Inventing Ireland

Description

INVENTING IRELAND is the most ambitious critical history of modernIrish literature to have been published for many years. DeclanKiberd argues that the Irish literary revival of the 1890-1922period embodied a spirit and a revolutionary, generous vision ofIrishness that is still relevant to post-colonial Ireland. Hedevelops his story through subtle and surprising readings of LadyGregory, Synge, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, ElizabethBowen, Heaney, Friel and younger writers to Roddy Doyle.

Description

Just as Ireland has produced many brilliant writers in the past century, so these writers have produced a new Ireland. In a book unprecedented in its scope and approach, Declan Kiberd offers a vivid account of the personalities and texts, English and Irish alike, that reinvented the country after centuries of colonialism. The result is a major literary history of modern Ireland, combining detailed and daring interpretations of literary masterpieces with assessments of the wider role of language, sport, clothing, politics, and philosophy in the Irish revival. Inventing Ireland restores to the Irish past a sense of openness that it once had and that has since been obscured by narrow-gauge nationalists and their polemical revisionist critics. In closing, Kiberd outlines an agenda for Irish studies in the next century and detects the signs of a second renaissance in the work of a new generation of authors and playwrights, from Brian Friel to the younger Dublin writers.

Subjects

Series Statement

• Convergences
• Convergences (Cambridge, Mass.)

Other Editions

• Inventing IrelandHarvard University Press1996-01-01
• Inventing IrelandJonathan Cape1995-01-01
• INVENTING IRELAND.Jonathan Cape1995-01-01
• Inventing IrelandJonathan Cape1995-01-01
• Inventing IrelandeBookRandom House Publishing Group2009-01-01