Irish Poetry since 1950 is a survey of poetry, from Northern Ireland, the Republic, Britain, and the US, covering the 1950s, the 1960s, the early period of the Troubles up to 1976, the 1980s and the 1990s.
Derived from the parent Guide to Literature in English, this volume offers in concise form over 4,000 entries on literature in English from cultures throughout the world. Writers and major works from the UK and the USA are represented, as are those from Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, India, and Africa. The coverage is broad - from the classics of English literature to the best of modern writing. Additionally, the Guide has a wealth of entries on literary movements, groups or schools in literature and criticism, literary magazines, genres and sub-genres, critical concepts, and rhetorical terms.
In the last fifty years Irish poets have produced some of the most exciting poetry in contemporary literature, writing about love and sexuality, violence and history, country and city. This book provides a unique introduction to major figures such as Seamus Heaney, but also introduces the reader to significant precursors like Louis MacNeice or Patrick Kavanagh, and vital contemporaries and successors: among others, Thomas Kinsella, Paul Muldoon and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. Readers will find discussions of Irish poetry from the traditional to the modernist, written in Irish as well as English, from both North and South. This Companion, the only book of its kind on the market, provides cultural and historical background to contemporary Irish poetry in the contexts of modern Ireland but also in the broad currents of modern world literature. It includes a chronology and guide to further reading and will prove invaluable to students and teachers alike.
Forty chapters, written by leading scholars across the world, describe the latest thinking on modern Irish poetry. The Handbook begins with a consideration of Yeats's early work, and the legacy of the 19th century. The broadly chronological areas which follow, covering the period from the 1910s through to the 21st century, allow scope for coverage of key poetic voices in Ireland in their historical and political context. From the experimentalism of Beckett, MacGreevy, and others of the modernist generation, to the refashioning of Yeats's Ireland on the part of poets such as MacNeice, Kavanagh, and Clarke mid-century, through to the controversially titled post-1969 'Northern Renaissance' of poetry, this volume will provide extensive coverage of the key movements of the modern period. The Handbook covers the work of, among others, Paul Durcan, Thomas Kinsella, Brendan Kennelly, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson. The thematic sections interspersed throughout - chapters on women's poetry, religion, translation, painting, music, stylistics - allow for comparative studies of poets north and south across the century. Central to the guiding spirit of this project is the Handbook's consideration of poetic forms, and a number of essays explore the generic diversity of poetry in Ireland, its various manipulations, reinventions and sometimes repudiations of traditional forms. The last essays in the book examine the work of a 'new' generation of poets from Ireland, concentrating on work published in the last two decades by Justin Quinn, Leontia Flynn, Sinead Morrissey, David Wheatley, Vona Groarke, and others.
Derek Mahon is one of the leading poets of his time, both in Ireland and beyond, famously offering a perspective that is displaced from as much as grounded in his native country. From prodigious beginnings to prolific maturity, he has been, through thick and thin, through troubled times and other, a writer profoundly committed to the art of poetry and the craft of making verse. He has also been no-less a committed reviser of his work, believing the poem to be more than a record in verse, but a work of art never finished. This virtuoso study by Hugh Haughton provides the most comprehensive account imaginable of Mahon's oeuvre. Haughton's brilliant writing always serves and illuminates the poetry, yielding extraordinary insights on almost every page. The poetry, its revisions and reception, are the subject here, but so thorough is the approach that what is offered also amounts indirectly to an intellectual biography of the poet and with it an account of Northern Irish poetry vital to our understanding of the times.
Antoinette Quinn's acclaimed biography of Patrick Kavanagh, the most important Irish poet between the death of W.B. Yeats and the rise of Seamus Heaney, tells the triumphant story of his journey from homespun balladry through early journal and poetry publications to his eventual coronation as one of the most influential figures in Irish poetry. Kavanagh (1904–1967) was born in County Monaghan, the son of a cobbler-cum-small farmer. He left school at thirteen to work the land but continued to educate himself, reading and writing poetry in his spare time. In 1929 he began contributing verses to the Irish Statesman and was soon publishing in Irish and English journals. His first collection, Ploughman and Other Poems, appeared in 1936 and was followed by an autobiography, The Green Fool, in 1938. In 1939 he moved to Dublin where he spent the rest of his life as a freelance writer and as part of the social and literary scene, keeping company with a gifted generation of writers, among them Flann O'Brien and Brendan Behan. He gained recognition as an important literary voice with his long poem 'The Great Hunger' in 1942. Further collections and the novel Tarry Flynn appeared in the following decades to growing critical acclaim. Published to widespread praise, Patrick Kavanagh, A Biography traces Kavanagh's publishing history as well as revealing what he was writing in the long interval between his books. This engaging, well-researched account of his daily professional life as a writer, his revisions and redraftings, his negotiations with publishers and editors, dispels the view that he was an untutored, gormless genius visited by an occasional flash of inspiration. Patrick Kavanagh, A Biography is the definitive account of Patrick Kavanagh's life and work and should be the standard for years to come. Patrick Kavanagh, A Biography: Table of Contents Introduction - No Genealogic Rosary (1850–1910) - Childhood (1904–1918) - Serving his Time (1918–1927) - Dabbling in Verse (1916–1930) - Farmer-Poet (1929–1936) - Towards The Green Fool (1936–1937) - The Green Fool and its Aftermath (1937–1939) - I Had a Future (1939–1941) - Bell-lettres (1940–1942) - The Great Hunger (1941–1942) - Pilgrim Poet (1940–1942) - Marriage and Money? (1942–1944) - The Enchanted Way (1944–1947) - Film Critic (1946–1949) - Tarry Flynn (1947–1949) - From Ballyrush to Baggot Street (1948–1951) - King of the Kids (1949–1951) - Bluster and Beggary (1952–1953) - Trial and Error (1954) - The Cut Worm (1954–1955) - The American Dream (1955–1957) - Noo Pomes (1957–1958) - Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (1959–1960) - Roots of Love (1960–1964) - Sixty-Year-Old Public Man (1964–1965) - Four Funerals and a Wedding (1965–1967) - 'So long'
Denis Sampson explores John McGahern's discovery of art as a young man and traces the development of his signature vision and style. Sampson considers McGahern's early efforts as an apprentice novelist and weaves the inner story of the composition of his acclaimed first novel The Barracks into a narrative of imaginative formation.
This dictionary is a guide to the key authors, concepts, and terms used in the study of literature written in English. Each entry begins with a straightforward definition, and is followed by explanation and examples. Each writer is defined by type, significant preoccupation and/or style, and a selection of notable works. There are a number of entries on writers in a foreign language who have had a major influence on literature in English. One of the most important uses of this book is as a cross-referencing tool. Italicized cross-referenced entries form an interrelated web, presenting a unified overall picture of particular areas of interest.
In revising this book for a second edition, Harry Blamires has updated his final chapters to give a thorough coverage to the work of dramatists, novelists and poets who have achieved prominence in the 1980s, either as new writers or rediscovered authors who have recently been brought back into print or revived by radio and television.