Irish Literature in Transition, 1880–1940: Volume 4


Book Description

The years between 1880 and 1940 were a time of unprecedented literary production and political upheaval in Ireland. It is the era of the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish Revival, and a time when many major Irish writers - Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Lady Gregory - profoundly impacted Irish and World Literature. Recent research has uncovered new archives of previously neglected texts and authors. Organized according to multiple categories, ranging from single author to genre and theme, this volume allows readers to imagine multiple ways of re-mapping this crucial period. The book incorporates different, even competing, approaches and interpretations to reflect emerging trends and current debates in contemporary scholarship. As ongoing research in the field of Irish studies discovers new materials and critical strategies for interpreting them, our sense of Irish literary history during this period is constantly shifting. This volume seeks to capture the richness and complexity of the years 1880-1940 for our current moment.




Irish Literature in Transition, 1780-1830:


Book Description

The years between 1780 and 1830 are vital decades in the history of Irish writing in English. This book charts the confluence of Enlightenment, antiquarian, and romantic energies within Irish literary culture and shows how different writers and genres absorbed, dispersed and remade those interests during five decades of political change. During those same years, literature made its own history. By the 1840s, Irish writing formed a recognizable body of work, which later generations would draw on, quote, anthologize and dispute. Questions raised by novels, poems and plays of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the politics of language and voice; the relationship between literature and locality; the possibility of literature as a profession - resonated for many Irish writers over the centuries that followed and continue to matter today. This comprehensive volume will be a key reference for scholars and students of Irish literature and romantic literary studies.




Irish Literature in Transition, 1940–1980: Volume 5


Book Description

This volume explores the history of Irish writing between the Second World War (or the 'Emergency') in 1939 and the re-emergence of violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It situates modern Irish writing within the contexts of cultural transition and transnational connection, often challenging pre-existing perceptions of Irish literature in this period as stagnant and mundane. While taking into account the grip of Irish censorship and cultural nationalism during the mid-twentieth century, these essays identify an Irish literary culture stimulated by international political horizons and fully responsive to changes in publishing, readership, and education. The book combines valuable cultural surveys with focussed discussions of key literary moments, and of individual authors such as Seán O'Faoláin, Samuel Beckett, Edna O'Brien, and John McGahern.




Irish Literature in Transition, 1830-1880:


Book Description

Ireland's experience in the nineteenth century was quite different from that of Victorian Britain. Its fictions were written in differing forms - like the gothic or historical novel - and its poetry and drama were populated with ballad and song. Its writers were by turns nationalist or unionist, anglophile or de-anglicising. If the effects of Famine and emigration were catastrophic for mid-nineteenth-century Irish culture, they initiated a literary story that spread across the diaspora. Despite the decline of spoken Irish, literature continued to be published, while scholarly endeavours such as translation or the Ordnance Survey preserved much from the Gaelic past. This rich volume examines the many forms of new writing that thrived throughout this period. Utilizing a thematic and historical approach, it addresses a broad anglophone readership in Victorian literature. Essays consider the Irish authors in America and India, women's writing, and the resilience of Irish literature before the revival.




Irish Literature in Transition, 1700–1780:


Book Description

This volume examines eighteenth-century Irish literature, highlighting the diversity of texts, authors and approaches that characterises contemporary studies of the period. Chapters consider the contexts of history, politics, language, philosophy, gender, sexuality, and the environment while situating Irish literature in relation to Ireland, Britain, Europe and beyond. Well-known authors (Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith) are read alongside less familiar writers (including Mary Barber, William Chaigneau, Frances Sheridan, and Samuel Whyte) and popular and ephemeral literatures take their place with formerly canonical texts. It demonstrates the exciting vitality and richness of eighteenth-century Irish literature - written and performed - as well as its complex intersections with different communities and traditions. This book will be a key resource to scholars and students of Irish eighteenth-century studies as well as readers generally interested in questions of Anglophone and Irish-language culture, representations of gender and sexuality, and national and trans-national identities.




The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry


Book Description

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, first published in 2003, provides an introduction to major figures such as Seamus Heaney, and also introduces the reader to significant precursors like Louis MacNeice or Patrick Kavanagh, and vital contemporaries and successors: among others, Thomas Kinsella, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Muldoon. 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 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.




A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature


Book Description

This book offers the first comprehensive survey of writing by women in Ireland from the seventeenth century to the present day. It covers literature in all genres, including poetry, drama, and fiction, as well as life-writing and unpublished writing, and addresses work in both English and Irish. The chapters are authored by leading experts in their field, giving readers an introduction to cutting edge research on each period and topic. Survey chapters give an essential historical overview, and are complemented by a focus on selected topics such as the short story, and key figures whose relationship to the narrative of Irish literary history is analysed and reconsidered. Demonstrating the pioneering achievements of a huge number of many hitherto neglected writers, A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature makes a critical intervention in Irish literary history.




Irish Literature in Transition, 1780–1830: Volume 2


Book Description

The years between 1780 and 1830 are vital decades in the history of Irish writing in English. This book charts the confluence of Enlightenment, antiquarian, and romantic energies within Irish literary culture and shows how different writers and genres absorbed, dispersed and remade those interests during five decades of political change. During those same years, literature made its own history. By the 1840s, Irish writing formed a recognizable body of work, which later generations would draw on, quote, anthologize and dispute. Questions raised by novels, poems and plays of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the politics of language and voice; the relationship between literature and locality; the possibility of literature as a profession - resonated for many Irish writers over the centuries that followed and continue to matter today. This comprehensive volume will be a key reference for scholars and students of Irish literature and romantic literary studies.




Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s


Book Description

What does it mean to focus on the decade as a unit of literary history? Emerging from the shadows of iconic Victorian authors such as Eliot and Tennyson, the 1880s is a decade that has been too readily overlooked in the rush to embrace end-of-century decadence and aestheticism. The 1880s witnessed new developments in transatlantic networks, experiments in lyric poetry, the decline of the three-volume novel, and the revaluation of authors, journalists and the reading public. The contributors to this collection explore the case for the 1880s as both a discrete point of literary production, with its own pressures and provocations, and as part of literature's sense of its expanded temporal and geographical reach. The essays address a wide variety of authors, topics and genres, offering incisive readings of the diverse forces at work in the shaping of the literary 1880s.




The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats


Book Description

A comprehensive and accessible introduction to the major themes of this important poet's life and career.