The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism

by Terence Brown

• ISBN13: 9780521118231
• ISBN10: 0521118239
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Terence Brown is Fellow Emeritus and former Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, Dublin.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
The Literary Revival: historical perspectives	p. 14
Joyce's magic lantern	p. 27
Music: the cultural issue	p. 36
Modernism and revolution: rereading Yeats's 'Easter 1916'	p. 45
Shakespeare and the Irish self	p. 61
Irish literature and the Great War	p. 75
Ireland, Modernism and the 1930s	p. 88
Post-modernists: Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien	p. 104
Patrick Kavanagh: religious poet	p. 122
MacNeice's Irelands: MacNeice's islands	p. 131
Louis MacNeice and the Second World War	p. 142
MacNeice and the puritan tradition	p. 156
John Hewitt and memory: a reflection	p. 170
Michael Longley and the Irish poetic tradition	p. 178
Seamus Heaney: the witnessing eye and the speaking tongue	p. 190
Derek Mahon: the poet and painting	p. 199
Telling tales: Kennelly's Cromwell and Muldoon's 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants'	p. 210
Redeeming the time: John McGahern and John Banville	p. 225
'Have we a context?': transition, self and society in the theatre of Brian Friel	p. 239
Hubert Butler and nationalism	p. 252
The Irish Dylan Thomas: versions and influences	p. 260
Index	p. 273
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