Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The three essays constituting this volume were originally published as individual pamphlets by the Field Day Theatre Company, in Derry, Northern Ireland. Each deals with the question of nationalism and the role of cultural production as a force in understanding and analyzing the aftermath of colonization. The authors' diverse perspectives are demonstrated by the essays' respective titles: Eagleton, Nationalism: Irony and Commitment; Jameson, Modernism and Imperialism; and Said, Yeats and Decolonization. The essays have implication beyond their immediate topics, bearing upon questions of feminism, decolonization, and modernism to illuminate problems that belong to other groups and regions.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The three essays featured in this excellent short book were initially published as individual pamphlets by the Field Day Theatre Company, a radical Londonderry-based enterprise founded in 1980 in response to the current political crisis in Northern Ireland. One of the directors of Field Day, Seamus Deane, contributes a succinct introduction to the volume. The essays themselves are bold, lucid, and thought-provoking. In "Nationalism: Irony and Commitment," Terry Eagleton offers an incisive analysis of the contradictions of anticolonialism as an ideology, focusing principally upon the historical antinomies of abstract universalism and concrete particularity, rationalism and aestheticism. In "Modernism and Imperialism," Fredric Jameson reads the work of Forster and Joyce and argues--against modernism's own representation of itself as apolitical--that the project of imperialism determines the structure and tendency of modernist discourse in profound ways. In "Yeats and Decolonization," Edward W. Said likens the Irish poet to such figures as Rabindranath Tagore, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Cesar Vallejo, and he makes a strong case for Yeats as an ideologist of nationalist anti-imperialism, brilliantly effective at this level, but unable to make the move to a fully liberationist anti-imperialism. Levels: graduate and upper-division undergraduate. N. F. Lazarus Brown University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Terry Eagleton received a Ph.D from Cambridge University. He is a literary critic and a writer. He has written about 50 books including Shakespeare and Society, Criticism and Ideology, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Literary Theory, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Why Marx Was Right, The Event of Literature, and Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America. He wrote a novel entitled Saints and Scholars, several plays including Saint Oscar, and a memoir entitled The Gatekeeper. He is also the chair in English literature in Lancaster University's department of English and creative writing.

(Bowker Author Biography)