Irish Literature

Modern Irish Literature marks the culmination of the lifetime interest of the distinguished scholar Vivian Mercier (1919-89) in the influence of Gaelic literature on modern Irish writing. Building on the insights developed in his classic The Irish Comic Tradition, Mercier's focus here is on the research of nineteenth-century scholars which gave rise to the revival of Irish literature in English. Separate chapters analyzing the work of writers including Bernard Shaw, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, and Beckett build to provide a fresh and timely picture of Irish literary tradition. Informed by a wealth and diversity of scholarship, and written in a highly accessible style, this book is a major contribution to the study of Irish literature.

This reference provides alphabetically arranged entries for more than 70 modern Irish writers. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of the author's major works and themes, an overview of the writer's critical reception, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. An opening essay surveys the critical response to Irish literature after 1885, and an extensive bibliography concludes the volume.

Irish literature after Yeats and Joyce, from the 1920s onwards, includes texts which have been the subject of much contention. For a start how should Irish literature be defined: as works which have been written in Irish or as works written in Englsih by the Irish? It is a period in which ideas of Ireland--of people, community, and nation--have been both created and reflected, and in which conceptions of a distinct Irish identity have been articulated, defended, and challenged; a period which has its origins in a time of intense political turmoil. `after Yeats and Joyce' also suggests the immense influence of these two writers on the style, stances, and preoccupations of twentieth-century Irish literature. Neil Corcoran focuses his chapter on various themes such as `the Big House', the rural and provincial, with reference to authors from Kinsella and Beckett to William Trevor, Seamus Heaney, and Mary Lavin, providing a lucid and far-reaching introduction to modern Irish writing.

This book identifies the origin, the development and, ultimately, the success of the Irish literary tradition in English as one of the first literatures that is both national and colonial. It demonstrates the remarkable relationships between works as diverse as Joyce's Dubliners and Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the worlds of the French Revolution and the Irish famine. Deane also shows how almost all the activities of Irish print culture--novels, songs, typefaces, historical analyses, poems--struggle within the limits imposed by its inheritance.

This book is an intimate study of the three giants in Irish literary history: Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. In addition to constructing a narrative of Irelands political and literary past, Vicki Mahaffey interweaves the lives and writing of the authors into a portrait of national imagination, shaped not only by a vast cultural and mythic heritage, but also by the hard fact of English political domination. States of Desire argues that what people desire is fundamentally connected to how they write and read. Not only do language and narrative shape desire (and vice versa), but because these processes are socially conditioned, some political circumstances, such as those present in Ireland at the turn of the century, foster experimental desire more successfully than others. Mahaffey's contribution to the critical discourse on literary modernism is to assign a political motive to the art of modernist wordplay; in doing so, she offers a more compelling and socially driven version of the oft-told tale of literary modernism. Irish writers, she argues, sought to disrupt the rigidity of political thinking and social control by turning language into a weapon; by opening up infinite new possibilities of meaning and association, linguistic play makes it impossible for thought to be monopolized by the state or any other institutional power. In this light, the text becomes a prism of political, cultural, and erotic desires: a fountain of conscious and unconscious linguistic suggestion. Defying semantic control and refuting societal repression, Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce literally fought, in their lives and in their work, for a freedom of expression which--as was painfully evidenced in the case of Wilde--was not to be had for the asking.

Irish playwrights such as Sean O'Casey, George Bernard Shaw, and John Millington Synge have made enormous contributions to world drama. This reference provides detailed entries for 32 Irish playwrights active from 1880 to 1995. Each entry includes a biographical sketch, a summary of productions, a critical assessment of the dramatist's work, and extensive bibliographical information. The volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography.

Ireland has given birth to some of the most admired works of world literature, and also to a fascinating body of folklore. This volume examines how conventions from Irish folklore have been used in twelve Irish novels published between 1912 and 1948. Among the authors discussed are James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Mervyn Wall, Darrell Figgis, Eimar O'Duffy, and James Stephens. From the sophisticated satire of Joyce, as found in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to the tragicomedies of Mervyn Wall's Fursey novels, the intrusion of medieval Irish sources remains constant, suggesting a certain homogeneity in the novels' offerings of escape from reality through a world that belongs, in part, to folklore.