[In the following review, Morgan offers unfavorable assessment of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger.]

Terry Eagleton is a professor of English at Oxford; Roy Foster the professor of Irish history there. Last year, Eagleton launched a violent attack on his colleague, accusing Foster, and Irish historians, of revisionism. There was also a pre-emptive strike against Foster's current project, the biography of W. B. Yeats. Eagleton accused him of raiding literature in a “reductive” manner, “paying only passing attention to the politics and poetics of form”.

Now, with Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Eagleton has continued the offensive with his great coat-trailing work on Irish history. At once the application of cultural theory to Ireland, and the insertion of Irish history into literary criticism, this set of essays intersperses slabs of impressionistic analysis of Victorian Ireland with studies of particular writers. The lead chapter, ripped from any context to catch the 150th anniversary of the famine (“a low-level nuclear attack”), is typical Eagletonism.

Heathcliff, he reveals, was an Irish famine victim—ever if Earnshaw's discovery in Liverpool might have been a gypsy or a Creole or something else, and Emily Brontë began Wuthering Heights before the potato blight impacted. There is one brief reference to the Brontë family's Irish (not Ulster) origins, and no investigation worth the name.

Some years ago, Eagleton seemed to apologise for all that Marxist cultural theory when he descended to writing literature himself. It could have been a response to 1989. But it's now clear that this was a retreat into identity politics, which has produced the absurdity of a postmodernist at war with himself. In the foreword to his play, Saint Oscar, he came out as “one of Irish working-class provenance … teaching in the very belly of the beast”. Nice work, if you can get it.

In this book, he is an “Irish Catholic”. Although he admits to being a “semi-outsider”, he bristles at Irish scholars weary of the indulgent posturing of Irish men (and women) abroad. And he can't resist a cheap jibe at Irish historians. While he is still formally at war with postmodernism, he reveals complicity in its social-intellectual base. Every time he has to justify his apologia for violent Irish nationalism, he makes the analogy with women and blacks. Liberalism and pluralism are dispatched, and the historical necessity of fundamentalism espoused.

Revisionism is surely the essence of historical endeavour, a sign of intellectual life. A national school of academic history developed in Ireland from the 1930s. By the mid-1960s, it was well on its way to achieving hegemony over the “1916 and all that” Sinn Fein version. Its key text—based on a series of television programmes—is T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin's Course of Irish History (1967). During the northern troubles, revisionism came to be pressed as a charge by the likes of Desmond Fennell, Eamon de Valera's representative on earth.

But it took the Field Day company—founded in the hunger strikes of 1980-81 as the cultural wing of the SDLP, while some of its prominent associates were consorting with Sinn Fein—to create the bogey of revisionism. The cultural proponents of nationality imagined an explanation for their political failure: it was all the fault of the historians. Finally, a Savonarola emerged in 1989, in the form of the Cambridge Irish cleric, Brendan Bradshaw. This heresy hunter was determined to re-evangelise Ireland. Irish historians, he warned, were out to deny the famine, Bradshaw being apparently oblivious to F. S. L. Lyons' popular textbook—Ireland since the Famine (1971).

This is the moment of Eagleton the oppressed Irish Catholic, packing them in among the dreaming spires. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger has been written with Lacan, Althusser and Derrida on the one side, a pile of mainly 19th-century Irish novels on the other, and secondary works of Irish history on the floor. If things were bad when Eagleton knew no Irish history, they are much worse after he has consulted the academic literature.

There are passages where Eagleton, having done no primary research himself, has to accept the conclusion of a community of scholars. But these are overwhelmed by a flood of generalisations, based upon the Manichean opposition of “Ireland” and “Britain”—the idea of burning everything from Britain but her coal. Its likely source is the British left's post-1968 championing of Irish republicanism. The tragic irony of this book, which berates postmodernism for its failure to deploy the concept of class, is Eagleton's failure to get a handle on Irish economic and political development.

It is a truism that cultural theorists do not address culture, but Eagleton does not even survey the literary culture of a given time and place. The Ulster-born Francis Hutcheson—a colonialist if ever there was one!—is approved for his “moral sense” philosophy, and credited with being “a remote precursor of Romantic nationalism”. Eagleton then gets into the canon, with Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan. There follow Irish Gothic, then Yeats and Joyce. He finishes off with Wilde and Shaw. His insights into these writers, with occasional pointed anecdotes, are lost by the overall thrust of the book: to present Ireland as a unique nation where culture was pre-eminent, then subject to the horrors of colonialism, to be followed inevitably by the shaking-off of the yoke.

It becomes virtuoso word-play, with ideas continually rubbed together, leaving the impression that Eagleton is unable to deal with unmediated reality. With the collapse of Marxism, irrationalism has taken over. While he gets drawn deeper into the Irish cultural revival (an experience that awaits an historical assessment, despite the worldwide interest in its writers), he moves further away from the reality of 19th-century sectarian division. Self-government was the product of Irish Catholic achievement and the need for separation, but it has been over-shadowed by the failure of nationalism, particularly its violent variety. Separatism as a viable strategy came to an end in the 1960s; the IRA of the past 25 years has no political achievement to its credit.

It is a historical question whether Years should have worried, in “Easter 1916”, about whether that play of his (Cathleen Ni Houlihan) sent out “certain men the English shot”. It was, until recently, a political question whether eminent figures on the British left shared in the moral responsibility for Ulster violence. My interim view is that a Brit-hating IRA did not need metropolitan apologists and that identity merchants like Eagleton—more Irish than the Irish—are symptomatic of a dissonance, but also a tolerance, in English cultural life.

He dedicates his book—a homage to Lady Morgan—to “the wild Irish girl”. Whoever this is (and it certainly isn't Mary Robinson), it says a great deal about the man. Gerry Adams likes to have analogies drawn between himself and Nelson Mandela: this is, of course, preposterous. Eagleton, one must assume, is an admirer of that great man as Mandela tries to construct a non-racial South Africa. But, on a reading of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, I can only conclude that his preference—given his enthusiasm for Romanticism—would be for Winnie.