Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture

by Terry Eagleton

When James Joyce called the Irish “the most belated race in Europe,” he stated a complex truth about the history of his people and the nation they had been creating since the eighteenth century. The Irish would, in Joyce’s lifetime, write many masterpieces of modernism in English, while at the same time forging a nation-state in many ways still backward-looking and traditionalist.

This paradox of Irish history is one of the many topics addressed in Terry Eagleton’s latest book. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger  reads Irish culture from Swift and Burke to Yeats and Joyce in the light of the tortuous, often tragic socio-political history that conditioned it.

Eagleton opens with a brilliant conjugation of Wuthering Heights  in the context of the famine in Ireland, highlighting the Irish connections of the Brontë family. He follows with a powerful analysis of the Protestant Ascendancy’s failure to achieve hegemony in Ireland; a dissection of the paradoxes of the Act of Union; a detailed account, spanning fiction from Swift and Maria Edgeworth, through Lady Morgan, Mauturin, Le Fanu and Stoker, to George Moore, of why the realist novel never flourished in Ireland; and a pointed consideration of the two great Irish exiles, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. The book also looks at the radical culture of Ulster and the cultural politics of nineteenth-century Ireland.

Drawing culture, writing and history together in a bold configuration, Eagleton changes the contours of Irish criticism and intervenes powerfully in Irish historical debate.

Genres: Criticism, Politics, Nonfiction, Ireland, Irish Literature, History, Literary Criticism

368 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Widely regarded as England's most influential living literary critic & theorist, Dr. Terry Eagleton currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster and as Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was Thomas Warton Prof. of English Literature at the University of Oxford ('92-01) & John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester 'til '08. He returned to the University of Notre Dame in the Autumn '09 semester as Distinguished Visitor in the English Department.

He's written over 40 books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction ('83); The Ideology of the Aesthetic ('90) & The Illusions of Postmodernism ('96).
He delivered Yale's '08 Terry Lectures and gave a Gifford Lecture in 3/10, titled The God Debate.

Reviews

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is magnificent. It explains the nature of Gothic literature perfectly, both in Northern Ireland and, by analogy, in the American South. It offers insights into the link between Victorian literature and empire, a la Edward Said. It’s beautifully written, as almost all Eagleton books are. I remember some of the book’s arguments 25 years after reading it.

[•Paula•]

Only read excerpts for my EoDP / TFG.

[Belén Payo]

Catherine and Heathcliff -an oppressed woman and an exploited farm labourer- have a chance, so
it would seem, to inaugurate a form of relationship at odds with the instrumental economy of the Heights; but Catherine’s renegacy prevents that relationship from entering upon material existence, just as it compels Heathcliff to run off, turn himself into a gentleman and appropriate the weapons of the ruling class in order to bring them low

[Zach Keenan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks Terry. If this doesn’t help me for Schols we are gonna have to have words my friend