But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature

Irish Literature, History, and Culture

by Andrew Murphy

At the rise of the Tudor age, England began to form a national identity. With that sense of self came the beginnings of the colonialist notion of the "other"" Ireland, however, proved a most difficult other because it was so closely linked, both culturally and geographically, to England. Ireland's colonial position was especially complex because of the political, religious, and ethnic heritage it shared with England. Andrew Murphy asserts that the Irish were seen not as absolute but as "proximate" others. As a result, English writing about Ireland was a problematic process, since standard colonial stereotypes never quite fit the Irish. But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us examines the English view of the "imperfect" other by looking at Ireland through works by Spenser, Jonson, and Shakespeare. Murphy also considers a broad range of materials from the Renaissance period, including journals, pamphlets, histories, and state papers.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published February 25, 1999

About the author

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Prof Andrew Murphy attended Trinity College Dublin as an undergraduate and went on to study for his MA and PhD at Brandeis University in Boston in the US. He was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire before joining the School of English at St Andrews in 1998. He has published monographs on the Irish context of early modern English Literature; on the history of Shakespeare editing and publishing; and on nineteenth-century working class readers of Shakespeare. He has also published an introductory study of the poetry of Seamus Heaney. Edited collections include The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality; Shakespeare and Scotland; and A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text. Currently he is working on a study of literacy and cultural nationalism in Ireland in the period 1790 to 1930, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.