which promoted causes of interest to women, but which also produced a body of literary achievement that influenced (as in Tighe’s case) Moore and Keats. The field of Irish romanticism, an “ism” whose cultural aims were belatedly realized in the constitution of the Irish Free State in the early 20^th century, has been troubled since the 1970s, for scholars as for most contemporary Irish poets, by the conservative politics of a nationalism “racy with the soil.” The field was able to be put back under active, less apologetic tillage with the emergence of postcolonial studies, and simultaneously its ablest critic Longley, at the center of Irish Studies in the 1980s. Its dominant voice was Field Day, but Declan Kiberd’s now-famous Yeats Summer School in 1987 (attended by Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Terry Eagleton) certainly shared the megaphone, lending welcome legitimacy, and indeed universality, to the study of Irish literature through the enlarged contexts postcolonial theory offered. Yet not even the efforts in the ‘80s of such by now well-known scholars of Irish Romanticism as Deane, Kiberd, David Lloyd, and Joep Leerssen, not even the path breaking scholarship in Irish 19^th century cultural studies published by Margaret Kelleher, Claire Connolly, Luke Gibbons, and Siobhan Kilfeather, indeed not even—last but by no means least—the confident critique of republican historiography mounted by the revisionists Edna Longley (who …