Donoghue, Denis; Joyce, James; Yeats, William Butler et al.

We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society

ISBN: 0394554515
New York, NY, USA: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. First Edition. Hardcover. ““We Irish, born into that ancient sect” – a line from Yeat’s “The Statues,” a poem he started in April and finished in June 1938, seven months before his death. The poetry he wrote during those months was nearly as strident as the prose of On the Boiler, exorbitant even to the situation that provoked it. Rage kept him going when reasonableness would have brought him down. But the argument of “The Statues” is outlandish even by Yeat’s standards. On the Boiler gives it in ostensibly high-minded prose. “There are moments,” he wrote, “when I am certain that art must once again accept those Greek proportions which carry into plastic art the Pythagorean numbers, those dances which are divine because all there is empty and measured. Europe was not born when Greek galleys defeated the Persian hordes at Salamis; but when the Doric studios sent out those broadbacked marble statues against the multiform, vague, expressive Asiatic sea, they gave to the sexual instinct of Europe its goal, its fixed type.””--Denis Donoghue, “We Irish,” pg. 3. Denis Donoghue (1928-2021), was an Irish and American literary critic & a professor who was the Henry James chair of English and American Letters at New York University. Donoghue was a prolific writer having authored nearly 40 books over his lifetime. However, the 1986 work We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society is widely considered as his masterpiece. We Irish is a collection of essays tackling Irish literary titans like W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), James Joyce (1882-1941), Frank O’Connor (1903-1966), and Irish society as a whole. From inside front flap of dust jacket: “We Irish is a sampling of Donoghue’s engagement with his native society. Born in Tullow, a small town in County Carlow, Denis Donoghue grew up in Warrenpoint, a town not much larger in Northern Ireland, and lived – his father was a sergeant in the Royal Ulster Constabulary – in the local police barracks. Donoghue’s sense of Irish literature is therefore never very far from the social, historical, and political circumstances made so vivid to him in his youth. Reading We Irish, we can feel what it means to live and to think in relation to a particular culture.” From the collection of the late, great George Bornstein (1941-2021), scholar, author & academician at the University of Michigan- a quintessential Man of Letters. Signed, dated & placed by Bornstein in pencil at inside front cover: “George Bornstein / 10 October 1986 / Ann Arbor.” We have found and retained between pages 10 & 11, two stapled sheets–a photo-copied version of an article by Denis Donoghue, titled “I Am Not Heathcliff,” from The New Republic August 21 & 28, 1995. Hardcover in unclipped dust jacket. First edition as stated at copyright page, presumed first printing though not explicated as such thereon. Book in relatively very fine condition with only very slight wear to fine edges, and moderate marginalia throughout interior. Dust jacket fine with moderate wear to fine edges, some tearing to fine edges at top and bottom, mild smudging/scratching/tearing to front and back covers, and mild discoloration due to age-toning to same. Very Fine / Fine. [Item #9335]

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