SOURCE: "Tradition and Modernity," in Irish Literary Supplement, Vol. 16, No. 2, Fall, 1997, p. 21.

In the following review, Hughes addresses the ambiguities he finds in Deane's definition of modernity in Strange Country.

Taking Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France as his "foundational text," Seamus Deane examines the "contrast and contest between tradition and modernity" which extends through and beyond the Irish nineteenth century. This discourse appears in a number of oppositional pairings—culture and economics, the national and the rational, speech and print, Ireland and England—and issues in the nineteenth century in "a narrative of strangeness" about Ireland because Ireland cannot be absorbed into a normalising narrative of progress and economic development.

Moving from Burke to Flann O'Brien, Deane's concern is with the way in which writers have negotiated between oppositions with the aim of destabilizing stereotypical ascriptions. The theoretical co-ordinates of Strange Country are, then, broadly deconstructive...