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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Conquest, colonial ideologies and the consequences for language
- Chapter 2 ‘A bad dream with no sound’: the representation of Irish in the texts of the Elizabethan conquest
- Chapter 3 ‘Wilde Speech’: Elizabethan evaluations of Irish
- Chapter 4 ‘Translating this kingdom of the new’: English linguistic nationalism and Anglicisation policy in Ireland
- Chapter 5 New world, new incomprehension: patterns of change and continuity in the English encounter with native languages from Munster to Manoa
- Chapter 6 The clamorous silence
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Conquest, colonial ideologies and the consequences for language
- Chapter 2 ‘A bad dream with no sound’: the representation of Irish in the texts of the Elizabethan conquest
- Chapter 3 ‘Wilde Speech’: Elizabethan evaluations of Irish
- Chapter 4 ‘Translating this kingdom of the new’: English linguistic nationalism and Anglicisation policy in Ireland
- Chapter 5 New world, new incomprehension: patterns of change and continuity in the English encounter with native languages from Munster to Manoa
- Chapter 6 The clamorous silence
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
We traffic with time in the arts of language, and with history and its events.
Robert Welch, Changing States, p. 4The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland is that point in history where the fortunes of two languages briefly intersect, then spectacularly diverge. For one, the conquest marks the inaugural episode of its imperialist expansion. For the other, it is the originary moment of a language shift that constitutes the great drama of Irish cultural history. The present book, written from the perspective of an Irish anglophone awkwardly aware that those troubled origins continue to shadow Irish speech, explores how far that moment of encounter throws light on an enduring paradox: that Irish literature in English – a literature rooted in the silencing of Irish and animated by that rupture – itself participates in that most Elizabethan of concepts, ‘the triumph of English’.
A sense of discontinuity, self-estrangement, of living beyond the faultline of a fractured tradition haunts Irish writing. Anglophone Ireland, cut off from its Irish-speaking antecedents, is ‘adrift among the accidents of translation’ (Thomas Davis, quoted in Lloyd, ‘Translator as Refractor’, p. 145). The ‘semantics of remembrance’ are impaired; cultural amnesia is inescapable: ‘there no longer exists any inherited reservoir of meaning’ (Steiner, After Babel, p. 494; Kearney, Transitions, p. 13). The past is available only in translation and not everything – not much – can jump the gap. In a context where ‘mother tongue’ and ‘native language’ do not necessarily seem synonymous, language is made strange.
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- Information
- Language and Conquest in Early Modern IrelandEnglish Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion, pp. 1 - 7Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001