This is a critical survey of the fiction and non-fiction written in Ireland during the key years between 1880 and 1920, or what has become known as the Irish Literary Renaissance. The book considers both the prose and the social and cultural forces working through it.
The Gaelic Revival has long fascinated scholars of political history, nationalism, literature, and theater history, yet studies of the period have neglected a significant dimension of Ireland's evolution into nationhood: the cultural crusades mounted by those who believed in the centrality of the Irish language to the emergent Irish state. This book attempts to remedy that deficiency and to present the lively debates within the language movement in their full complexity, citing documents such as editorials, columns, speeches, letters, and literary works that were influential at the time but all too often were published only in Irish or were difficult to access. Cautiously employing the terms "nativist" and "progressive" for the turnings inward and toward the European continent manifested in different authors, this study examines the strengths and weaknesses of contrasting positions on the major issues confronting the language movement. Moving from the early collecting or retelling of folklore through the search for heroes in early Irish history to the reworking of ancient Irish literary materials by retelling it in modern vernacular Irish, O'Leary addresses the many debates and questions concerning Irish writing of the period. His study is a model for inquiries into the kind of linguistic-literary movement that arises during intense nationalism.
First published in 1979, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, through the works of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, J. M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey, documents the complex spectrum of political, social and other pressures that helped fashion modern Ireland. At least three sets of cultural assumptions coexisted in Ireland during the years between 1890 and 1930, -- English, Irish and Anglo-Irish, each united by a common language but divided by considerable tensions and strain. The question of Irish identity forms the central theme of the study, and illustrates how it was a major, even obsessive concern for these writers. Subsidiary and interwoven themes constantly recur. Themes such as the concepts of the peasant and the hero, political nationalism, the meaning of Ireland’s history and the validity of her cultural traditions. Rather than use the literature concerned as merely endorsing evidence for a sociological or political thesis, this study allows its major themes and issues to emerge and develop from direct and close study of the work of the writers. This book will be of interest to students of literature and history.
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction presents authoritative essays by thirty-five leading scholars of Irish fiction. They provide in-depth assessments of the breadth and achievement of novelists and short story writers whose collective contribution to the evolution and modification of these unique art forms has been far out of proportion to Ireland's small size. The volume brings a variety of critical perspectives to bear on the development of modern Irish fiction, situating authors, texts, and genres in their social, intellectual, and literary historical contexts. The Handbook's coverage encompasses an expansive range of topics, including the recalcitrant atavisms of Irish Gothic fiction; nineteenth-century Irish women's fiction and its influence on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism; the diverse modes of irony, fabulism, and social realism that characterize the fiction of the Irish Literary Revival; the fearless aesthetic radicalism of James Joyce; the jolting narratological experiments of Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain; the fate of the realist and modernist traditions in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor, Seán O'Faoláin, and Mary Lavin, and in that of their ambivalent heirs, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, and John Banville; the subversive treatment of sexuality and gender in Northern Irish women's fiction written during and after the Troubles; the often neglected genres of Irish crime fiction, science fiction, and fiction for children; the many-hued novelistic responses to the experiences of famine, revolution, and emigration; and the variety and vibrancy of post-millennial fiction from both parts of Ireland. Readably written and employing a wealth of original research, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction illuminates a distinguished literary tradition that has altered the shape of world literature.
Joyce and the Anglo-Irish is a controversial new reading of the pre-Wake fictions. Joining ranks with a number of recent studies that insist on the importance of historical contexts for understanding James Joyce, Len Platt's account has a particular focus on issues of class and culture. The Joyce that emerges from this radical reappraisal is a Catholic writer who assaults the Protestant makers of Ireland's traditional literary landscape. Far from being indifferent to the Irish Literary Revival, the James Joyce of Platt's book attacks and ridicules these revivalist writers and intellectuals who were claiming to construct the Irisih nation. Examining the aesthetics and politics of revivalist culture, Len Platt's research produces a James Joyce who makes a crucial intervention in the cultural politics of nationalism. The Joyce enterprise thus becomes centrally concerned both with a disposal of the essentialist culture produced by the tradition of Samuel Ferguson, Standish O'Grady and W.B. Yeats, and a redefining of the 'uncreated conscience' of the race.
Irish travellers or 'tinkers' have appeared as characters in Irish literature since the early nineteenth century. Representations of this semi-nomadic cultural and ethnic minority in works by non-traveller authors almost invariably function in some way within the context of Irish identity politics, whereby the 'tinker' often serves as a 'primitive' Other to a modern, civilized Irish Self. This study considers the 'tinker' character in a large body of serious and popular literary texts, some well known, others rarely if ever discussed, and traces how the literary construct of the 'tinker' figure as domestic or foreign Other evolves over time. Three chapters concentrate on specific historical contexts, as the 'tinker' shifts from being a relatively straightforward scapegoat in the literature of the early nineteenth century, to being a more complex and ambiguous embodiment of both the aspirations and anxieties of the Anglo-Irish writers of the Revival, to being a barometer of aspects of modernity and regression in the mid-twentieth-century Irish Republic. Three further chapters focus on thematic contexts that have particular relevance for the development of the 'tinker' figure: children's literature from and about Ireland; fabulist narratives, particularly those with plot configurations derived from Celtic mythology; and crime and detective fiction set in Ireland. Finally the way in which individual travellers represent themselves in autobiographical narratives of the late twentieth century is considered, often in response to the fictional 'tinker' stereotype that has persisted in sedentary society and its cultural expressions for centuries.
Features 13 captivating tales, from the early Irish prose fiction of Maria Edgeworth and William Carleton to the 20th-century works of William Butler Yeats, James Stephens, James Joyce, Seumas O'Kelly, and Liam O'Flaherty.
This is the first study of Irish improvement fiction, a neglected genre of nineteenth-century literary, social, and political history.Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement shows how the fiction of Mary Leadbeater, Charles Bardin, Martin Doyle, and William Carleton attempted to lure Irish peasants and landowners away from popular genres such as fantasy, romance, and 'radical' political tracts as well as 'high' literary and philosophical forms of enquiry. These writersattempted to cultivate a taste for the didactic tract, an assertively realist mode of representation. Accordingly, improvement fiction laboured to demonstrate the value of hard work, frugality, and sobriety in a rigorously realistic idiom, representing the contentment that inheres in a plain social order free ofexcess and embellishment. Improvement discourse defined itself in opposition to the perceived extremism of revolutionary politics and literary writing, seeking (but failing) to exemplify how both political discontent and unhappiness could be offset by a strict practicality and prosaic realism. This book demonstrates how improvement reveals itself to be a literary discourse, enmeshed in the very rhetorical abyss it sought to escape. In addition, the proudly liberal rhetoric of improvement isshown to be at one with the imperial discourse it worked to displace.Helen O'Connell argues that improvement discourse is embedded in the literary and cultural mainstream of modern Ireland and has hindered the development of intellectual and political debate throughout this period. These issues are examined in chapters exploring the career of William Carleton; peasant 'orality'; educational provision in the post-Union period; the Irish language; secret society violence; Young Ireland nationalism; and the Irish Revival.
A great tide of literary invention swept through Ireland between the 1890s and the 1920s. This engrossing, illuminating, and beautifully illustrated guidebook explores the personal and professional histories of writers such as W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, and Sean O’Casey and examines their relationships with the people, culture, and landscapes of Ireland. From Galway and the Aran Islands, to County Mayo and County Sligo, and from Dublin to Wicklow, this guide to the places that inspired Irish Literary Revival showcases the locations where many of Ireland’s finest writers shaped an enduring vision of the country.