" Since the language they were writing in was not exactly their own, they tended to approach it with a finer self-consciousness than those lodged securily inside it, a self-consciousness that could then lend easily to modernist experiment. James Joyce remarked that the Irish were condemned to express themselves in a tongue not their own, but for the same reason they could reinvent it with a brio and panache which English-born authors found hard to rival. To be marginal to a language and culture is also to be freer than natives from its ruling forms and conventions, and thus to be less hamstrung by them. "

― Terry Eagleton , Culture