Comparing the Literature of the British Isles

 Terminological Problems:

Sorting one’s ways through the terminology is extremely complex, and it can be deeply
offensive to make mistakes. So, for example, if we speak of British comparative literature, to
include Irish writers would be an act of appropriation, because Irish work would be
subsumed under the heading of British.

 Languages, Dialects, and Identity

In which case the linguistic map of the British Isles would consist principally of Celtic
languages (Erse, Irish, of Northern Ireland, Scots Gaelic, and Welsh, as living languages, with a
body of texts in Manx and Cornish and Germanic languages (English, Scots, and Norse) with
channel Island French and a growing number of languages in daily use within immigrant
communities.
The persistence of history in the literatures of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as history
understood in a special ways as an account of an ongoing struggle for national identity, is in
marked contrast to the English version of history, which traces instead the gradual rise to the
world dominance of the English language and its literature.

 The Significance of History:

In contrast, Irish, Welsh and Scots Gaelic have been undergoing a living revival, for reasons
that have everything to do with a reassertion of national identity through the medium of
language.
There is no space here even attempt a proper discussion of the revival of Celtic languages over
the past century, but the important point to note is that such a revival has been taking place,
and that despite the dominance of English there are a great many speakers of Welsh, Irish and
Gaelic, and a flourishing literary and performance tradition in all three.
Fact that English literature enjoys a particularly exalted place in the world, partly through the
influence of individual writers and more recently through the prominence of the English
language.
If we compare the state of literary production and of libraries across the British Isles around
the time of the Norman Conquest, we find a flourishing oral poetry in Wales and Ireland, in
contrast to the Saxon tradition which had sunk into decline. The Irish libraries had been one of
the glories of Europe for centuries.
 What we can deduce from this quirk skimming across the centuries is:

 Firstly, that the predominance of English and of English literature is a relatively recent
phenomenon and coincides.

 Secondly, that English expansion into the Celtic cultures of the British Isles has been
characterized by a conscious strategy of linguistic discrimination.

 Thirdly, that it is hardly surprising given such circumstances that the revival of nationalism
should have had its impact on Welsh, Scottish, and Irish writers and intellectuals, and
should have led to a revival of interest in Celtic languages and the Celtic tradition.

 Comparative Britain’s:

Literature produced by writers of the British Isles could not be compared without an
understanding of the problematics of ‘Britishness’, and that the difficulties of using the term
‘British’ could not be understood without some sense of the use made of that term at
different moments in the past.
The dominance of English as a language, as a literature and as a political system has
resulted in a marginalization of a great deal of marvelous writing from elsewhere in the
islands.
The terminology of ‘English literature’ or ‘English studies’ is used all-embracing, so that
Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and Irish writers are frequently included within a syllabus
without any reference to their different point of origin and different literary traditions.