Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture

Terry Eagleton

Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays and Monographs

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.

Terry Eagleton is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. He has published widely on the subject of literary theory. His books include Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1996) and Saint Oscar and Other Plays(1997).

Reviews

“Eagleton’s ten essays in this fifth volume of the series, “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