The Literature of Ireland
Culture and Criticism

A collection of important essays from one of Ireland's foremost literary and cultural historians.

Terence Brown (Author)

9780521118231, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 July 2010

292 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 1.8 cm, 0.58 kg

"The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism brings together valuable essays from one of Ireland's most distinguished scholars. Individual chapters highlight gaps in scholarship and present new readings of well known authors...this collection will be of value to both Irish Studies scholars and to those with a more general interest in the authors discussed."
-Caoilfhionn Ni Bheachain, University of Limerick, College Literature

One of Ireland's foremost literary and cultural historians, Terence Brown's command of the intellectual and cultural currents running through the Irish literary canon is second to none, and he has been enormously influential in shaping the field of Irish studies. These essays reflect the key themes of Brown's distinguished career, most crucially his critical engagement with the post-colonial model of Irish cultural and literary history currently dominant in Irish Studies. With essays on major figures such as Yeats, MacNeice, Joyce and Beckett, as well as contemporary authors including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Brian Friel, this volume is a major contribution to scholarship, directing scholars and students to new approaches to twentieth-century Irish cultural and literary history.

Introduction
1. The Literary Revival: historical reflections
2. Joyce's magic lantern
3. Music: the cultural issue
4. Modernism and revolution: re-reading Yeats's 'Easter 1916'
5. Shakespeare and the Irish self
6. Irish literature and the Great War
7. Irish modernism and the 1930s
8. Post-modernists: Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien
9. Patrick Kavanagh: religious poet
10. MacNeice's Ireland: MacNeice's Islands
11. Louis MacNeice and the Second World War
12. MacNeice and the Puritan tradition
13. John Hewitt and memory: a reflection
14. Michael Longley and the Irish poetic tradition
15. Seamus Heaney: the witnessing eye and the speaking tongue
16. Derek Mahon: the poet and painting
17. Telling tales: Kennelly's Cromwell and Muldoon's 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants'
18. Redeeming the time: the novels of John McGahern and John Banvillle
19. 'Have we a context': transition, self and society in the drama of Brian Friel
20. Hubert Butler and nationalism
21. The Irish Dylan Thomas: versions and influences.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary essays [DNF]