Declan Kiberd – författare

Kiberd - one of Ireland's leading critics and a central figure in the FIELD DAY group with Brian Friel, Seamus Deane and the actor Stephen Rea - argues that the Irish Literary Revival of the 1890-1922 period embodied a spirit and a revolutionary, generous vision of Irishness that is still relevant to post-colonial Ireland. This is the perspective from which he views Irish culture. His history of Irish writing covers Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Heaney, Friel and younger writers down to Roddy Doyle.

The Irish Revival of 1891 to 1922 was an extraordinary era that generated not only a remarkable crop of poets and writers but also a range of innovative political thinkers and activists. The contributors to this period exchanged ideas and opinions about what Ireland was and could become, yet much of this discourse remains out of print, some of these voices almost forgotten. Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891–1922 collects for the first time many of the essays, articles, and letters by renowned figures such as James Joyce, Maud Gonne, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O'Casey, and J. M. Synge, among others. The anthology also contains pieces by lesser-known individuals such as Stopford A. Brooke, Mary Colum, and Helena Molony. Many of the lesser-known texts contextualize the social, political, and cultural lives, values, and aspirations of those involved in and on the periphery of the Revivalist movement. The introduction and commentary by Declan Kiberd and P. J. Mathews convey the ideas of a brilliant generation that, in spite of difficulty and demoralization, audaciously shaped a modern Ireland. Divided into sixteen sections covering issues as diverse as literature, religion, drama, education, women's rights, and the 1916 Rising, this is the ultimate reference book for anyone with an interest in Irish literature and history.

The Irish Revival of 1891 to 1922 was an extraordinary era that generated not only a remarkable crop of poets and writers but also a range of innovative political thinkers and activists. The contributors to this period exchanged ideas and opinions about what Ireland was and could become, yet much of this discourse remains out of print, some of these voices almost forgotten. Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891–1922 collects for the first time many of the essays, articles, and letters by renowned figures such as James Joyce, Maud Gonne, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O'Casey, and J. M. Synge, among others. The anthology also contains pieces by lesser-known individuals such as Stopford A. Brooke, Mary Colum, and Helena Molony. Many of the lesser-known texts contextualize the social, political, and cultural lives, values, and aspirations of those involved in and on the periphery of the Revivalist movement. The introduction and commentary by Declan Kiberd and P. J. Mathews convey the ideas of a brilliant generation that, in spite of difficulty and demoralization, audaciously shaped a modern Ireland. Divided into sixteen sections covering issues as diverse as literature, religion, drama, education, women's rights, and the 1916 Rising, this is the ultimate reference book for anyone with an interest in Irish literature and history.

Why James Joyce's great modernist masterpiece is in fact a book that can teach ordinary people to live better lives.

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.

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.

In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's Ulysses offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. As much a guide to contemporary life as it is virtuoso work of literary criticism, Ulysses and Us offers revolutionary insights to the scholar and the first-time reader alike.Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the hero of James Joyce's Ulysses, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the city streets, and in his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of the literature upon which Joyce drew in writing Ulysses, such as Homer, Dante and the Bible.'Declan Kiberd's brilliantly informed and highly entertaining advocacy liberates Joyce's greatest book from the dungeon of unreadable masterpieces.' Joseph O'Connor

In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's Ulysses offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. As much a guide to contemporary life as it is virtuoso work of literary criticism, Ulysses and Us offers revolutionary insights to the scholar and the first-time reader alike.Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the hero of James Joyce's Ulysses, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the city streets, and in his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of the literature upon which Joyce drew in writing Ulysses, such as Homer, Dante and the Bible.'Declan Kiberd's brilliantly informed and highly entertaining advocacy liberates Joyce's greatest book from the dungeon of unreadable masterpieces.' Joseph O'Connor

A celebration of the tenacious life of the enduring Irish classics, this book by one of Irish writing's most eloquent readers offers a brilliant and accessible survey of the greatest works since 1600 in Gaelic and English, which together have shaped one of the world's most original literary cultures.In the course of his discussion of the great seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gaelic poems of dispossession, and of later work in that language that refuses to die, Declan Kiberd provides vivid and idiomatic translations that bring the Irish texts alive for the English-speaking reader.Extending from the Irish poets who confronted modernity as a cataclysm, and who responded by using traditional forms in novel and radical ways, to the great modern practitioners of such paradoxically conservative and revolutionary writing, Kiberd's work embraces three sorts of Irish classics: those of awesome beauty and internal rigor, such as works by the Gaelic bards, Yeats, Synge, Beckett, and Joyce; those that generate a myth so powerful as to obscure the individual writer and unleash an almost superhuman force, such as the Cuchulain story, the lament for Art O'Laoghaire, and even Dracula; and those whose power exerts a palpable influence on the course of human action, such as Swift's Drapier's Letters, the speeches of Edmund Burke, or the autobiography of Wolfe Tone. The book closes with a moving and daring coda on the Anglo-Irish agreement, claiming that the seeds of such a settlement were sown in the works of Irish literature.A delight to read throughout, Irish Classics is a fitting tribute to the works it reads so well and inspires us to read, and read again.

Political failures and globalization have eroded Ireland's sovereignty-a decline portended in Irish literature. Surveying the bleak themes in thirty works by modern writers, Declan Kiberd finds audacious experimentation that embodies the defiance and resourcefulness of Ireland's founding spirit-and a strange kind of hope for a more open nation.

Ellmann''s sensitivity to what it meant to be an artist shaped his work from the outset: "The life of an artist ... differs from the lives of other persons in that its events are becoming artistic sources even as they command his present attention. Instead of allowing each day, pushed back by the next, to lapse into imprecise memory, he shapes again the experiences which have shaped him." Richard Ellmann died in 1987. His life and work have touched the lives of many. Some of the essays in this collection commemorate Richard Ellmann and his committment to Twentieth Century literature: most provide a continuing investigation of the Twentieth Century literature to which he devoted his carrer. Contributors include: Alison Armstrong, Daniel Albright, Christopher Butler, Carol Cantrell, Jonathan Culler, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Andonis Decavelles, Rupin Desai, Susan Dick, Terence Diggory, Terry Eagleton, Rosita Fanto, Charles Feidelson, James Flannery, Charles Huttar, Bruce Johnson, John Kelleher, Brendan Kennelly, Frank Kermode, Declan Kiberd, Peter Kuch, Bruce Johnson, James Laughlin, A. Walton Litz, Dominic Manganiello, Ellsworth Mason, Christie McDonald, Dougald McMillan, Sean O''Mordha, Vivian Mercier, Mary T. Reynolds, William K. Robertson, Joseph Ronsley, S.P. Rosenbaum, Ann Saddlemyer, Sylvan Schendler, Daniel Schneider, Fritz Senn, Jon Stallworthy, Lonnie Weatherby, Thomas Whitaker, and Elaine Yarosky.

Synge was the victim of a cruel paradox: those who loved his works knew no Irish and those who loved Irish despised his works. This book aims to show that Synge''s command of Irish was extensive and that this knowledge proved invaluable in the writing of his major plays.

Kiberd - one of Ireland's leading critics and a central figure in the FIELD DAY group with Brian Friel, Seamus Deane and the actor Stephen Rea - argues that the Irish Literary Revival of the 1890-1922 period embodied a spirit and a revolutionary, generous vision of Irishness that is still relevant to post-colonial Ireland. This is the perspective from which he views Irish culture. His history of Irish writing covers Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Heaney, Friel and younger writers down to Roddy Doyle.

Ireland is suffering a crisis of authority. Catholic Church scandals, political corruption, and economic collapse have shaken the Irish people''s faith in their institutions. The nation''s struggle for independence is thrown into doubt. But, as Declan Kiberd argues in this engaging survey of post-war Irish literature, the country''s creative writers have been alert to this reality from the start. He describes the young Samuel Beckett witnessing the burning of Dublin in 1916 and realising that ''the birth of a nation might also seal its doom.'' Surveying thirty works by modern Irish writers, Kiberd traces the response to the crisis of Irish Statehood in the work of Seamus Heaney, Edna O''Brien, Joseph O''Connor, Tom Murphy, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Derek Mahon and John Banville, among others. Placing these writers at the centre of Ireland''s on-going exploration of the true meaning of freedom, Kiberd shows how Irish artists preserve and extend a humane culture that imagines a renewed, more plural and open nation. Kiberd''s Inventing Ireland, originally published in 1995 is a dazzlingly ambitious critical history of modern Irish literature and the standard work on the Irish Literary Revival. In After Ireland, Kiberd responds to the next generation of Irish writers, in this second renaissance of Irish literature.

A teasing but affectionate study of the genius of the English people as seen from a postcolonial perspective – and of the game of cricket, which was one of their richest, strangest and most lasting gifts to the wider world.

To celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses, the most important literary work of the twentieth century, eighteen artists, writers and thinkers respond to an episode each of the great modernist text. Each essayist is an expert in one of the subjects treated in the novel, but what brings them together is a common love of Ulysses.Joseph O''Connor considers the music-saturated Sirens episode and David McWilliams writes about the bigotry and violence of nationalism on display in Cyclops. Irish obstetrician Rhona Mahony responds to Oxen and the Sun, set in a maternity hospital, journalist Lara Marlowe examines the Aeolus episode, which takes place in a newspaper office, and Irish philosopher Richard Kearney reflects on the erudite musings of Stephen Dedalus as he walks along Sandymount strand.The Book About Everything counters the perception of Ulysses as the sole preserve of academics and instead showcases readers'' responses to the book. It is a vivid, even eccentric collection, filled with life and Joycean spirit.