We are concerned here with two towers. One is a Norman keep in the Galway barony of Kiltartan, some twenty miles from the western seacoast. The second, one of a chain constructed by the British to withstand a Napoleonic invasion, stands facing eastwards towards the Irish sea at the village of Sandycove, a few miles south of Dublin. Yeats's tower at Ballylee—Ballylee Castle as it was grandly termed—and the Martello tower in which Joyce lived in for a few weeks in (...) 1904, the setting upon which Ulysses opens, take on central and symbolic roles in the art of each man and enter also those shorthands of symbols by which we, in our turn, hold the two writers in our imagination. I propose to consider the very different manner in which each man came to accept his identity as an Irish writer. And this in its turn involves some consideration of what for convenience we may term the "matter of Ireland," the body of oral and written Irish literature, and the accumulated symbolic powers of the word "Ireland" itself. If I place their two towers, Ballylee and Martello, as twin emblems at our entrance way, it will at last appear, I trust, that I do so for substantial rather than decorative purposes. Thomas Flanagan, chairman of the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of The Irish Novelists, 1800-1850 and many studies of contemporary literature. (shrink)

The essays in this book began as a contributions to a Summer Workshop arranged by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, and haled at the University of Calgary from July 7 to 14, 1978. The Institute, which was founded by the University in 1976 for the encouragement of humanistic studies, has held such conferences each summer as a part of its programme of research.