Irish Art of Controversy

Controversies are high drama: in them people speak lines as colorful and passionate as any recited on stage. In the years before the 1916 Rising, public battles were fought in Ireland over French paintings, a maverick priest, Dublin slum children, and theatrical censorship. Controversy was "popular," wrote George Moore, especially "when accompanied with the breaking of chairs."In her new book, Lucy McDiarmid offers a witty and illuminating account of these and other controversies, antagonistic exchanges with no single or no obvious high ground. They merit attention, in her view, not because the Irish are more combative than other peoples, but because controversies functioned centrally in the debate over Irish national identity. They offered to everyone direct or vicarious involvement in public life: the question they articulated was not "Irish Ireland or English Ireland" but "whose Irish Ireland" would dominate when independence was finally achieved.The Irish Art of Controversy recovers the histories of "the man who died for the language," Father O'Hickey, who defied the bishops in his fight for Irish Gaelic; Lady Gregory and Bernard Shaw's defense of the Abbey Theatre against Dublin Castle; and the 1913 "Save the Dublin Kiddies" campaign, in which priests attacked socialists over custody of Catholic children. The notorious Roger Casement—British consul, Irish rebel, humanitarian, poet—forms the subject of the last chapter, which offers the definitive commentary on the long-lasting controversy over his diaries.McDiarmid's use of archival sources, especially little-known private letters, indicates the way intimate exchanges, as well as cartoons, ballads, and editorials, may exist within a public narrative. In its original treatment of the rich material Yeats called "intemperate speech," The Irish Art of Controversy suggests new ways of thinking about modern Ireland and about controversy's bluff, bravado, and improvisational flair.

In writing a book about Irish controversies, McDiarmid faced a daunting challenge in narrowing her selections to a manageable, representative set, given the preponderance of cultural and political battles to choose from during these years. Her choices are carefully balanced between revisiting well-known high literary affairs and introducing readers to cultural battles that deserve to be more widely studied.... McDiarmid brings to her investigation enviably deep, rich knowledge of the Irish Revival, building on her influential literary scholarship on Yeats, Gregory, and Casement.... In The Irish Art of Controversy, Lucy McDiarmid provides the sustained, masterful intellectual engagement that one would expect of a leading critic in Irish studies. She possesses the persuasive, illuminating power to reshape multiple debates about high cultural nationalism, language studies, sexuality, censorship, and socialism, to name but a few of the key topics studied here. As admirable, she has the narrative command and stylistic flourish to educate and edify non-specialists too. Very few scholars today attempt, let alone achieve, such balance., McDiarmid discovers the drama of national identity enacted on the 'small sites' of particular controversies. Her case, built on finely detailed examples that blend fieldwork and archival study, is extremely compelling.... The book transcends its putative subject matter, however, to take on the larger history of modern Irish identity, eventually finding 'the Ireland of Mary Robinson and Sinead O'Connor' in the pre-1916 Ireland of Casement, Yeats, and others.... The compact timeline of the controversies' origins, 1908–1916, belies a project of far greater scope. In most cases, the controversy outlives the controversialist, and McDiarmid traces the posthumous history of each case right up to the present day... allowing new light to be shed on old arguments., McDiarmid's book... delivers an enjoyable, readable account of five 20th-century Irish spats.... The Irish Art of Controversy is an impressively researched, admirably intelligent study., McDiarmid's book is a masterly survey of one of the most complex periods of modern European history. The thoroughness and extent of the research is astonishing.... The Irish Art of Controversy has significant implications for the ways we think about language, power, interpretation, and culture in the period that gave rise to Gregory, Shaw, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, and O'Casey., Rather than tell a familiar political tale of oppressors and oppressed, McDiarmid focuses on the dramatic subtleties of the domestic fight for control of the discourse of nationality.... Written with an objectivity of approach that reflects extensive research, with a strong narrative line that is maintained by a personable and sometimes even exclamatory style, The Irish Art of Controversy is an excellent referee for those who already know something of these fights, as well as for those new to the Irish cultural ringside.

Lucy McDiarmid is Professor of English at Villanova University. She has been the Carole and Gordon Segal Visiting Professor of Irish Literature at Northwestern University and Visiting Professor of English at Princeton. A former president of the American Conference for Irish Studies, McDiarmid is also author of Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden between the Wars and Auden's Apologies for Poetry, and coeditor of High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture 1889-1939 and Lady Gregory: Selected Writings. She is a fellow of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library for 2005-2006.