Critical Ireland is a collection of 31 papers given at the New Voices conference in Queen's University, Belfast, last year. Young critics came from the universities of Tⁿbingen, Genoa and Burgos, two from the US, and half a dozen from England or Scotland. Postgraduates from TCD and Queen's top the lists, with seven each. Altogether, there are 19 men and 12 women. Four articles are on Joyce, three on the practice of reviewing, and two each on Wilde, Yeats, AE (both on The Interpreters), Kavanagh, Eavan Boland and the Irish dramatic revival.
The prize for the only funny essay goes to David Cotter (TCD), who says on Friday nights he socialises with other tenants of his building in Rathmines - Kenyan and Algerian refugees, a Hindu, and an Egyptian - and then speculates on the varieties of world religion (they all boil down to brotherly love and charity) and the endlessly interesting matter of national identity.
Seeking an identity by studying Irishness is "cheap, a cop out". A "borderline" intellectual, he concludes that his lines of inquiry will not be dictated by help-wanted ads for teaching posts in "national studies".
All 31 of the contributors to this book are frighteningly intelligent and coolly adept at the manipulation of the jargon of symbolic systems, talents that could earn one a fortune in the software business.
Since the writers have learned to out-Eagleton Eagleton - ditto for Declan Kiberd, Edna Longley and the ubiquitous Homi Bhabha - they could easily learn the ropes of any new dot.com scam. But they don't. Instead, they write articles on 'AE, the Irish Civil War and the Dialogical Text' (James Heaney, TCD) or 'Reproblematising the Irish Text' (Aaron Kelly, QUB).
The continuing attractions of the intellectual life and literature itself to the astute young are thus tacitly celebrated.
I wish these attractions were celebrated less tacitly. On the whole, the articles have too little to say about literature as literature, and they do not often say it in a very literary way. Jarlath Kileen's lively and elliptical essay on Marian apparitions at Knock, Wilde's 'The Emperor and the Nightingale' and the politics of blood sacrifice is unusual in its panache - though it might be a bellwether in its camp taste for "the sumptuous Catholicism of pre-Tridentine ruritania, to philosophy on the other.
Beauty matters, too. Yet the "hermeneutics of suspicion" prevail. This is more an attitude than a philosophical assumption: that literature is part of a rotten power structure, authors are self-contradictory and complicit in the power structure, and things are never what they seem, but really much worse.
These themes, of course, are good enough for great writing, but as themes in themselves they are unlikely to win many readers.
However, when you could be making a fortune but cannot get a university job - or even if you do manage to get one, a decent wage - the world's value systems don't seem right.
After a session with a graduate recruiter (What is English good for? "Teaching and literary journalism"), Stephen Hull decides that making a PhD in literature serve any particular function is "nothing short of murderous".
Knowledge, as Newman beautifully explained, is its own end - but then Newman was angling for the job as Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland.
The best advice is given by David Wheatley at the end of this alphabetically arranged book - young critics should shed the cares of doctoral work a while and write lively journalism for magazines.
Adrian Frazier is Director of the MA in Drama and Theatre Arts at NUI Galway. His book, George Moore 1852-1933 was published last year