Introduction

Construction of Identity in Northern Irish Novels 201
focus on individual identity and its place within the wider community came under
scrutiny” as McCall has observed (29).
Subsequently, print-capitalism opened up new ways for the imagined community.
What followed were smaller communities that from then on were united by
superior forms of spoken languages. Anderson describes three paradigms that
“laid the basis for national consciousness” (44). First of all print-languages formed
an intermediate level between the spoken vernaculars and Church Latin.
Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who
might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation,
became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper.
In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands,
even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the
same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged.
These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed,
in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally
imagined community (Anderson 44).
What Anderson is essentially saying here is that print-media tied people together
in a new way. While many people could not understand each other properly due
to different vernaculars they now could due to a shared language in printed form.
Secondly, Anderson argues that print-capitalism distinctly fixed languages and
thirdly, that print-capitalism helped to produce “languages-of-power” (44). With
the latter he refers to vernacular languages that were closer to the print-language
than others. Speakers of these forms of languages were thus in advantage while
others lost their prestige. This “new form of imagined community”, in Anderson’s
terms, “set the stage for the modern nation” (46).
In the case of Ireland – both North and South – one can see that Anderson’s
concept is easily applicable. On the one hand Irish ceased to exist due to the reasons
already explained and English became the superior language on the island
both in everyday speech and writing (and the only language taught in schools).
This clearly shows how one language was superseded by another one and is evidence
for the “languages-of-power” theory. On the other hand on a different level
Irish served as a marker for cultural belonging that united those who wanted to set
themselves apart from the British. Print-media here again served as a means to
reinstall the forgotten language. Hence, with the foundation of the Gaelic League
in 1893, Gaelic Irish regained its importance in print-media as well as concerning
identity issues. Several bilingual newspapers were published by them. With the
help of these newspapers and most notably the Nation journalists “promoted the
aim of an independent, rural, Gaelic Ireland, free from the colonial rule of an
alien, industrial, English neighbor.” Other newspapers like the Connaught Telegraph
or the Kerry Sentinel delivered information about a national identity to the smaller
rural communities (McCall 30). In the latter half of the twentieth century televi-