In 1875, one year short of the centennial of the American republic, the publisher George H. Putnam asked Moses Coit Tyler to produce a ‘manual’ of American literature. Tyler was to do much more than that. Convinced that it was now time to write an account of what he called ‘the most confidential and explicit record’ of the American mind, the record preserved in the nation’s literature, he undertook a full-scale history of American literature from 1607 to 1765, a pioneering effort that was to mark the beginning of the serious study of that literature. Tyler himself was in 1881 to join the faculty of Cornell University as the holder of the first professorship in the United States devoted to American history.

We believe that now is the time for a similar pioneering effort to create a coherent and authoritative history of Irish literature in the two major languages of the island. The publication in 1991 of the three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, the first attempt to formulate a standard if not definitive anthology of Irish literature, has in effect established a canon of Irish literature, a canon since expanded with the appearance in 2002 of the fourth and fifth volumes of the anthology, volumes dedicated to writing by and about women. The existence of such a canon, however contested, only makes more compelling – even urgent – the need for an accessible and reliable historical framework within which the newly canonical texts can be read, and marginalised texts, together with the reasons for their marginalisation, can be explored.

In 1875, one year short of the centennial of the American republic, the publisher George H. Putnam asked Moses Coit Tyler to produce a ‘manual’ of American literature. Tyler was to do much more than that. Convinced that it was now time to write an account of what he called ‘the most confidential and explicit record’ of the American mind, the record preserved in the nation’s literature, he undertook a full-scale history of American literature from 1607 to 1765, a pioneering effort that was to mark the beginning of the serious study of that literature. Tyler himself was in 1881 to join the faculty of Cornell University as the holder of the first professorship in the United States devoted to American history.

We believe that now is the time for a similar pioneering effort to create a coherent and authoritative history of Irish literature in the two major languages of the island. The publication in 1991 of the three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, the first attempt to formulate a standard if not definitive anthology of Irish literature, has in effect established a canon of Irish literature, a canon since expanded with the appearance in 2002 of the fourth and fifth volumes of the anthology, volumes dedicated to writing by and about women. The existence of such a canon, however contested, only makes more compelling – even urgent – the need for an accessible and reliable historical framework within which the newly canonical texts can be read, and marginalised texts, together with the reasons for their marginalisation, can be explored.

Introduction

Just three years after its foundation, the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language (SPIL) proclaimed in its annual report for 1879 that its object was ‘the Preservation and Extension of the Irish as a Spoken Language’, and that in order to achieve this end it would, among other things, encourage ‘the production of a Modern Irish Literature – original or translated’. By 1882, the Gaelic Union, a dissenting offshoot of SPIL, had taken a significant initial step in this ambitious direction by founding the bilingual journal Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge (The Gaelic Journal), a periodical that would appear, somewhat sporadically, until 1909, after 1893 under the management of the Gaelic League. The audacity of SPIL’s commitment to fostering a modern literature in Irish – as opposed to the safer and more obvious goal of collecting and preserving manuscript materials from the distant and recent past – was underscored in 1909 by the poet and scholar Tadhg Ó Donnchadha (‘Torna’) (1874–1949), who, looking back on the Gaelic literary landscape of 1882, wondered whether there had then been more than fifty people in the whole country who could read, much less write, Irish in the native script. While it should be evident from the chapter by Gearóid Denvir in volume 1 of this history that Ó Donnchadha was exaggerating for effect to pay tribute to the courage of those who founded Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge in such inauspicious circumstances, there can be no doubt that the focus on original literature so early in the Revival was an act of faith and hope as much as it was a rational decision based on an objective assessment of the contemporary linguistic and cultural climate.