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“... business. It doesn’t stop with the book titles, either: the chapter on Edna Longley in W.J. McCormack’s short and contentious study of Irish cultural debate requires us to attend to ‘the reaction from Ulster’, and sums it up thus: ‘Fighting or Writing?’ This humorously echoes the famous anti-Home Rule poster with its caption, ‘Ulster will ...”

“... literary critics’ valorisation of tradition’. This phrase occurs towards the end of W.J. McCormack’s dissection of Anglo-Irishness as a literary and historical concept, Ascendancy and Tradition. ‘Valorise’, indeed, is a verb much favoured in this book, along with others like ‘energise’ and ‘traumatise’. There’s a word that might be ...”

“... Irish, Scottish, and Welsh culture into an untraditional and externally imposed category. As W.J. McCormack argues in his Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History (1985), this is a characteristic which ‘Celticism’ shared with ‘Orientalism’. McCormack concedes that ‘There is no doubt that ...”

“... of Irish writing in the 20th century, but also to the playwriting of the modern world. W.J. McCormack’s biography claims to place Synge in the context of turn of the century modernity, but he chooses a pretty perverse point of comparison. His association of Synge with Ibsen (whom Synge himself rejected as one of those ‘analysts with their ...”

“... writers think of tradition as involving continuities, though not necessarily repetitions. W.J. McCormack writes of tradition as ‘the guarantee, the demonstration of the real interaction of literature and social life’. But there is nothing in The Crane Bag quite as telling, on this theme, as the poems collected in An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed ...”

“... have failed.’ Both brothers were triumphant at Parnell’s acquittal. ‘On the surface,’ W.J. McCormack has written in his essay on The Picture of Dorian Gray and Parnell’s acquittal, the two crises differ in every important respect: the one arising from the publication of a short novel, the other from a vote of confidence in a political leader. Yet ...”

“... lived in relative obscurity. His 70th birthday in 1972 was marked by a Festschrift edited by W.J. McCormack and this book set the tone for Irish writing about Stuart over the next twenty-five years. ‘Despite the outbreak of war,’ McCormack wrote, ‘Stuart decided that he should be where Europe was then focused, that ...”