Terence Brown

Life
[?-?]; born in China, the son of Presbyterian missionary parents; ed. Belfast Academical Institute; prominent in rugby and cricket as a schoolboy; grad. TCD in English; completed PhD and first book, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (1975); appt. lecturer at TCD; m. Susan; chief reader for Gill & Macmillan; appt. Dowden Prof. of English, TCD, c.1998 [var. Professor of Anglo-Irish literature]; MRIA and Chairman of the RIA Committee for Anglo-Irish Studies; committee member of ESSE; a conference celebrating his contribution to Irish criticism along with that of Seamus Deane is planned at Clonliffe for 2005; Dean of Arts and Humanities in 2006.

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Series Editor, with Brendan Kennelly, “Irish Prose Writings: Swift to the Literary Renaissance” (Hon-no-Tomosha 1992). The series of 23 titles incls. George Moore, A Story-teller’s Holiday; Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent; Samuel Lover, Handy Andy; William Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry; Samuel Ferguson, Hibernian Nights; J. Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly; John Mitchel, Jail Journal; James Clarence Mangan, The Prose Writings, ed. D. J. O’Donoghue; Charles J. Kickham, Knocknagow; Gerald Griffin, The Collegians; Charles Lever, Lord Kilgobbin; W. Steuart Trench, Realities of Irish Life; Canon P. A. Sheehan, Luke Delmege; C. R. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer; Augusta Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne; J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands; ; D. P. Moran, Tom O’Kelly, and The Philosophy of Irish Ireland; Padraic H. Pearse, Political Writings and Speeches; A.E. [George Russell], The National Being; Somerville & Ross, The Real Charlotte; Eimar O’Duffy, The Wasted Island; Padraic O Conaire, The Woman at the Window and Other Stories [all 1992.]

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Associations, contrib. to The European English Messenger ‘Coming into Being’ [report on 2st conference in Norwich], 1, 1 (Autumn 1991), pp.9-11; ‘The New Novel Laureate’, in The European English Messenger, IV, 2 (Autumn 1992), p.11.

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Bibliographical details
Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (Dub: Gill & Macmillan 1975), 278pp. CONTENTS: 1. Poetry in a Colony [5]; Samuel Ferguson: Cultural Nationalism [29]; William Allingham: Cultural Confusion [42[; Of Heroes, Gods and Peasants [55]; John Hewitt: Land and People [86]; Louis MacNeice: An Anglo-Irish Quest [98]; W R Rodgers: Romantic Calvinist [114]; Robert Greacen and Roy McFadden: Apocalypse and Survival [128]; Padriacc Fiacc: The Bleeding Bough [141]; John Montague: Circling to Return [149]; Four New Voices: Poets of the Present [171]; Conclusion: With Kavanagh in Mind [214]; Notes [222]. Select Bibliography [240; infra]; Index.

Ireland: A Social and Cultural History: 1922-1972 (London: Fontana 1981), 364pp.; and Do. [rev. 2nd. edn.] 1922-1985 (London: Harper Press 1985), 396pp.; and Do. [rev. 3rd. edn.] 1922-2001 (London: Harper Perennial 2004), viii, 496pp.

Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1988), essays on Ferguson, Dowden, et al. incl. ‘Yeats, Joyce and the Irish Critical Debate’ [77-90], ‘Thomas Moore: A Reputation’ [prev. in Gaeliana (Caen 1987)]; ‘Ireland, Modernism and the 1930s’ [in progress].

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Criticism
W. J. McCormack, ‘Terence Brown and the Historians’, in The Battle of the Books: Two Decades of Irish Cultural Debate (Dublin: Lilliput 1986), pp.40-47.

See also Nicholas Allen & Eve Patten, eds., That Island Never Found: Essays and Poems for Terence Brown (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), pp.200 [contents].

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Nicholas Allen & Eve Patten, eds., That Island Never Found: Essays and Poems for Terence Brown (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007). Contents: John Wilson Foster, ‘Foreword’; Paul Muldoon, ‘A Mayfly’; Chris Morash, ‘The Remains of Ellen Hanley’ [subject of Gerald Griffin's The Collegians]; Brendan Kennelly, ‘The Search’ [poem]; Nicholas Grene, ‘Yeats and Dates’; R. F. Foster, ‘Yeats, Joyce and Modern Ireland’; Derek Mahon, ‘Chorus from Antigone’ [poem]; Nicholas Allen, ‘Louis MacNeice and Autumn’s Ghosts’; Eve Patten, ‘Olivia Manning, Imperial Refugee’; Greg Delanty, ‘The Rising’ [poem], ‘To a Teacher’; Declan Kiberd, ‘Growing up Absurd’; Sighle Breathnach-Lynch, ‘Commemorating whose Dead?’; Gerald Dawe, ‘The Pleasure Boats’ [poem]; Edna Longley, ‘Back in the 1960s’; Helen Vendler, ‘Seamus Heaney’s “Sweeney Redivivus’’; Seamus Heaney, ‘Human Chain’ [poem].

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Commentary
W. J. McCormack, ‘Terence Brown and the Historians’, in The Battle of the Books (Dublin: Lilliput 1986), pp.40-47: discusses the nexus of history and literary culture in F. S. L. Lyons, Oliver MacDonagh, et al., and adjudges Brown’s Social and Cultural History ‘simply the very best available’ (p.45); see further under Conor Cruise O’Brien, infra.

J. J. Lee, ‘The Irish’, in ‘O’Faoláin Special Issue’, Cork Review, ed,. Seán Dunne (Cork 1991), p.66-67, describes Brown’s Ireland: Social and Cultural History as a fulfilment of Sean O’Faolain’s prediction and hope that ‘somebody may write an Irish Social History and give a different value to events.’ (Lee, op. cit., p.67.)

Thomas Kinsella is scathing of Terence Brown’s conception of ‘Northern Voices’ and a distinct tradition of Ulster poetry which he believes to be Unionist propaganda for a separate province - with the non-Unionist counties ‘edited out’, but praises what he regards as Brown’s evolving political consciousness. (See The Dual Tradition, 1995 Edn.)

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Hermione Lee, review of Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats [with Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts], in NY Times, “Book Review” (21 Nov. 1999): ‘[Brown] repeatedly tells us that “apparent contradiction” was the basis of Yeats’s “developing artistic personality”, that his “lack of assurance”, and his “ineluctably divided nature” became the “dynamic of his writings.” Lee approves Brown as ‘properly severe on Yeat’s quarrelsome brutality, snobbery, ruthlessness and extremism’, but laments the writing as too often ‘stuffy and verbose’, calling for a Poundian red-pencil in relation to such sentences as: ‘Yet it is wide of the mark in failing to grasp the tragic import [of] an excoriating vision of irrevocable action as ineluctable destiny.’ Epithets like redolent, bespeak, purport, adumbrate are targeted also. (See quotations, under W. B. Yeats, infra.)

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Quotations
Language revival: ‘The revival attempt, therefore, despite its apparent radicalism, can be seem as rather more a reactionary expression of the deep conservatism of mind that governed public attitudes in the period than as a revolutionary movement.’ (Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1972, 1981, p.67.)

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Irish Catholicism: ‘The Church […] offered to most Irishmen and women in the period a way to be Irish which set them apart from the rest of the inhabitants of the British Isles, meeting the needs thereby of a nascent Irish nationalism at a time when the Irish language and the Gaelic culture of the past were were enduring a protracted decline. Bound up in the past with the traditional Gaelic way of life […] historically associated with the repression of the eighteenth century when the native priesthood had heroically resisted the proscription of their faith, permeated with that profound sense of the supernatural which had characterised the countryside for centuries, Catholicism was richly endowed with attributes appropriate to its modern role in the nation’s life. Strengthened by the Roman vigour of the devotional revolution […] the Catholic faith of the majority of the Irish people became therefore intimately linked with the national feeling. Accordingly […] Irish Catholicism increasingly became a badge of national identity.’ (Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1972, London: Fontana 1981, pp.28-29.)

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Artists & the Troubles (in the 1970s): ‘No longer do artists and writers find themselves able or willing to work in anything like a distinctive national mode, nor do they feel able to mount a social criticism of a society with clearly defined targets for attack. Paradoxically, this inclination on the part of artists and writers to fulfil clearly defined social and national roles has co-existed with demands that they do so. As Irish people began to sense their changing circumstances and as the Northern crisis challenged much that they had taken for granted about the national life, it was the artist and particularly the writer who was often expected to provide some kind of guidance as to the way forward. Writers were therefore asked to reflect […] on […] the substance of Irish identity and on how that bore on the contemporary struggle in the North.’ (p.321-22; quoted in Loredana Salis, ‘“So Greek with Consequence”: Classical Tragedy in Contemporary Irish Drama’, PhD Diss., UUC, 2005.)

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IE joins EC: ‘Was it the case that when the issue of reunification became for once a real one the Republic preferred to look the other way and to proceed with business as usual - in the EEC, in trade, with Britain, welcoming British tourists, refusing to confront Britain in too direct a fashion, adopting at moments an unworthy ambivalence of word and action in relation to conflicting ideological imperatives?’ (Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1985 [2nd edn.] (London: Fontana 1985, p.283; in Loredana Salis, op. cit., 2005.)

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Censorship Act (1929): ‘[M]uch more than a law to suppress the grosser forms of pornography, [it] had been revealed to be a legal instrument that could be used to protect Ireland from contamination by “alien” influences and by Irish writers who did not accept the dominant moral and social consensus. The political censorship of the war years can accordingly be understood as a further attempt by the political class in Ireland to use laws restricting freedom of expressin for ideological purposes. In oth the literary and political censorship, national identity was at issue. Both involved notions of Irish exceptionalism, which presumed spiritual and moral superiority to other nations at its heart.’ (Review of Donal Ó Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland, Cork UP 1996, in Irish Studies Review, 20, Autumn 1997, pp.45-46; cited in Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature, London: Pluto Press 1998.)

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‘Translating Ireland’, in Gerald Dawe & Jonathan Williams, eds., Krino (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1996), pp.137-40: ‘Often enough in the past, translation from the Irish was an act of nationalist piety; an expression of atavistic need, or even the consequence of a deliberate programme. One gets no sense of such from the recent work. Rather, the translations often seem to take for granted that the meium through which most people in Ireland experience their world and live their lives is English and that it is wholly appropriate that an Irish poet should write, if he or she wishes, in that language. The sense of guilt which sometimes dogged English language poets of an earlier generation no longer seems endemic. That the ascination for translation from Irish seems to imply is not a nostalgia for some truly indigenous expression, nor any revivalist enthusiasm, but a sense that the complexity of the Irihs poet’s contemporary experience requires an interpretative resource which current English language usage somehow fails fully to supply.’ (p.137.) Further, ‘Concurrent with this recent reinvigoration of bilingual poetic endeavour has been the related phenomenon of translation of poetry from the European languages. Once again in much of this work one senses a desire to expand the field of contemporary vision and to add to possible ways of conceiving of the present in an English language poetry. For the poems from such places come with the imprint of a savage and terrible history on their very structures, bearing the mark of pain in the flesh of their language, courage in the syntactical scruple with which they comport themselves in the face of terror. They afford the Irish poet a way of deepening the local sense of a frighteningly flawed national life while they offer a means of escape from a futility and inanity which must result form the fact that our flawed Irish world only occasionally presses with a defining immediacy on the individual.’ (p.138.)

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War memorials: Brown remarks on ‘the larger suppressions and resurfacings in Irish consciousness of the profound effects upon Irish life of the Great War itself, as well as the difficulty of addressing these in the public domain since memories of the war and attitudes to it differ so greatly, bespeaking current points of stress and division. The Great War is one of the great unspokens of Irish life, something which rattles skeletons in many a family closet, something which even now cannot find that full expression which would lay to rest for ever all its Irish victims. It is, one supposes, part of hte unfinished business of our curent imbroglio.’ (‘Who Dares to Speak?: Ireland and the Great War’, in Robert Clark & Piero Boitani, eds., English Studies in Transition: Papers from the Inaugural ESSE Conference, London: Routledge 1993, pp.227-28; quoted in Heinz Kosok, ‘The Easter Rising versus the Battle of the Somme: Irish Plays about the First World War as Documents of the Post-colonial Condition’, in Munira H. Mutran & Laura P. Z. Izarra, eds., Irish Studies in Brazil, Sao Paolo 2005, pp.91-92.) Note, Brown elsewhere speaks of Northern Unionists and ‘the tragic conflict of legitimate interests which had generated the recent conflict in their native land, which but for the catastrophic events in the greater European theatre might have resulted in an Irish civil war between the forces of Nationalism and unionism.’ (review of Paul Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism 1912-1916, OUP 1995, in Irish Literary Supplement, Spring 1996, p.9.)

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Ulster group: Brown attributes a ‘tense astringency’ to the Belfast poets [Longley, Mahon, et al.] in Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1972 (London: Fontana 1981) [q.p.]

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