Comparing the Literature of the British Isles

1.       Terminological Problems

-          Sorting one’s ways through the terminology is extremely complex, and it can be deeply offensive to make mistakes. So, for example, if we speak of British comparative literature, to include Irish writers would be an act of appropriation, because Irish work would be subsumed under the heading of British.

-          A way out of the difficulty, for comparative purposes then, is to abandon the term British, and to propose instead a comparative study of the literatures of the British Isles.

2.       Languages, Dialects, and Identity

-          In which case the linguistic map of the British Isles would consist principally of Celtic languages (Erse, Irish, of Northern Ireland, Scots Gaelic, and Welsh, as living languages, with a body of texts in Manx and Cornish and Germanic languages (English, Scots, and Norse) with channel Island French and a growing number of languages in daily use within immigrant communities.

-          The problem for a comparatist is that knowledge of the Celtic and Germanic languages is unevenly distributed. English dominates, and the marginalization of Celtic languages has meant that they tend to be learned in situ only.

-          Only a bilingual scholar who had a Celtic language and English, could undertake comparative study, and it would also mean that Scots, Anglo-Welsh, and Anglo-Irish would be excluded because the boundary between their status as languages and as dialects would be unclear. The result would be an affirmation of the hegemony of English, with further marginalization of the literary production of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

-          The problem of dialect also applies to English English. Henry Wyld, in the early twentieth century, defined Standard English as a class dialect, arguing that this form of English is common to educated classes regardless of regional origin. Standard English, then, was, and is a class dialect, untainted by regional accent and the model speaker the future King of England.

-          The suppression of Celtic languages, the penalization of Celtic speakers, the process of Anglicizing place name and baptismal names that went on for centuries left a legacy of bitterness as strong as that felt today by ethnic groups.

-          The persistence of history in the literatures of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as history understood in a special ways as an account of an ongoing struggle for national identity, is in marked contrast to the English version of history, which traces instead the gradual rise to the world dominance of the English language and its literature.

3.       The Significance of History

-          In contrast, Irish, Welsh and Scots Gaelic have been undergoing a living revival, for reasons that have everything to do with a reassertion of national identity through the medium of language.

-          There is no space here even attempt a proper discussion of the revival of Celtic languages over the past century, but the important point to note is that such a revival has been taking place, and that despite the dominance of English there are a great many speakers of Welsh, Irish and Gaelic, and a flourishing literary and performance tradition in all three.

-          Fact that English literature enjoys a particularly exalted place in the world, partly through the influence of individual writers and more recently through the prominence of the English language.

-          If we compare the state of literary production and of libraries across the British Isles around the time of the Norman conquest, we find a flourishing oral poetry in Wales and Ireland, in contrast to the Saxon tradition which had sunk into decline. The Irish libraries had been one of the glories of Europe for centuries.

-          As Thomas Parry has argued in his ground-breaking history of Welsh literature, the combination of political union and the Protestant Reformation brought about a leap forward in Welsh prose writing. That leap forward happened, as it so often does, in times of cultural transition, through translation.

-          In the later part of the sixteenth century, the Bible was translated into Welsh. The Bible, Parry feels gave Wales standard Welsh, a literary language which, in a country ‘which lacked a university or any cultural institution’, was to serve as a focal point.

-          By the end of the eighteenth century, the start of the Age of Romanticism, another period of great literary development in English, the picture across the British Isles had again changed completely.

-          In both Scotland and Ireland the wretched poverty of the mainly rural population led millions to emigrate in search of a better life. Moreover, the changing class structure had created an English-speaking gentry in both countries, with the Celtic languages despised and outlawed. Despite the attempts to suppress Scots Gaelic and Irish, both languages like Welsh, survived.

-          By the end of the eighteenth century the cultural interface between Dublin, Edinburgh, and London had gone beyond any sense of binary opposition between Celtic and Teutonic linguistic systems.

-          What we can deduce from this quirk skimming across the centuries is:

   - Firstly, that the predominance of English and of English literature is a relatively recent phenomenon and coincides.

   - Secondly, that English expansion into the Celtic cultures of the British Isles has been characterized by a conscious strategy of linguistic discrimination.

   - Thirdly, that it is hardly surprising given such circumstances that the revival of nationalism should have had its impact on Welsh, Scottish, and Irish writers and intellectuals, and should have led to a revival of interest in Celtic languages and the Celtic tradition.

-          Unlike the Czech revival, there was no consensus on the need to use the ‘national’ language had resulted in a peasantry who operated in spoken Welsh, Gaelic or Irish and a class of intellectuals who operated in their own variant of English.

-          As Sean Lucy says, attempting to define Anglo-Irish poetry, there is still ‘on the one hand a complex and developing relationship between two traditions, cultures, languages and on the others. In considering the British Isles at any point in time it is not enough to draw up maps that show variations in language distribution. Other factors such as the relationship between urban and rural communities, changes in the educational system and the impact of such changes on class patterns need to be considered too.

4.       Parochial and Provincial

-          We have to confront the hegemony of English before comparison can take place, and once that confrontation starts, all kinds of questions relating to minority/majority cultures come out into the open.

-          Patrick Kavanagh use writers make of national myths and the gap between ordinary lived experience and the construct of a myth of a nation, and in questioning the meaning of the national myth, he expounds his theory of parochialism and provincialism, a crucial distinction that offers an alternative way of perceiving the literary output of the British Isles.

-          Kavanagh’s distinction between parochial and provincial is an important one. In the context in which he used the term, he was reproaching fellow Irish writers for their provincialism, but he also touches upon the hierarchical relationship between the secondary margins and the primary centre and in proposing the universality of parochialism, he effectively deconstructs that hierarchy.

-          By focusing not on the general but on the specific by establishing a set of criteria, be they aesthetic or social that are determined parochially, the writer can draw readers into his or her world.

5.        Comparative Britains

-          Literature produced by writers of the British Isles could not be compared without an understanding of the problematics of ‘Britishness’, and that the difficulties of using the term ‘British’ could not be understood without some sense of the use made of that term at different moments in the past.

-          The dominance of English as a language, as a literature and as a political system has resulted in a marginalization of a great deal of marvelous writing from elsewhere in the islands.

-          The terminology of ‘English literature’ or ‘English studies’ is used all-embracingly, so that Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and Irish writers are frequently included within a syllabus without any reference to their different point of origin and different literary traditions.

-          The points are, it is becoming possible to think of comparing the literatures of the British Isles without resorting to discriminatory or appropriatory tactics and comparative literary study of the British Isles has to begin and end with a rethinking of the processes of naming.