Robert Tracy’s ‘Unappeasable Host’ | Literary and Historical Essays on Ireland and Empire [2024]

Description

The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities explores some of the tensions created when Anglo-Irish writers – Protestant in religion, of non-Irish ancestryreflected upon their preferred subject matter, Ireland and their unhyphenated Catholic contemporaries. These tensions involve the writers’ sense of anxiety about their own membership in the Irish community, and at the same time their anxiety about losing their distinctive identity. Anglo-Irish writers founded modern Irish literature in English, identifying themselves with their native country and its people. Yet they often felt themselves surrounded and watched by an ‘Unappeasable Host’, a population that resented them. Robert Tracy discusses Irish writers who in England were considered Irish, in Ireland English – including Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, the Banim brothers, Roger O’Connor, Sheridan Le Fanu, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Elizabeth Bowen – together with James Joyce, who, although neither of English ancestry nor Protestant, similarly focuses on individuals separated or excluded from the Irish life around them.

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