At the heart of Anglo-French Orientalism has been the supposition that “East” and “West” are absolutely distinct. Not so Irish Orientalism, argues Joseph Lennon, in his recent reevaluative study, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Cultural History. Lennon maintains that far from imposing strict boundaries between East and West, Irish Orientalists from the medieval period through the Celtic Revival embraced and elaborated upon myths and pseudohistories to cement Ireland's “fantastic Eastern credentials” (126). Unlike Anglo-French Orientalism, a discourse Lennon characterizes as predicated on strict binaries between civility and savagery, intellect and emotion, and piety and paganism, Irish Orientalism emerged as a discourse that from its inception reacted to negative associations of the Irish with the Orient by reordering the process of representation, often transforming imperial stereotype into anticolonial allegory. Irish Orientalism offers an interdisciplinary overview of the long-standing, multiple, and often frankly outlandish arguments deployed by both Irish and non-Irish writers intent on forging genealogical, migratory, linguistic, and colonial connections between Ireland and the East. Although the dominant European mode of Orientalism certainly influenced Irish representations of Eastern cultures, Irish Orientalism has a distinct history—one which Lennon argues has not been fully apprehended, defined, or appreciated.

Lennon's study meticulously tracks a shifting cross-cultural discourse linking the twinned figures of the “Celt” and the “Oriental.” Surveying over twelve centuries of such Irish-Asian identifications, Lennon consistently sets Irish texts that foreground and celebrate ancestral and cultural connections with the East against texts by non-Irish writers that linked the Celt and the Oriental to “textually barbarize” both. Such racist representations, Lennon demonstrates, encouraged Irish writers to allegorize Ireland's relationship to the Orient differently. Examples of this discourse first surfaced in ancient Greek geographies and travel narratives in which Ireland was imagined as a “wild, remote borderland” existing, like Asia, on the outer fringes of the known world. Later British writers, from Cambrensis to Spenser, transformed such ancient correlations into spurious origin myths linking the “borderland” peoples of ancient Ireland and barbarous Scythia. Early Irish writers retaliated not by debunking the Irish/Asian link altogether, but by instead affirming ancestral ties to the more “civilized” Phoenecians and Milesians. After centuries of such “perpetual reinvention” (2), Ireland became known as a kind of “backyard Orient”: an ancient, peculiar, and mysterious island that offered seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians, etymologists, and Orientalists—both Irish and non-Irish—a European culture to dissect and codify as they would those other “ancient” cultures of the East.

The scope of this cultural history is vast; simply scanning Lennon's introduction, one is confronted with this daunting overview of works consulted: “grammatical texts, genealogies, histories and pseudohistories, pastoral dialogues, pseudoletter collections, travel narratives, antiquarian studies, Orientalist romances, Celticist studies, popular fiction, colonial critiques, syncretic Irish-Asian works” (xix). When examined in isolation, Lennon observes, such seemingly idiosyncratic texts have consistently fallen outside extant generic categories. Irish Orientalism offers an historical and cultural framework capable of grouping together such seemingly disparate Irish texts as the eighth-century Irish grammar text Auracepit na n-Eces (The scholar's primer); Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland (1633); Geoffery Keating's Foras Feasta ar Éirinn (1634); Míchéal Ó Cléirigh's Annála Ríoghachta Eireann (1636); Charles Vallency's Essay on the Antiquity of the Irish Language, Being Collation of the Irish with the Punic Language (1772); Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and The Missionary (1811); Thomas Moore's Oriental romance Lalla Rookh (1820); Matthew Arnold's “On the Study of Celtic Literature” (1867); and the more readily identified Orientalist works of Celtic Revival writers W. B. Yeats, George Russell, James Stephens, Lady Gregory, Roger Casement, and James Cousins. By uniting under the collective term Irish Orientalism authors who have rarely been discussed as participating in a long-standing literary and intellectual tradition, this study illuminates “an unacknowledged discourse in Irish culture and European imperialism” (xix).

Irish Orientalism is separated into two distinct sections. The first, rather vaguely entitled “Continuity and Development,” offers readers four chapters covering the emergence and expansion of Irish Orientalism from the sixth century BCE through the mid-nineteenth century. Lennon's numerous examples, culled from multiple genres and examined from diverse historical, intellectual, and political vantage points, often seem to belabor his theoretical point; his painstaking inventory loses force in its reiteration and repetition. However, it is precisely this cumulative weight of example that lends authority to Lennon's later arguments. Irish Orientalism's second section, “The Oriental and the Celt: The Syncretism of the Revival,” reexamines the Celtic Revival's use of Orientalist tropes in light of the long-standing dialogic history so meticulously traced in the book's first section. Lennon describes his argument as both dialectical and cumulative, and it is certainly true that when one finally reaches chapter 6, “W. B. Yeats and the Celtic Orient,” one apprehends the stakes of Lennon's accumulation. The author points out that although the bulk of scholarship on Irish uses of Orientalist discourse is centered on Yeats and the Celtic Revival, scholars generally dismiss the poet's interest in Eastern culture as little more than fodder for his refashioning of Celtic Ireland or as an inconsequential, tangential interest soon abandoned. Lennon maintains that not only have such interpretations failed to acknowledge Yeats's lifelong interest in and correspondence with Eastern cultures (his long-standing relationship with Rabindranath Tagore being one example), but critics writing on the Celtic Revival have largely overlooked precisely what his study seeks to prove: that “representations of the Orient and of the Celtic ‘mystical Eire’” share a literary and intellectual history whose “narratives operate in tandem, particularly in Ireland” (251).

Lennon goes on to identify other writers of the Celtic Revival, including Gregory, Russell, Stephens, and Cousins, whose dogged cross-cultural identifications of Irish and Eastern forms of colonialism and anticolonial nationalism should be understood as emerging from a distinct cultural tradition. Lennon is able to present these writers, many of whom have been left out of critical studies on the Celtic Revival, as a “tight-knit group of Celtic Revivalists [who] inherited and embraced much of the unacknowledged discourse of Irish Orientalism” (209). Upon reaching the end of this second section, one is left feeling that it is this reassessment of the Orientalist impulse in the Celtic Revival that forms the true crux of Lennon's argument. Although this reassessment is one made possible by Lennon's painstaking characterization of a two-thousand-year-old cultural dialogue, one nonetheless wishes that the information presented in the book's first half had been more carefully shaped and condensed. Nevertheless, scholars working in the fields of Irish and postcolonial studies should find Lennon's overview useful and enlightening.