Introduction: Fostering Discussion — From the Irish Question to the British Problem by Way of the English Renaissance

Abstract

Researching a PhD on Spenser and Ireland at Cambridge in the 1980s, I came across three essays by Roy Foster which had a profound and lasting effect on my thinking.¹ Foster was — is — a formidable and influential historian of modern Ireland. My own work as a literary critic had forced me to forage in the field of early modern Ireland, a field being parcelled out at the time by three Irish historians who, fortunately for me, were all interested in Spenser, though they did not quite see eye-to-eye on him, or much else for that matter.² There were many things that troubled me about Foster’s work, but in a nutshell it struck me as untheoretical, anti-Marxist, anglocentric and elitist — and these were, to my mind, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.³ At the time, I lacked the critical discourse, the political nous and the historical awareness even to begin to challenge Foster’s views. Over the years I have tried to develop arguments that foreground ‘varieties of Englishness’ to supplement his ‘varieties of Irishness’, and to press for the supplanting of the old Irish question with the new British Problem.⁴ I have also tried where possible to introduce Scotland as a complicating factor in readings of Anglo-Irish history.⁵ One of the three essays by Foster was titled ‘“We are all revisionists now”’. I suppose there must be some truth in that.⁶ We are all of us compelled to revise our initial opinions based on deeper study.⁷ Whatever influences are at play in my own work — Marxism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, the New Historicism — it has taken a revisionist turn in recent years.