The Irish Writer and the World

A major work from the award-winning scholar and cultural commentator.

Declan Kiberd (Author)

9780521602570, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 August 2005

344 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 2.6 cm, 0.48 kg

'There is a clear sense in all his writings, as in those of the late Edward Said, of an intellectual speaking over the heads of a narrow academic audience to the wider public. Part of the general appeal of his work, aside from its lucidity and rhetorical momentum, is the sense that something important is being articulated.' The Times Literary Supplement

The Irish Writer and the World is a major new book by one of Ireland's most prominent scholars and cultural commentators. Declan Kiberd, author of the award-winning Irish Classics and Inventing Ireland, here synthesises the themes that have occupied him throughout his career as a leading critic of Irish literature and culture. Kiberd argues that political conflict between Ireland and England ultimately resulted in cultural confluence and that writing in the Irish language was hugely influenced by the English literary tradition. He continues his exploration of the role of Irish politics and culture in a decolonising world, and covers Anglo-Irish literature, the fate of the Irish language and the Celtic Tiger. This fascinating collection of Kiberd's work demonstrates the extraordinary range, astuteness and wit that have made him a defining voice in Irish studies and beyond, and will bring his work to new audiences across the world.

1. Introduction: the Irish writer and the world
2. The fall of the stage Irishman
3. Storytelling: the Gaelic tradition
4. Writers in quarantine? The case for Irish studies
5. Synge, Yeats and Bardic poetry
6. George Moore's Gaelic Law Party
7. The flowering tree: modern poetry in Irish
8. On national culture
9. White skins, black masks: Celticism and Negritude
10. From nationalism to liberation
11. The war against the past
12. The elephant of revolutionary forgetfulness
13. Reinventing England
14. Museums and learning
15. Joyce's Ellmann, Ellmann's Joyce
16. Multiculturalism: the strange death of Liberal Europe
17. The Celtic Tiger: a cultural history
18. The city in Irish culture
19. Strangers in their own country: multiculturalism in Ireland.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]