Books as well as rocks and guns have long been weapons in the feuds that have riven Ireland.

Seamus Deane, nearing the end of his work on one of the biggest books of all, an anthology of 14 centuries of Irish writing, hopes it will be simply too large and too inclusive to hurl at an enemy.Deane, a professor of English and American literature at University College Dublin, is general editor of "The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 550-1990," to be published in April by Faber & Faber.

In two volumes and 3,000 pages, the anthology will include examples of writing in early, medieval and modern Irish, Norman French, Latin and English.

Deane stresses "writing" in the title because he has included magazine and newspaper articles, oral histories, attempts at literature that could hardly be called great and commentaries about Ireland by English nota-bles, including Oliver Cromwell, who led a bloody military expedition through Ireland.

"This immense and distressing work," as Deane calls it, is inevitably a political document, an argument against anyone - republican, loyalist, Protestant, Catholic, Celt, Gael, Scots-Irish, Anglo-Irish - who would stake an exclusive claim to being Irish.

"We are not trying to say, in fact we are refusing to say, that there is some metaphysical essence called `Irishness' that is as visible in a ninth century poem as it is in a play by Sean O'Casey. We're not interested in that, because we don't believe in the existence of it," said Deane, a native of Londonderry in the British province of Northern Ireland, during a recent visit to London.

"The anthology is a serious attempt to try to introduce to people the idea of a culture that was so rich and diverse that it cannot be appropriated by any one group."

The anthology was sponsored by Field Day, founded in Londonderry in 1980 by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea as a traveling theater company. It expanded into publishing in 1983 with a series of political pamphlets and is widely regarded as the finest cultural response Northern Ireland has produced against the violence that has torn the province.

Deane described the anthology as a definition of Irish writing; of repossession of Irish-born authors such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke and Laurence Sterne who are prominent in English letters; and of decolonization.

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"It is important that this should be an exemplary act of showing how you can retain cultural intimacy and links with the colonizing power while at the same time not learning to think of yourself as having an ancillary, marginal or junior role to that power," Deane said.

However, he also detects in Ireland a tendency to fall into a trap of colonial self-image: "They don't know where they are or where they came from, and they invent fake origins that exclude many people whom they have to live with."

Ultimately, he argued, this process of inventing origins and excluding latecomers makes the "others" less human and thus suitable targets for murder.

The anthology is intended, Deane said, to "provide material that will show the stupidity and the brokenhearted terminus to which sectarianism leads, and how sectarianism can only be justified by a certain kind of deliberate, fostered, nurtured ignorance of what in fact has happened, what contributions have been made by various groups over the centuries to the culture."

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