文章基本信息

标题：Years of Apprenticeship
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作者：david pierce
期刊名称：Estudios Irlandeses : Journal of Irish Studies
电子版ISSN：1699-311X
出版年度：2012
期号：7
出版社：Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses
摘要：If in 1971 you wanted to pursue almost any topic in Irish Studies, you were heading for trouble. August 1971 marked the beginning of Internment in Northern Ireland and an upsurge in violence across the region. Thereafter the Troubles only became more intense, the mood more sombre, and for those bent on quiet reading it grew increasingly difficult to keep politics at a distance. This was the background to those early years of my research into Irish writing. As I drove down into Irish history, there was a constant interruption from the present. Indeed, it was quite a struggle to identify what was background and what was foreground. The political situation was providing a resurgence in the colonial encounter between Britain and Ireland, but my research concerned quieter, more literary questions, at first into writers from County Clare and the province of Munster but then into the relation between fiction and society beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century with Maria Edgeworth and William Carleton. How would I connect what was happening in the present with what happened in the past, or should I have addressed the dilemma in a much more direct fashion and undertaken work on contemporary writers from Ulster? Perhaps I should have applied what I had learnt the previous year about the Spanish labyrinth to the Irish situation, for in many ways that is what I was absorbing at this time, that there was an Irish labyrinth which embraced history and the present, politics and literature.