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Life
1950- ; b. Feb. 1950, Belfast; grad. Wadham College, Oxford (English); taught at New College; appt. lect. at Univ. of Sussex, 1976; appt. to chair of English and American Studies at Sussex University, in 1993; issued The Sinews of the Spirit (1985), a study of Victorian literature and religious ideas; Irish Literature: A Social History (1990) is a historicist study of ‘tradition, identity, and difference' over four centuries; issued Victorians and Ancient Rome (1997); gave keynote lecture at IASIL Conference in Goteborg, Sweden, 1997; issued Irish Literature Since 1800 (2002).
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Works| Selected monographs |
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| Miscellaneous |
| review of Robert Mahony, Jonathan Swift: The Irish Identity (Yale UP 1995) and several other writings on Swift, in Times Literary Supplement (2 Feb. 1996), pp.6-7; |
Bibliographical details
Norman Vance, Irish Literature Since 1800 [Longman Literature in English Ser.] (Harlow: Longman 2002), viii, 301pp. CONTENTS: 1. Introducing Ireland and Irish Writing: Historical Background; The Irish Language Tradition, and Others Writing in English before 1800. 2. Victorian Ireland, 1837-1890: Thomas Moore; Romantic Ireland and Romantic Visitors; Maria Edgeworth, Morgan and Maturin; Romanticising Politics and History. 3. Victorian Ireland, 1837-1890: Hunger, Dissent and the Age of Reform; Le Fanu and Ferguson; Journals and Journalism; Lover, Lever, and Irishness for Export Literature; Violence and Nationalism Nature and Nature's God. 4. The Literary Revival And Other Stories, 1890-1920: Revival, Religion and Politics; Some Revivalist Writers; Yeats; Other Stories. 5. James Joyce and Modern Ireland, 1920-1960: Joyce; Europeans, Romantics, Realists and Others. 6. Writing and Contemporary Ireland, 1960-2000: Past and Present; Reliving Anglo-Ireland; Rebels and Resentments; Books from Books; Seamus Heaney.
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Quotations
Irish Literature: A Social History (1990): ‘Irish utterance, Irish literary tradition, in so far as it exists as a single entity, has always been constituted out of a disturbingly rich plurality. But cultural politics, colonialist and nationalist, have conspired to obscure this richness and variety. It is only in the light of this generous complexity that modern Irish writing and the actualities and potentialities of the contemporary Irish experience, stricken and divided as it is, can be fully understood.’ ( p.15; quoted in Suman Gupta, ‘What colour’s Jew Joyce ...: Race in the Context of Joyce’s Irishness and Bloom’s Jewishness’, in Bullán, 1, 2, Autumn 1994, p.64.)
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Map of Ireland: ‘[T]he map of Ireland’s physical features and Ireland’s place on the map of Europe are [...] the only constants in Irish affairs. In neither language nor genre nor “literature” as we tend to understand it today offers much support for sustained continuities in Ireland, do topographical and geographical permanances contribute much of substance to Irish literary tradition? They do. Poems of place have survived from the earliest times. Ireland’s geographical location close to the British mainland entails an enduring Irish-English (or Irish-British) dialectic institutionalised by conquest, obsessively explored in literature [...] But simple polarities are too simple for the tangles of the Irish experience and Irish writing. In any case, it is not so much demonstrable continuity as resented discontinuity that stimulates the tradition-seeking process.’ (p.8; quoted in Thomas Hofheinz, Joyce and the Invention of History, Cambridge UP 1995, p.[72])
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