Irish Literature in Transition – serie

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.

Irish Literature in Transition, 1980-2020 elucidates the central features of Irish literature during the twentieth century's long turn, covering its significant trends and formations, reassessing its major writers and texts, and providing path-making accounts of its emergent figures. Over the past forty years, life in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland has been transformed by new material conditions in each polity and by ideological shifts in the way people understand themselves and their relation to the world. Amid these remarkable changes, culture on both sides of the border has emerged as a global phenomenon, one that both reflects and intervenes in rapidly changing contemporary conditions. This volume accounts for broad patterns of literary and cultural production in this period and demonstrates the value of Irish contemporary literature within anglophone and European traditions and as a body of work that has kept its eye trained on the particularities of the island and its inhabitants.

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.

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.

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.