While the Irish Literary Revival began around 1885 and ended somewhere between 1925 and 1940, the Irish Renaissance has continued to the present day and shows no sign of abating. The period has produced some of the most important and influential figures in Irish literature, some of whom are counted among the world's greatest authors. The Revival saw a reestablishment of Ireland's literary connections with its Celtic heritage, and writers such as William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory drew heavily on the myths and legends of the past. James Joyce boldly reshaped the novel and wrote short fiction of enduring value. Contemporary Irish writers continue to be leading figures and include such authors as Brian Frigl, Seamus Heaney, and Eavan Boland. Included in this reference book are alphabetically arranged entries for more than 70 modern Irish writers, including Samuel Beckett, William Trevor, Patrick Kavanagh, Medbh McGuckian, Sean O'Casey, J. M. Synge, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. Entries are written by expert contributors and reflect a broad range of perspectives. Each entry contains a brief biography that summarizes the author's career, a discussion of major works and themes, an overview of the author's critical reception, and a bibliography of primary and secondary works. An introductory essay reviews the large and growing body of scholarship on modern Irish literature, while an extensive bibliography concludes the volume.

Silence in Modern Irish Literature is the first book to focus exclusively on the treatment of silence in modern Irish literature. It reveals the wide spectrum of meanings that silence carries in modern Irish literature: a mark of historical loss, a form of resistance to authority, a force of social oppression, a testimony to the unspeakable, an expression of desire, a style of contemplation. This volume addresses silence in psychological, ethical, topographical, spiritual and aesthetic terms in works by a range of major authors including Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Bowen and Friel.

Modern Irish Literature and the Primitive Sublime reveals the primitive sublime as an overlooked aspect of modern Irish literature as central to Ireland’s artistic production and the wider global cultural production of postcolonial literature. A concern for and anxiety about the primitive persists within modern Irish culture. The “otherness” within and beyond Ireland’s borders offers writers, from the Celtic Revival through independence and partition to post-9/11, a seductive call through which to negotiate Irish identity. Ultimately, the disquieting awe of the primitive sublime is not simply a momentary recognition of Ireland’s primitive indigenous history but a repeated rhetorical gesture that beckons a transcendent elation brought about by the recognition of the troubled, ritualistic and sacrificial Irish past to reveal a fundamental aspect of the capacity to negotiate identity, viewed through another but intimately reflective of the self, within the long emerging twentieth-century Irish nation.

This book sets out to expose through a combination of literary, cultural and historical analysis the fictive nature of Irish monoculturalism and to probe figurations of racial identity, racial difference, and foreignness in Irish culture.

The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature offers a fresh new look at the origins of literary modernism in Ireland. Beginning with the archives of the Ordnance Survey, which mapped Ireland between 1824 and 1846, the book argues that the roots of Irish modernism lie in the attempt by the Survey to produce a comprehensive archive of a land emerging rapidly into modernity. Drawing on literary theory, studies of space, the history of cartography andIrish Studies, the book paints a picture of Irish writing deeply engaged in the representation of the multi-layered landscape, and will appeal to students of Irish literature, modernism, Irish history, mapshistory, and theories of space and place.

Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature offers the first book-length treatment of the literary return to and reinterpretation of Giraldus Cambrensis's twelfth century The History of the Conquest of Ireland. Writers studied include W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, James Joyce, Sean O'Faoláin, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Brendan Behan and Jamie O'Neill.

This innovative study analyzes the range of representation of farming in Irish literature in the period since independence/partition in 1922, as Ireland moved from a largely agricultural to a developed urban society. In many different forms including poetry, drama, fiction, and autobiography, writers have made literary capital by looking back at their rural backgrounds, even where those may be a generation back. The first five chapters examine some of the key themes: the impact of inheritance on family in the patriarchal system where there could only be one male heir; the struggles for survival in the poorest regions of the West of Ireland; the uses of childhood farming memories whether idyllic or traumatic; and the representation of communities, challenging the homogeneous idealizing images of the Literary Revival; the impact of modernization on successive generations into the twenty-first century. The final three chapters are devoted to three major writers in whose work farming is central: Patrick Kavanagh, the small farmer who had to find an individual voice to express his own unique experience; John McGahern in whose fiction the life of the farm is always posited as alternative to a rootless urban milieu; and Seamus Heaney who re-imagined his farming childhood in so many different modes throughout his career. Farming in Modern Irish Literature yields original insights into the literary iconography of rural Ireland and its interplay with social and cultural history, opening up fresh vistas on the achievements of Irish writers in different genres, styles, and historical eras.

This is the second of four collections of essays intended to be published under the general title Studies in Contemporary Irish Literature (only two were) which are devoted to critical analysis of Irish writing since the 1950s.

This book is about the role that the imperfect, the disquieting and the dystopian are currently playing in the construction of Irish identities. All the essays assess identity issues that require urgent examination, problematize canonical definitions of Irishness and, above all, look at the ways in which the artistic output of the country has been altered by the Celtic Tiger phenomenon and its subsequent demise. Recent narrative from Ireland, principally published in the twenty-first century and/or at the end of the 1990s, is dealt with extensively. The authors examined include Eavan Boland, Mary Rose Callaghan, Peter Cunningham, Emma Donoghue, Anne Enright, Emer Martin, Lia Mills, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Bernard O’Donoghue, Peter Sirr and David Wheatley.

Irish literature's roots have been traced to the 7th-9th century. This is a rich and hardy literature starting with descriptions of the brave deeds of kings, saints and other heroes. These were followed by generous veins of religious, historical, genealogical, scientific and other works. The development of prose, poetry and drama raced along with the times. Modern, well-known Irish writers include: William Yeats, James Joyce, Sean Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, John Synge and Samuel Beckett.