Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled by Nicholas Allen (review)

Abstract

4 George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1871). 5 See use of the word extensively in Geoffrey Hartman’s Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), and Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964). 6 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1881). 7 See James Joyce, “The Dead,” “Dubliners”: Text, Criticism, and Notes (pp. 175-224). Brian Gingrich also discusses Gabriel’s epiphany as an “imperial epiphany,” which is an interesting contrast because, while epiphany is a momentous narrative instance, the adjective imperial connotes a vast (in terms of time and space) and contingent phenomenon. Gabriel’s epiphany at the end of the story becomes, in a way, a spark of an understanding that spans hundreds of years of Irish submission to the British. See pages 166-67 in Gingrich for more. 8 See Joyce “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: Text, Criticism, and Notes, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1968), and “Ulysses”: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York: Vintage Books, 1986). Gingrich further explains that “[t]he chapter endings of A Portrait herald a new eastering. Though the famous bird-girl epiphany that ends chapter 4 may resemble the epiphany at the end of ‘The Dead’—a ‘swooning’ into a ‘vast cyclic movement’—its orientation is very different. Stephen faces not inland and westward, but eastand seaward, toward the continent where he will soon seek a new beginning” (p. 174). At the beginning of chapter 5 of the novel, however, we find Stephen westered (at home with all its prosaic connotations) again, as Gingrich argues, and when he leaves Dublin for Paris at the end of the book, he is faced with a (failed, as we see at the beginning of Ulysses) world entry/eastering.