Irish Classics

by Kiberd, Declan

• ISBN13: 9780674010086
• ISBN10: 0674010086
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-10-30
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction	xi
Gaelic Ireland: Apocalypse Now?	1	(12)
Bardic Poetry: The Loss of Aura	13	(12)
Saving Civilization: Ceitinn and O Bruadair	25	(14)
Dying Acts: O Rathaille and Others	39	(16)
Endings and Beginnings: Mac Cuarta and After	55	(16)
Jonathan Swift: a Colonial Outsider?	71	(15)
Home and Away: Gulliver's Travels	86	(21)
Nostalgia as Protest: Goldsmith's `Deserted Village'	107	(17)
Radical Pastoral: Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer	124	(13)
Sheridan and Subversion	137	(24)
Eibhlin Dhubh Ni Chonaill: The Lament for Art O Laoghaire	161	(21)
Brian Merriman's Midnight Court	182	(21)
Burke, Ireland and Revolution	203	(18)
Republican Self-Fashioning: The Journal of Wolfe Tone	221	(22)
Native Informants: Maria Edgeworth and Castle Rackrent	243	(22)
Confronting Famine: Carleton's Peasantry	265	(22)
Feudalism Falling: A Drama in Muslin	287	(15)
Love Songs of Connacht	302	(23)
Anarchist Attitudes: Oscar Wilde	325	(15)
George Bernard Shaw: Arms and the Man	340	(20)
Somerville and Ross: The Silver Fox	360	(19)
Undead in the Nineties: Bram Stoker and Dracula	379	(20)
Augusta Gregory's Cuchulain: The Rebirth of the Hero	399	(21)
Synge's Tristes Tropiques: The Aran Islands	420	(20)
W.B. Yeats -- Building Amid Ruins	440	(23)
Ulysses, Newspapers and Modernism	463	(19)
After the Revolution: O'Casey and O'Flaherty	482	(18)
Gaelic Absurdism: At Swim-Two-Birds	500	(20)
The Blasket Autobiographies	520	(23)
Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice	543	(13)
Kate O'Brien: The Ante-Room	556	(18)
All the Dead Voices -- Cre Na Cille	574	(16)
Underdeveloped Comedy: Patrick Kavanagh	590	(12)
Anglo-Gaelic Literature: Sean O Riordain	602	(15)
Irish Narrative: A Short History	617	(16)
Notes	633	(56)
Index	689