Abstract
Out of every corner of the woods and glens they come creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them; and if they found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue there withal; that in a short space there were none almost left. (Spenser, 15951)
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Notes
Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland (1595), in Henry Marley (ed.), Ireland under Elizabeth and James I (London, 1890) pp. 143–4.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Act of Union’, Selected Poems 1965–75 ( London: Faber and Faber, 1980 ) p. 125.
Seamus Deane, ‘The Literary Myths of the Revival: A Case for their Abandonment’, Cahiers Irlandais, 1979, p. 140.
Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 ( London: Faber and Faber, 1980 ) p. 60.
David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988 ) p. 146.
Robert Burns, ‘Man Was Made to Mourn’, in Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. James Barke (London: Collins, 1955 ) p. 123.
Andrew Marvell, ‘The Garden’, in Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981 ) p. 100.
Maurice Harmon, ‘Generations Apart: 1925–1975’, in Rafroidi and Harmon, The Irish Novel in our Time p. 65.
David Thomson, Woodbrook ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974 ) p. 102.
William Trevor, Fools of Fortune (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 169.
William Trevor, The Stories of William Trevor ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983 ), p. 351.
John Banville, Birchwood (London: Panther,1973) p. 143.
Bernard MacLaverty, Cal ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983 ) p. 118.
Jennifer Johnston, Shadows on our Skin ( London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977 ) pp. 133–4.
Edna O’Brien, Mother Ireland ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976 ).
W. B. Yeats, Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), in W. B. Yeats. Selected Plays, ed. N. Jeffares ( London: Macmillan, 1964 ) pp. 245–56.
Shaun Herron, The Whore Mother (1973), quoted by Richard Deutsch in Rafroidi and Harmon, The Irish Novel in our Time p.144.
Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island ( 1907; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965 ).
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© 1991 Robert Giddings
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Watson, D.B. (1991). The Cross of St George: The Burden of Contemporary Irish Literature. In: Giddings, R. (eds) Literature and Imperialism. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21431-0_2
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