The Irish Literature

What is Irish Literature? It is literature written either in Gaelic or in English by writers of Irish birth who remain identified with Irish life and culture. The work of those Irish-born writers who are closely identified with English life and literature - such as Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, etc. – is shortly represented below.

19-th century literature

From about the middle to the end of the 19th century, the work of patriotic and lyric poets dominated Irish poetry written in English. Seriocomic novels, often caricaturing Irish life and character, were also a popular form of 19th-century Irish literature.

Patriotic and Lyric Poetry

To the patriots, the need to arouse the Irish people to a sense of nationalism was stronger than the impulse to write poetry distinguished for its formal or aesthetic perfection. The work of these poets was characterized by flamboyant diction and fiery emotion and was important for its political effect.

20th-Century Literature

The Irish literary revival extended far into the 20th century. By 1940 the excitement generated in the earlier years had largely subsided, but many writers continued to produce distinguished works. Thinking of this century’s literature without the Irish is like dreaming of the ocean without whales. What would short stories be like without the example of Joyce’s “Dubliners” or the novel without his “Ulysses”? What would poetry be like without Yeats? Or the theater minus Synge, O’Casey, Shaw or Beckett? It is still astonishing, a half century after the Irish Renaissance, that the whole hardnosed course of modernist writing took its cues from such a small country. More astonishing, it looks as if it could happen all over again.

Without doubt, Irish writing is the best that’s currently being done by any one country’s authors. Even as violence has seethed in Northern Ireland, a new wave of Irish writers has arisen, transforming not only Irish literature, but Ireland’s sense of itself. This second renaissance is part of a larger explosion of Celtic culture, which includes everything from music (the rock bands U2, Cranberries, Simple Minds, etc., the traditional but chart-topping Chieftains) to dance (Riverdance, Lord of The Dance, the smash-hit revenue built around traditional Irish dancing).

In the 1980s the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney attracted international attention. His passion for words and vivid imagery that reflect the tragic conflicts of the Irish experience is evinced in his Poems: 1965-1975 (1980), and in the longer verse cycles Sweeney Astray (1983), a version of an early medieval Gaelic work. Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978 (1980) contains Heaney's sensitive literary criticism and other essays.

Ireland’s literary lions are led by:

Ranging from the 17th-century satires of Jonathan Swift to the contemporary novels of Roddy Doyle, The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction is a comprehensive representation of Irish fiction in English, edited and extensively introduced by the acclaimed author and journalist Colm Toíbín. This massive anthology collects in one volume the work of almost 100 writers, including the full text of seminal works such as Gulliver in Lilliput, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, James Joyce's "The Dead," and Samuel Beckett's "First Love. Thanks to books such as Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and Roddy Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy, interest in all things Irish -- and Irish literature in particular -- has never been greater. Barnes & Noble.com is pleased to honor the Emerald Isle with a collection of recently published novels by Irish and Irish-American authors, from Maeve Brennan's posthumous masterpiece to F. X. Toole's hard-boiled tales about the gritty underworld of professional boxing.