Thomas Flanagan, who died in 2002 at the age of seventy-nine, was, in addition to his achievements as a novelist, one of our most humane and readable practitioners of literary criticism and commentary. Though he came of age during the New Criticism era, Flanagan was, as his friend Seamus Heaney puts it in his preface to this new collection, “a history and biography man.” His 1959 study, The Irish Novelists, 1800–1850, rescued from oblivion such writers as Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, Gerard Griffin, and William Carleton, and established a context for them in Irish literary history. Previously, little was known, in America at least, about Irish writing before Yeats, Joyce, and Synge. Flanagan not only broadened and deepened our understanding of Ireland and her literature, he also laid the foundations for the edifice that would come to be known as Irish studies.
This new, posthumously published book, called There You Are—not a very helpful title, in my view—is a collection of his essays, book reviews, reminiscences, memories of old friends, and a speech and lecture or two. The book concentrates on Irish and Irish-American writers. Parts of it would have gone into the book on Irish America Flanagan was working toward at the time of his death. It is more than the omnium gatherum one might have expected; it has real coherence, managing to be both a study of several Irish-American artists and a study- in-miniature of Irish history and literature.
At the same time
