ALAN Riach’s startling new book at once calls to mind, for its single-handed, multiple-minded virtuosity, Declan Kiberd’s brilliant study Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1996). If you haven’t read Kiberd, you should, but keep it back until you’ve bought and read Scottish Literature: An Introduction, in key and obvious ways, a very different kind of work from Kiberd’s, one in a class of its own.
Kiberd is both a scholar of the Irish language and a master of the modern Irish canon. Without that body of work (from, say, Swift and Sheridan, to Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett) what is called “English” or even “British” literature, would be less than half its shadow cast at noon, but for Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Dickens, Hardy, Woolf, Auden, Orwell, Greene etc.
