Irish literature

Irish literature, the body of written works produced by the Irish. This article
discusses Irish literature written in English from about 1690; its history is
closely linked with that of English literature. Irish-language literature is treated
separately under Celtic literature.
The hybridity of Irish literature in English
After the literatures of Greek and Latin, literature in Irish is the oldest literature
in Europe, dating from the 4th or 5th century CE. The presence of a “dual
tradition” in Irish writing has been important in shaping and inflecting the
material written in English, the language of Ireland’s colonizers. Irish writing is,
despite its unique national and linguistic characteristics, inevitably intertwined
with English literature, and this relationship has led frequently to the
absorption of Irish writers and texts into the canon of English literature. Many
of the best-known Irish authors lived and worked for long periods in exile, often
in England, and this too has contributed to a sense of instability in the
development of a canon defined as uniquely Irish. Key Irish writers, from
Edmund Burke and Jonathan Swift to Oliver Goldsmith, Maria
Edgeworth, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw, were traditionally
considered English (or British) authors. But during the 20th century—
particularly after the partition and partial independence of Ireland in 1920–22
—scholars reclaimed these writers and their works for Ireland. This shift can be
seen in the changing use of the term Anglo-Irish literature, which at one time
referred to the whole body of Irish writing in English but is now used to describe
literature produced by, and usually about, members of the Anglo-Irish
Protestant Ascendancy of the 18th century.

Ireland’s history of conquest and colonization, of famine and mass emigration,

and of resistance, rebellion, and civil war etched its literature with a series of
ruptures and revivals. Since the 17th century, Irish society has also
simultaneously been a colonial one and an independent, national one. That
hybridity has been the source of endless cultural tension in Irish writing, which
has repeatedly coalesced around four issues: land, religion, nationality, and
language.

The defeat of Hugh O’Neill, 2nd earl of Tyrone, at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601
marked the start of the gradual, century-long collapse of Gaelic civilization as
the dominant mode of Irish existence. It also marked the acceleration of a long
process of Protestant British colonization that would dramatically transform the
land, the language, and the religion of Ireland. Out of the profound cultural
trauma engendered by this process, “Anglo-Irish” writing emerged.
The 18th century
As the shifting meaning of the term Anglo-Irish literature during the 20th
century demonstrates, there is disagreement about how to characterize 18th-
century Irish writing in English. There is little disagreement, however, about
the dichotomous nature of Irish society at that time. The country was dominated
by the Protestant and English-speaking minority, which had triumphed over
Roman Catholic Ireland at the Battles of the Boyne (1690) and Aughrim (1691)
after the Glorious Revolution; the Protestant population’s control over the
country was later referred to as the Protestant Ascendancy. The legacy of the
political settlement in Ireland that followed the defeat at Aughrim thus had a
strongly sectarian and colonial cast that, when coupled with the grim Irish
realities of conflict and poverty, would later trouble the writings of Edmund
Burke. Whig writers such as Burke and Jonathan Swift, who considered the
Glorious Revolution a triumph of liberty, also stumbled over the long-standing
unequal relationship between the kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain.
Protestant patriots rejected the notion that Ireland was either a dependant
kingdom or a colony, but the statute book, the economic and political
restrictions placed on Ireland by the British government at London, and the
planting of English placemen in Irish jobs instructed them otherwise. In The
Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), Swift asked:

Were not the people of Ireland born as free as those of England? How have they
forfeited their Freedom? Is not their Parliament as fair a Representative of
the People, as that of England? And hath not their Privy Council as great, or a
greater Share in the Administration of publick Affairs? Are they not Subjects of the
same King? Does not the same Sun shine over them? And have they not the
same God for their Protector? Am I a Free-man in England, and do I become
a Slave in six Hours, by crossing the Channel?
By “the people of Ireland,” of course, he meant English Protestants living in
Ireland, and therein lies the paradox at the root of the Anglo-Irish condition.
Dual allegiance was first and foremost a political problem, but that problem also
worked itself out in shifting and ambiguous senses of cultural (or national)
identities and in writing.

The Irishness of Anglo-Irish literature

Swift demonstrated no interest in the “barbarous” Irish language and, unlike

Burke, no sympathy for poor Irish Roman Catholics. Swift’s views were an
expression of his own bifurcated vision of Irish writing. According to such a
view, 18th-century Ireland produced two distinct literatures that never touched
or intersected: one in English, the language of print, and another in Irish,
mainly in manuscript. Thus conceptualized, the first—what is best called Anglo-
Irish literature—can scarcely be separated from the wider English tradition. If,
as English critic Samuel Johnson remarked, the noblest prospect that a
Scotsman ever sees is the high road to England, for many an ambitious Anglo-
Irish writer—including the Shakespeare scholar and editor Edmund Malone,
one of Johnson’s friends in London—that prospect was the boat to Holyhead,
the Welsh port that served as the chief entry point for travelers to the British
mainland from Ireland. Burke, George Farquhar, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard
Brinsley Sheridan, and many others left Ireland and made their careers in
England. After 1714 Swift wanted to leave Ireland but could not, given the
political changes in England that had led to his Irish exile. He likened his
condition in Dublin to that of a “poisoned rat in a hole.” London exerted an
almost irresistible force as a literary and theatrical market. Anglo-
Irish drama and novels were written mostly with an English audience in view; in
terms of content, there is often nothing specifically Irish about, for example, the
plays and novels of Henry Brooke or the essays and poetry of Goldsmith.

Yet Ireland was not absent from Anglo-Irish writing. Indeed, there is a good
deal of Irish content in the drama and poetry. “Irish” plays were among the
most popular and most often performed of the 18th century. They
include Ireland Preserv’d; or, The Siege of Londonderry (1705) by John
Mitchelburne (Michelborne); its companion piece, Robert Ashton’s The Battle
of Aughrim (1728), of which as many as 25 editions were published between
1770 and 1840; and the better-known True-Born Irishman (1763) by Charles
Macklin. The first two—vividly recorded by William Carleton as part
of Ulster popular culture well into the 19th century—underlined the narrowly
Protestant character of the post-Aughrim political settlement in Ireland,
although The Battle of Aughrim appealed to Catholics as well for its portrayal of
the Jacobite hero Patrick Sarsfield. More mundanely, the hero of Macklin’s play
is a resident landlord, a personification of the sort of practical patriotism
promoted by the Royal Dublin Society (founded 1731) and articulated by a
substantial pamphlet literature stretching from Swift’s A Proposal for the
Universal Use of Irish Manufactures (1720) to Samuel Madden’s Reflections
and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland (1738) and including
Viscount Molesworth’s Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture
and Employing the Poor (1723), Thomas Prior’s best-selling A List of the
Absentees of Ireland (1729), Arthur Dobbs’s An Essay on the Trade and
Improvement of Ireland (1729–31), and George Berkeley’s The Querist (1735–
37).

A second Irish dimension in Anglo-Irish literature of the period may be detected

in the cross-fertilizations of language. At their most basic level, these cross-
fertilizations produced Hiberno-English—the “barbarous denominations” of the
Irish brogue, as Swift had it, from which an Englishman expected nothing but
“bulls, blunders, and follies.” Hiberno-English was usually deployed as a highly
self-conscious comic device, and stage Irishmen, such as Sir Callaghan
O’Brallaghan in Macklin’s Love à la Mode (1759) and Sir Lucius O’Trigger in
Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), delighted 18th-century audiences, including Irish
ones. Yet the Irish priest Foigard—another comic character, in Farquhar’s The
Beaux’ Stratagem (1707)—represents a reminder of the darker side of linguistic
politics when he is warned that “your tongue will condemn you before any
bench in the kingdom.”

At a more subtle level, close scrutiny of Irish verse in English reveals that the
languages did not so much coexist across a yawning divide as cohabit in
an intimate, mutually enriching relationship. The impact of linguistic proximity
is discernible not only in the conscription into poetry of “nonstandard” local
vocabulary but in the infiltration of traditional Irish metrics as well. A third
“language” in which verse was composed further complicates the binary
opposition of English and Irish: the Ulster-Scots dialect. A regional variant of
the Lowlands Scottish (Lallans) used by Scottish poet Robert Burns, Ulster-
Scots invigorates the vernacular verse of the “weaver poets,” such as Samuel
Thomson and James Orr, who were writing in the late 18th century.

The influences of and borrowings from the Irish language and, more broadly,
from Gaelic culture were largely unselfconscious. The last three decades of the
18th century, however, did witness a self-aware Gaelic revival. This revival had
its origins, at least in part, in Scotland and Wales. The Scottish poet James
Macpherson’s “translations” from the Gaelic tradition, especially
his Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763), were in large part—as Samuel Johnson
and as the Irish scholar, antiquarian, and activist Charles O’Conor charged—
invented, but that did not retard their popularity. These Ossianic poems in fact
may be seen as the foundational texts for a new movement to reclaim an ancient
Celtic civilization. In Ireland this movement was represented by the antiquarian
researches of O’Conor (a Catholic), Charles Vallancey (an English-born
Protestant), and others, by Joseph Cooper Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the
Irish Bards (1786), and by the influential Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) of
Charlotte Brooke, the daughter of Henry Brooke. Her collections and
translations from oral tradition mark both an emerging vogue for the
“primitive” and a developing Irish Protestant engagement with “native” Irish
heritage, which Swift could not have imagined, let alone foreseen. The year 1789
also saw the publication of Denis Woulfe’s translation into English
of Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an mheán oíche (The Midnight Court), the
outstanding long poem of the 18th century in the Irish language.

A third way in which the Irishness of Anglo-Irish literature registers itself is at

once the most difficult to pin down and the most important: style. Swift shared a
common language with his English friends Alexander Pope and Viscount
Bolingbroke, but, in the words of 20th-century Irish nationalist writer Daniel
Corkery, “the Ascendancy mind is not the same thing as the English mind.” Nor
was the Ascendancy experience the same thing as the English experience.
English writers inhabited a world that—despite the bitter partisanship of the
era, the succession controversy after Queen Anne’s death in 1714, and the
persistent Jacobite threat—showed a degree of political security
and continuity that was largely unfamiliar to Anglo-Irish writers. The Anglo-
Irish were keenly aware of the precariousness of their position as a ruling elite
and the anomalies and inequities of their relationship with the “mother
country.” This last circumstance in particular gave rise to a condition that can be
described as cultural dislocation. Just as the split personality embodied
by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is sometimes read as
symbolic of the Scottish predicament, it is in the predicament of the Anglo-Irish,
caught uneasily between two civilizations and feeling out of place in both, that
its characteristic voice—ironic, detached, nostalgic, often Gothic—is to be heard.

From Swift to Burke

The Anglo-Irish style rises to its best, clearest, and most powerful expression in
the works of Swift, Goldsmith, Sheridan, and Burke. As the 20th-century Irish
poet, novelist, and critic Seamus Deane observed, “Anglo-Irish writing does not
begin with Swift, but Anglo-Irish literature does.” And where Swift begins, he
adds, with Burke “the formation of the Anglo-Irish cultural and literary identity
reaches completion.” All of these writers moved in the sphere of English letters
and—with the exception of Goldsmith—politics, and to that extent they were
insiders. All were born in Ireland, and in that respect they were outsiders. (It
must not be forgotten that the English journalist John Wilkes once said of
Burke, today considered a giant of English political thought, that his oratory
“stank of whiskey and potatoes,” a curt dismissal that lays bare Burke’s status as
an outsider.) Indeed, Anglo-Irish writers were doubly outsiders, given their
minority status within Ireland’s largely Catholic population. Their unique
position within both English and Irish society nurtured a doubleness in their
language, which was manifested in the finely honed sense of irony evident in
Swift’s savage satires and in the glittering verbal dexterity of Sheridan’s The
School for Scandal (1777).

Irony is also a distancing technique, and critical distance, or detachment, shapes

works as various as Francis Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of Our
Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725); Swift’s satirical A Modest Proposal (1729),
which in a matter-of-fact tone recommends the eating of Irish infants as a
remedy for famine; and Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World; or, Letters from
a Chinese Philosopher (1762). Goldsmith can see the English, the subject of
his Letters, in ways that the English cannot; he is able to use his sense of
cultural dislocation to achieve detachment from his subject. Similarly,
Goldsmith’s status as an exile heightens his expressions of nostalgia in his long
poem The Deserted Village (1770). The poem elegiacally describes the
depopulation—caused by emigration—suffered by the village of Auburn, and it
condemns the atmosphere that has replaced the pastoral good health of the
past: the village has become a place “where wealth accumulates, and men
decay.”

A sense of nostalgia—for a traditional world lost or for an ideal world gone

wrong—also gives a sometimes tragic note to Swift’s indignation and suffuses
Burke’s complex literary output. A politician for most of his career, Burke
entered public life after having written two philosophical books, A Vindication
of Natural Society (1756) and A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). These proto-
Romantic treatises privilege the natural and the authentic over the artificial, and
they prefigure Burke’s defense of the integrity of native and
traditional culture in India during the impeachment proceedings he initiated in
1786 against Warren Hastings, governor-general of India. Ireland too had an
ancient civilization, and it is Burke’s acute sensitivity to this fact—perhaps
nurtured by his mother and by his wife, both Roman Catholics—that explains
this Irish Protestant’s unrelenting hostility to a parvenu Protestant Ascendancy.

Burke’s writings on Ireland are concerned mainly with alleviating the lot of the

Catholics. He denounced what he saw as injustice, corruption, and misrule, but
he diagnosed these as essentially local phenomena. He despised the Ascendancy
but venerated the British connection. These were positions that, perhaps, could
not be reconciled. Certainly many of Burke’s countrymen came to think so in the
revolutionary 1790s, when the Society of United Irishmen, an Irish political
organization, linked the demand for political justice with the aspiration to an
independent Irish republic.
Political pamphleteering and political satire kept the Irish presses busy in the
last decades of the 18th century. Of these works, which were
often ephemeral and of mixed literary quality, two stand out. Wolfe Tone’s An
Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (1791) not only persuaded its
target audience, Belfast Presbyterians, to support the repeal of the anti-
Catholic Penal Laws—something for which Burke had long argued—but did so
with verve and wit. James Porter’s Billy Bluff and Squire Firebrand (1796) is a
funny, blistering assault on the Ascendancy that first appeared as a series of
letters in The Northern Star, the newspaper of the United Irishmen. It may not
attain Swiftian flight, but it did bite deeply enough to send the author to the
scaffold. Tone’s own journals and memoir, published posthumously in 1826,
also retain the immediacy of their original composition; they have a lightness of
touch and an air of self-deprecation that has earned them a well-deserved place
not merely in Irish literary history but among prominent memoirs of the 18th
century.
The 19th century
In Belfast in 1792 there was an unprecedented gathering of Irish harpers, the
aim of which, as it was described in a circular of the time, was to revive “the
Ancient Music and Poetry of Ireland.” Musician and folk-song collector Edward
Bunting transcribed the music played at the festival and published A General
Collection of Ancient Irish Music in 1796, which was followed, in 1809 and
1840, by two expanded editions. Where Charlotte Brooke had made available to
English-reading audiences the cadences of Irish poetry, Bunting’s collections of
traditional Irish airs provided a musical accompaniment.

The writer who, more than any other, took up the challenge of writing new
“national” lyrics to Bunting’s music was Thomas Moore, who published 10
separate numbers of his Irish Melodies between 1807 and 1834. These hugely
popular drawing-room songs (including “Let Erin Remember the Days of Old,”
“Dear Harp of My Country,” and “Oft in the Stilly Night”) reinvented for
audiences across Ireland and Great Britain a form of romantic Celticism that,
though nationalist in flavour, was nonetheless politically superficial. Moore’s
lyrics are sentimental and do not stand well when separated from the music to
which they were written, but the cultural impact of the Irish Melodies was
enormous. Later commentators, however, disdained them. James Hardiman—
the editor of Irish Minstrelsy (1831), a collection of bardic poetry—called them
“vulgar ballads,” and English essayist William Hazlitt accused Moore of having
converted “the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuff-box.” Moore was made a
best-selling poet by Lalla Rookh (1817), a long allegorical poem in which an
Eastern princess traveling accompanied by a poet—her husband-to-be in
disguise—hears tales of insurrection and passion. His historical novel The
Memoirs of Captain Rock, the Celebrated Irish Chieftain (1824) also enjoyed
wide popular appeal.

Ferguson, Owenson, and Edgeworth

Samuel Ferguson was an Ulster Protestant, unionist, and cultural nationalist
whose poetry and prose, as well as antiquarian work, provided foundational
texts for the Gaelic revival of the 1830s and also, crucially, for a subsequent
revival, the Irish literary renaissance, that began in the last decades of the 19th
century. In 1833 he wrote “A Dialogue Between the Head and Heart of an Irish
Protestant.” Having published widely in Blackwood’s and The Dublin
University Magazine throughout the 1830s and the famine years of the 1840s
(during which he condemned British policies in Ireland), Ferguson produced in
1858 the prose burlesque Father Tom and the Pope; or, A Night in the Vatican.
In 1865 he published Lays of the Western Gael, a collection of poems on Irish
themes. His roiling, gutsy, and poetic version of the Ulster epic Congal appeared
in 1872. Significantly, much of his work was republished or collected for the first
time after his death, and his posthumous reputation coincided forcefully with
the Irish literary renaissance. One of the primary figures of the renaissance, the
poet William Butler Yeats, described him in 1886 as

one who, among the somewhat sybaritic singers of his day, was like some aged sea-
king sitting among inland wheat and poppies—the savour of the sea about him, and
its strength.
One of Moore’s best-known Irish literary contemporaries was his friend the
novelist Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan. She too wrote songs, and she
published Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies in 1805. But it was
her romantic novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) that made her a household name.
This partly epistolary novel, set in Ireland, concerns the romance between
Horatio, a young Englishman, and Glorvina, whose father’s Irish estate has been
destroyed by Horatio’s father. Owenson was also one of the earliest exponents of
the Romantic Irish national tale. Her novels present exuberant and independent
heroines in rambling—but always colourful—plots, copiously footnoted with
antiquarian and historical insights. She expounded a vigorous
Irish nationalism and was a vocal supporter of Catholic Emancipation in
Ireland, promised at the time of union in 1800 but not granted until 1829.
Owenson’s politics and her perceived religious apostasy opened her to
numerous attacks in the English press, and she was loathed by the English Tory
establishment and especially by the politician and critic John Wilson Croker.
Her travel narratives France (1817) and Italy (1821) made her a literary
phenomenon on the Continent. Other novels include The
Missionary (1811), Florence Macarthy: An Irish
Tale (1818), Absenteeism (1825), and The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827).

A very different kind of novelist was the reform-minded Maria Edgeworth.

Much of Edgeworth’s early work was educational in focus, completed under the
supervision and influence of her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Her Letters
for Literary Ladies (1795), The Parent’s Assistant (1796), and Practical
Education (1798) reflected the liberal educational theories of her father. These
theories, ultimately derived from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, argued that children’s memories should be cultivated by “well-
arranged associations” rather than by rote. Edgeworth’s short novel Castle
Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale (1800), published anonymously the same year
that the Act of Union was approved, was an immediate popular success.
Narrated by the Roman Catholic family retainer Thady Quirk, who somewhat
resembles contemporary stage Irishmen, Castle Rackrent is an ironic treatment
of the life of an Anglo-Irish estate in times of political turbulence. The novel was
innovative in its use of dialect and locale and in featuring Irish Catholics as
central to the narrative. Considered the first regional novel in the British Isles, it
was enormously influential, particularly on the work of Sir Walter Scott, the
Scottish pioneer of the national historical novel. To Scott, Edgeworth was “the
great Maria,” and he began Waverley (1814) under the influence of Castle
Rackrent. Her other novels and books of stories
include Belinda (1801), Leonora (1806), Tales of Fashionable Life (first series
1809; second series, including The Absentee,
1812), Harrington and Ormond (published together in 1817),
and Orlandino (1848), her last novel.

Roman Catholic writers

Castle Rackrent anticipated the rise of an Irish Catholic bourgeoisie, and the
first half of the 19th century witnessed the emergence of an increasingly
confident Catholic voice among Irish writers. Brothers John and Michael
Banim, who sometimes published jointly under the pseudonym “the O’Hara
Brothers,” produced a series of novels and tales often historical and always
politically pessimistic, as are John’s The Boyne Water (1826), set in Ulster
during the Jacobite war of 1688–91, and Michael’s vivid The Croppy (1828), set
during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. But the Banims were also intent on telling
contemporary stories of the Catholic Irish peasantry that were infused with a
strong element of superstition and sentimentality. These tales, including
Michael’s Crohoore of the Bill-Hook (1825) and John’s The Fetches (1825)
and The Nowlans (1826), were published together as Tales by the O’Hara
Family (two series, 1825 and 1826). John Banim’s important last novel,
published on the eve of Catholic Emancipation, was The Anglo-Irish of the
Nineteenth Century (1828).

Another important Catholic novelist of the period was John Banim’s

associate Gerald Griffin, who was born just after the union and died a few years
before the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. His novel The Collegians (1829) is
one of the best-loved Irish national tales of the early 19th century. Based on a
true story, it involves a dashing young Anglo-Irish landowner, Hardress Cregan,
who elopes with a beautiful young Catholic peasant girl, Eily O’Connor. With the
help of his crippled servant, he later murders her in order to marry a woman of
his own class. The novel gained renewed fame when the Irish-born American
playwright Dion Boucicault wrote a hugely popular dramatization of it, The
Colleen Bawn (1860).

The title of Boucicault’s play drew on that of a novel, Willy Reilly and His Dear
Colleen Bawn (1855), in which the central plot of The Collegians is inverted: a
young Catholic gentleman falls in love and elopes with an Anglo-Irish woman.
Its author, William Carleton, though born among the Irish-speaking Catholic
peasantry of County Tyrone, first attracted notice while writing for the strongly
anti-Catholic magazine The Christian Examiner; he eventually converted to
Protestantism and argued against Catholic Emancipation. His five volumes
of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830–33) are vibrant descriptions
of the lives and traditions of the rural Irish, and more than 50 editions were
published before Carleton’s death in 1869. At the time he wrote the tales,
Carleton had found his subjects “a class unknown in Irish literature, unknown
by their own landlords, and unknown by those in whose hands much of their
destiny was placed.” As he wrote, he therefore “became the historian of their
habits and manners, their feelings, their prejudices, their superstitions and their
crimes.” Carleton’s haunting novel The Black Prophet (1847) was based on the
Irish famines of 1817 and 1822; its publication in the midst of the Great Potato
Famine gave it obvious contemporary relevance. Though Carleton’s political
positions and sympathies were inconsistent, his work retains an honesty of
delineation. Yeats called him
a great Irish historian. The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battle-fields,
but in what the people say to each other on fair-days and on high days, and in how
they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage. These things has Carleton recorded.

Irish nationalism and the Great Potato

Famine
In step with developments elsewhere in Europe, Ireland in the mid-19th century
saw renewed expressions of nationalism. These, however, coincided with the
greatest catastrophe experienced by the Irish people: the Great Potato Famine,
or An Gorta Mór (“The Great Hunger”), of 1845–49.

The nationalist Young Ireland movement coalesced around a newspaper, The

Nation, which began publication in 1842 and provided the growing movement
for the repeal of the Act of Union with a vital cultural and political outlet.
Among its founders were the young Roman Catholic journalist Charles Gavan
Duffy and Thomas Osborne Davis, a Protestant and a graduate of Trinity
College, Dublin. The Nation published nationalist ballads (including Davis’s “A
Nation Once Again,” which remained a nationalist staple through the turn of the
21st century), debated the political issues of the day, and revived popular
interest in Irish history and antiquarianism and in the Irish language. As Davis
wrote: “A nation without a language of its own [is] only half a nation.… To lose
your native tongue, and learn that of an alien, is the worst badge of conquest.”
The best of the poems published in the newspaper were collected in The Spirit
of the Nation (1843).

The most accomplished poet to publish in The Nation was James Clarence

Mangan. Much of Mangan’s work consisted of translations or of versions of
poems that had appeared in other languages—German, Irish, French, Coptic—
but he engaged with contemporary issues, in particular with the famine, in a
melodramatic, intense, and often morbid style. He lived and died in great
poverty. Among his more-noteworthy poems are a version of the Irish song
“Róisín dubh”—“Dark Rosaleen”—and “Siberia,” an allegorical famine
poem. James Joyce, the greatest Irish novelist of the 20th century, considered
Mangan “the most significant poet of the modern Celtic world.”

The Young Ireland movement was both energized and divided by the famine of
the 1840s. Two writers in particular engaged in the period’s debate about
Ireland’s future and Britain’s policies during the famine: John Mitchel and
James Fintan Lalor. Mitchel became an editor of The Nation in 1845, but over
the next three years he grew increasingly disillusioned with the idea of legal
and constitutional agitation for change in Ireland. In 1848 he split from The
Nation and founded the incendiary newspaper The United Irishman. He was
accused of sedition and arrested and tried under the Treason Felony Act of
1848. A “packed” jury convicted him, and he was sentenced (as were other
Young Irelanders) to time in Britain’s penal colonies. Mitchel’s Jail
Journal (1854) remains one of the great prose classics of Irish writing, and his
trenchant critiques of the British Empire and of British policy in Ireland during
the famine became foundational texts for the later Irish republican
movement. Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916,
praised the Jail Journal as “the last Gospel of the New Testament of Irish
nationality, as Wolfe Tone’s Autobiography is the first.” Lalor was less of a
public figure than Mitchel, though Lalor’s ideas strongly influenced the younger
man. In an important series of articles published in The Nation, Lalor sought to
toughen the rhetoric of Irish nationalism, particularly as it intersected with the
campaign for land reform. He called for “the soil of Ireland for the people of
Ireland,” and his stirring rhetoric advocated boycotts, rent strikes, and armed
rebellion to achieve it.

If the abortive Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 was a military failure, its energy
and the ways in which its intellectuals had altered the nature of the debate over
Ireland’s future did not disappear. In 1858 the secret Irish Republican
Brotherhood was founded, with an American counterpart, the Fenian
Brotherhood, appearing simultaneously. The Fenian leader and novelist Charles
Kickham, a Roman Catholic who had taken part in the Young Ireland rising of
1848, was a kind of Irish republican counterpart to English novelist Charles
Dickens. Immensely popular in both Ireland and the United States, Kickham’s
novels Sally Kavanagh; or, The Untenanted Graves (1869) and Knocknagow;
or, The Homes of Tipperary (1879) were initially serialized in newspapers.
Sentimental and didactic, Kickham’s fiction was the literary embodiment of the
Fenianism that, through the latter half of the 19th century, played a vital role in
building Irish nationalism as a political force.
The decline of the Protestant Ascendancy
While Roman Catholic and nationalist voices proliferated, the 19th century saw
a concomitant decline in the position of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy,
and this produced a literature characterized by class anxiety and loss. Among
this literature’s most enduring genres are the so-called Big House novel—not
least in its later humorous vein, as in the works of Somerville and Ross (Edith
Somerville and Martin Ross, the latter a pseudonym of Violet Florence Martin)
—and the much darker Gothic novel. The latter achieved its highest form in the
hands of three Anglo-Irish writers: Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Robert Maturin,
and Bram Stoker. Le Fanu, one of the most popular Victorian writers in both
Ireland and England, is often called the father of the modern ghost story. He
was a journalist—at various times in his career he owned or part-owned half a
dozen newspapers and magazines—whose politics were implacably unionist,
and his fiction invariably occupies a haunted, unstable, ruinous, and guilt-
ridden landscape. His 14 novels and numerous stories include, most
importantly, Uncle Silas (1864) and “Carmilla” (1872), the latter a lesbian-
inflected vampire story; both were influential precursors to
Stoker’s Dracula. Elizabeth Bowen, herself an author of Big House novels, saw a
connection between her novels and Le Fanu’s:

The hermetic solitude and the autocracy of the great country house, the demonic
power of the family myth, fatalism, feudalism and the “ascendancy” outlook are
accepted facts of life for the race of hybrids from which Le Fanu sprang.
Maturin, a Church of Ireland clergyman whose relatively short career was tinged
with clear anti-Catholic prejudice, published The Wild Irish Boy (1808) in
response to Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl. Unlike Owenson’s feisty heroines,
however, the heroes of Maturin’s stories are invariably ruined by some kind of
demonic crime. In the preface to The Milesian Chief (1812), Maturin
acknowledged that

If I possess any talent, it is of darkening the gloomy, and deepening the sad; of
painting life in extremes, and representing those struggles of passions when the soul
trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed.
For Maturin, Ireland was the perfect setting for the exploration of such a
struggle, partly perhaps because of its Catholicism but partly, according to
Maturin himself, because it is “the only country on earth…where…the extremes
of refinement and barbarism are united.” His finest literary achievement
was Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a Gothic, Faustian tale of destruction told
in a series of nested frame stories. Mangan and Scott were great admirers of
Maturin, as were the French writers Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac.

Stoker was the most famous, if not necessarily the greatest or the most prolific,
of the Irish Gothic novelists. His Dracula (1897) gave Western culture one of its
most enduring and fantastic villains, the vampire Count Dracula. A young
lawyer, Jonathan Harker—whose journal makes up the first third of the novel—
travels into the wilds of eastern Europe in search of Dracula, a strange,
aristocratic Anglophile. Shortly after his arrival, Harker is imprisoned by
Dracula, who travels to London and wreaks terror on the city’s
population. Dracula taps into the anxieties of a post-Jack the Ripper fin-de-
siècle England—anxieties centring on sex, class, and the ownership of territory
(or empire) in particular.

Shaw and Wilde

Two exiled Irish writers influenced British culture in important ways as the 19th
century turned. George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde were both dramatists
and polemicists. Shaw was a Dublin-born middle-class Protestant who by the
1920s had worked his way from an apprentice clerkship to a position as one of
Europe’s most influential men of letters. Shavian became the adjective used to
describe the witty epithets that punctuate Shaw’s writing and serve as the glue
that holds together works that could often be didactic and dramatically stilted.
Over the course of a long career, Shaw produced some 50 plays, five novels, and
innumerable political and cultural essays. He played the part of the engaged
public intellectual with insistence and courage, making himself unpopular in
England with his criticism of World War I and his campaigns against the
executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising. Shaw, a member of the
socialist Fabian Society, condemned what he called “middle-class morality” and
its strictures. Most of his plays were, in fact, modern morality plays, influenced,
at least early in his career, by the realism and feminism of Norwegian
playwright Henrik Ibsen. Many of his early plays had to wait years before
appearing in London; frequently his work would instead open in Germany or
the United States. Among these plays were the then-scandalous Mrs. Warren’s
Profession (written 1893, performed 1902), which tackled the moral economy of
prostitution; Arms and the Man (performed 1894), which subverted the
conventions of romantic drama to undermine the ideals of war; and his first
financial success, The Devil’s Disciple (performed 1897), in which Shaw, this
time inverting the conventions of contemporary melodrama, took apart two
more “ideals”—those of family and marriage.

Shaw’s middle-period plays—including Caesar and Cleopatra (performed

1901); John Bull’s Other Island (performed 1904), the only play that dealt
specifically with the Irish situation; Man and Superman (performed 1905);
and Major Barbara (performed 1905)—established him as the leading
playwright in London, particularly after Wilde’s disgrace in 1895. By the time
of Pygmalion (performed 1913), notorious for its onstage use of the
epithet bloody, Shaw’s work was drawing huge audiences to long runs.

Two years after the success of what is widely regarded as his best play, St.
Joan (performed 1923), Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an
award that acknowledged his international reputation. He accepted the prize
but declined the money. Shaw occupies an awkward place in the Irish literary
canon, in part because of his long absence from his country of birth and in part
because of his tangential relationship to the nationalist Irish literary
renaissance.

Often a seeming disciple, whether of the critics Walter Pater and John Ruskin or

of the painter James McNeill Whistler, Wilde nonetheless cut a brilliant and
individual figure. Wilde was born in Dublin to parents with nationalist
sympathies; his mother was best known in the 1840s for writing
strident poetry and articles for The Nation. He attended Trinity College in
Dublin but thereafter moved to England. “The Critic as Artist” (1890),
a dialogue on aesthetics, emphasizes Wilde’s elevation of the individual.
“Criticism is itself an art,” he wrote; the response of the critic to a work of art
should be to create another. Wilde wrote fairy tales and short stories, and his
only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890; rev. ed. 1891), is a Gothic tale
of duplicity, narcissism, and destruction. It was the most notorious novel of its
time. Wilde is reputed to have once said that “in every first novel the hero is
the author as Christ or Faust,” and Dorian Gray’s tale is a Faustian one. While a
hidden portrait of him reveals the damage to his soul wreaked by years of
corruption, Dorian himself retains his youthful beauty. At the end of the novel,
he stabs the portrait and is later found as a hideous human wreck with a knife in
his heart, while the portrait has reverted to its original beautiful form. The novel
has strong homoerotic and Decadent undertones; one contemporary critic
described it as having been written for “none but outlawed noblemen and
perverted telegraph boys.”

Although his play Salomé (published 1893) was banned during rehearsals,

Wilde’s greatest literary success came in the theatre with a series of light,
epigrammatic comedies of manners: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman
of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of
Being Earnest (1895). After the latter opened, Wilde was accused by the
marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, of
sodomy; Wilde responded by taking out a warrant against Queensberry for
criminal libel. Wilde lost the case in a scandalous and spectacular trial and was
himself arrested, tried, and found guilty of homosexual offenses. During his two
years’ hard labour, Wilde wrote a long letter to Douglas, a moving meditation on
love and suffering; first published posthumously in 1905 as De Profundis, it did
not appear in its complete form until 1949. His final work was a poem, The
Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), inspired by the execution of a fellow
prisoner. Decadent, dandy, aesthete, wit, playwright, poet, novelist, critic, and
public lecturer, Wilde remains one of the most controversial Irish writers, not
least because, like Shaw, his relationship to his country of birth was an uneasy
one.

The 20th century

As the 20th century drew near in Ireland, a new nationalist cultural revival
stirred. It would come to be known as the Irish literary renaissance and would
change modern Irish history, but first it had to make sense of the Irish past. In
1878 Standish James O’Grady, considered by his contemporaries the “father” of
this revival, published History of Ireland: The Heroic Period. More a fantasia
than a history, it nonetheless introduced a new generation of nationalists to
the myths and legends of early Irish history. This Gaelic past would ballast the
rising nationalist movement, providing it with subject matter and inspiration. In
1893 Douglas Hyde founded the Gaelic League to preserve the Irish
language and to revive it where it had ceased to be spoken. Hyde became a
central figure in the revival, and his translations of poetry from the Irish
inflected new poetry being written in English at the turn of the 20th century. In
1892 he gave the lecture “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland,” a call to
embrace things authentically Irish. Hyde’s call gave rise to multiple
organizations that pushed a nationalist agenda in the 1890s and early 1900s
and, by 1905, had culminated in the foundation of the Sinn Féin movement. In
literary terms, this period saw a renaissance in Irish drama and poetry in
particular and a move away from realism.
Yeats
The preeminent writer—and the architect—of the Irish literary renaissance
was William Butler Yeats, whose remarkable career encompassed both this
revival and the development of European literary Modernism in the 1920s and
’30s. In both movements Yeats was a key participant. While the renaissance
gave new life—and new texts—to Irish nationalism in the late 19th century,
Yeats aimed to produce a new kind of modern Irish literature in the English
language. Toward the end of his life, while he was writing some of his greatest
poetry, Yeats wrote of this seeming paradox:

I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser, and to Blake…and to the English language

in which I think, speak and write…; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with
hate.
Yeats’s career falls roughly into three phases. An early romantic period
produced work saturated by folklore, occultism, and Celtic mythology, such as
the collection The Wanderings of Oisín (1889) and the play The Countess
Cathleen (1892, first performed 1899). The latter stirred particular religious
controversy among Roman Catholics. Yeats’s counterversion of that play
was Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), which became the central literary moment of
the renaissance. In that play—set in 1798, the year of the Irish Rebellion—an old
woman persuades a young man to forgo marriage and fight for his country
instead; upon leaving the man at the end of the play, she is reported to have
been transformed into a young queen, thereby allegorizing the rejuvenation of
Ireland by heroic male sacrifice. Near the end of his life, Yeats would write, in
reference to the Easter Rising of 1916: “Did that play of mine send out / Certain
men the English shot?”

A mature middle period saw Yeats’s continued preoccupation with the matter of
Ireland, particularly during the revolutionary years 1916–23. In 1904 Yeats—
with playwright and folklorist Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory—founded
in Dublin the Abbey Theatre, one of Europe’s earliest national theatres. For the
Abbey, between 1915 and 1920, he wrote At the Hawk’s Well, The Only Jealousy
of Emer, The Dreaming of the Bones, and Calvary, published together in 1921
as Four Plays for Dancers. In the first two—and in On Baile’s
Strand (1904), The Green Helmet (1910), and The Death of Cuchulain (1939)—
Yeats embodies his changing view of Ireland in Cuchulain (Cú Chulainn), the
powerful but ultimately maimed hero of Ulster legend. Strongly influenced by
the nonrealistic dance-based conventions of the Japanese Noh theatre, these
plays radically challenged theatrical convention.

Yeats’s vision grew increasingly apocalyptic as he aged. The executions of the

leaders of the Easter Rising led to some of his most powerful work, notably the
poem “Easter 1916” (1921), in which he marks the transformation of political
activists into martyrs and the alteration in his own opinion of them, for all is
“changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” The late poems are to
some extent his greatest. In “The Second Coming” (1921), “Meditations in Time
of Civil War” (1928), “Leda and the Swan” (1928), “Sailing to Byzantium”
(1928), “Among School Children” (1928), and “Long-Legged Fly” (1939), among
many others, Yeats created a body of work in which both the nation-changing
events Ireland experienced in these years and his own journey toward old
age and death were filtered through an elaborate personal belief system.
Outlined in A Vision (1925; rev. ed. 1937), Yeats’s philosophy is an obscure
system of gyres and oppositions, with the poet aiming for what he called “unity
of being.” This notion of system is crucial to understanding Yeats, for it marked
him as essentially Romantic, an heir to the English poet and visionary William
Blake. It also differentiated him from many of the other great Modernist poets
of the period, for whom disintegration or chaos represented a more
seductive aesthetic. In 1923, two years before Shaw, Yeats became the first Irish
writer to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature.
Synge
See all videos for this article
The most original playwright of the many given their start by the Abbey Theatre
was John Millington Synge. An Anglo-Irish Protestant of means, Synge spent
time on the remote Aran Islands, which inspired him to identify the west of
Ireland as a site of authentic Irishness. Through his plays he planted this idea
firmly at the heart of the Irish literary renaissance. In the one-act plays In the
Shadow of the Glen (first performed 1903) and Riders to the Sea (1904) and the
three-act The Well of the Saints (1905), the language, character, and humour of
the Irish peasant, not least the female peasant, were rendered in a manner that
broke with earlier comic depictions by Macklin, Sheridan, and others. But it was
with his darkly comic masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World (1907)—
based on a story he had overheard in western Ireland—that Synge gave
the fledgling national-theatre movement its most explosive moment. The
Playboy, Christy Mahon, is a young man who claims—falsely, it turns out—to
have run away from the family farm after killing his father with a spade. Rather
than provoking outrage, Christy becomes a local hero, especially to the local
women who clamour for his sexual attention. The play’s bawdy irreverence and
its perceived insult to the piety of Irish Catholic womanhood offended
nationalists. In 1907, during the play’s second performance at the Abbey, the
use of the word shift (to refer to a girl’s undergarment) provoked a riot;
subsequent performances were plagued by protests and disorder.

Joyce

Learn about the importance of Dante's 'Inferno' to Irish writers and artists
See all videos for this article
Unlike many of the major Irish writers of the Irish literary renaissance—such as
Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, and AE (George William Russell)—James
Joyce, Ireland’s greatest and most influential modern novelist, was a Roman
Catholic. His religion and his complex, critical relationship to it—in which early
devotion gave way to a deep agnosticism that was yet indebted to the symbolism
and structures of Catholicism—remained a central preoccupation. The Joycean
artist-hero occupies a messianic (and, as some have argued, pervasively
autobiographical) role in Joyce’s aesthetic; this figure is most clearly embodied
in the character of Stephen Dedalus, who is incrementally developed in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922).

Joyce’s lifelong literary engagement with Ireland was conducted, geographically

speaking, elsewhere. His major works were written in exile—Zürich, Paris,
Trieste—and were initially published with difficulty, often serially in small
magazines and pamphlets. Joyce’s fictional debut was Dubliners (1914), a
collection of short stories. These tales stand in sharp contrast to the idealized
versions of Irishness that coloured much writing of the renaissance; they are
filled with the sense of paralysis that Joyce perceived as constricting the
Catholic Dublin society of which he wrote. He perfected what he famously called
a style of “scrupulous meanness” for Dubliners, as befitted the bleak,
claustrophobic world of his characters. But in the final and best-known
story, The Dead (written as a kind of coda for the collection, in part as an effort
to lift its unremitting mood of pessimism), Joyce produced the powerful, lyrical
tone that would characterize his later work. Dubliners was a turning point in
the genre of the short story, a genre that would become central to Irish writing
as the 20th century progressed.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce wrote

a Modernist bildungsroman in which the young, developing scholar-
artist Stephen Dedalus emerges from the restrictive religious and linguistic
conventions within which he has been raised, able, as he says, “to forge in the
smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Joyce’s style reflects his
protagonist’s spiritual and artistic journey (the novel opens with nursery-rhyme
language) as well as his own conviction, as he described it in his essay “A
Portrait of the Artist” (1904), that “the past assuredly implies a fluid succession
of presents.” But it was Ulysses (1922) that transformed the European novel.
Written between 1914 and 1921, as war altered the European landscape, Joyce’s
epic—loosely organized on Homer’s model of Ulysses’ journey home to his wife
and son—is set in Dublin on a single day: June 16, 1904. The Dublin
of Ulysses (unlike that of Dubliners) is full of lively talk, sex, and song, as well as
isolation, betrayal, and loneliness. In the novel’s “succession of presents,”
Stephen Dedalus reappears, along with the other main character, a Dublin Jew
called Leopold Bloom. The novel moves between Stephen’s and Bloom’s
perambulations around the city, relaying their thoughts of fantasy, fear, and the
everyday through its stream-of-consciousness narrative technique.
In Ulysses Joyce reconstructs the basic forms of fiction and creates a new kind
of novel in which he can attend to myth, history, naturalistic
detail, epic, epiphany, and love in a frequently bewildering range of styles. Joyce
created new words, played with existing ones, and turned
traditional syntax topsy-turvy. Needing to find ever-more-flexible language to
express his vision of humanity, he went still further in Finnegans Wake (1939),
his last novel, creating an almost impenetrable, apparently (though not in fact)
chaotic prose poetry.
Beckett and O’Brien
The magnitude of Joyce’s influence on European Modernism is unquestionable
and colossal. It also pervades subsequent Irish literature, but in this respect two
very different Irish writers stand out: Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett. But
these were no mere imitators of Joyce. Indeed, the very differences between
their imaginative worlds—one Roman Catholic, cynical, and playful and the
other Protestant, bleak, and intense—stand as testimony to the capaciousness of
the Joycean inheritance. O’Brien—the pen name adopted by Brian O’Nolan, who
also used the name Myles na gCopaleen as a columnist for The Irish Times—
sent a copy of his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), to Joyce. “That’s a real
writer with a true comic spirit,” Joyce remarked. At Swim-Two-Birds, a book
about books within a book, mixes and subverts genres—from cheap American
westerns to Irish myths—and sports multiple narratives and characters never
entirely under the control of their “authors.” Once thought of as Modernist, the
novel today seems to parody late 20th-century postmodernism even as it
anticipated it. At Swim-Two-Birds is a bravura performance, all the more
remarkable when viewed against the background of the pinched, provincial
world of censorship and social conformity from which it emerged—and, indeed,
which it satirized. One of the most successful and funniest satires of the pieties
of the Irish Free State was O’Brien’s An béal bocht, published in Irish in 1941
and translated into English in 1973 as The Poor Mouth, which remains an Irish
comic classic. Three more novels followed, the last published
posthumously: The Hard Life (1961), The Dalkey Archive (1964), and The Third
Policeman (1967).

Watch an excerpt from a production of Waiting for Godot

See all videos for this article
Unlike O’Brien, but like his mentor and friend Joyce, Beckett did not conduct
his literary career in Ireland. He spent almost all his adult life in France, and he
moved freely between writing in French and in English. His first fictions—the
short stories in More Pricks than Kicks (1934) and the novel Murphy (1938)—
were in English, but Beckett increasingly turned to French, providing his own
English translations. His international reputation rests ultimately on
his audacious, spare, challenging drama. En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting
for Godot) transformed European theatre just as Ulysses had transformed the
European novel. In the play the two characters (often called tramps, although
Beckett never described them as such) Estragon and Vladimir, later joined by
passersby Pozzo and Lucky, engage in seemingly directionless banter while
waiting for Godot, who in the end never arrives. Like all of Beckett’s
work, Waiting for Godot is linguistically lean and reveals its author’s immense
philosophical learning. Beckett was interested not in politics or literary
movements but in the big existential questions, and his work shows the
influence of René Descartes, whom he considered his favourite philosopher. His
stagecraft was minimalist, a characteristic that reached its acme in Not I (1973),
which features a disembodied mouth, encased in darkness, from which an
endless flow of words cascades. Many of the plays—including Fin de
partie (1957; Endgame), Krapp’s Last Tape (1960), and Happy Days (1961)—
are characterized by Beckett’s tendency toward silence. As his career
lengthened, Beckett’s plays became even shorter and sparer. In 1969 he became
Ireland’s third Nobel laureate in literature.

Ireland and Northern Ireland

Both Beckett and Joyce, 20th-century Ireland’s towering literary presences,
were exiles. But that century’s literary history is also tied to the traumatic
political and cultural changes that Ireland sustained and to which writers who
stayed at home responded. By 1923, Ireland had experienced rebellion (the
Easter Rising), the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), a civil war (1922–23),
and the partition of the country into two states. Of the 32 Irish counties, 26 were
newly independent; 6, in northeast Ulster, became “Northern Ireland.” In the
independent counties, a new political and cultural dispensation reigned in
which the energies of revolutionary nationalism and the Irish literary
renaissance gave way to the lethargies of a constrictive, censorious, and
clericalist Roman Catholicism, a narrow and conservative nationalism, and
a parochial, self-imposed isolation that would last until the 1960s. While the
new independent establishment officially sanctified the Irish Revolution, it now
tried to close off revolutionary ideas. Writers inevitably reacted to these new
conditions, many of them negatively.

In the theatre, working-class Protestant Sean O’Casey, who had been involved in

radical Dublin politics in the period before 1916, placed a new antinationalist
and socialist agenda on the stage. His plays often explore the effect on
ordinary Dubliners of events sparked by political unrest. The Shadow of a
Gunman (1923), for instance, explores one family’s experience of raids by Black
and Tans (members of a British auxiliary police force) during the War of
Independence. Juno and the Paycock (1924) takes the civil war as its backdrop,
and The Plough and the Stars (1926) deals with the Easter Rising. All three
plays were performed at the Abbey Theatre.

O’Casey’s was very much an urban drama. His ear for Dublin street language
and his strong, resilient, funny characters—particularly female ones—made
O’Casey’s plays fresh and natural, especially when read against the older work of
another great Abbey playwright, Synge. In O’Casey’s three major plays, the
violence of the public world, which happens offstage, is set alongside a private
domestic universe (usually Dublin tenement rooms) in which humans attempt
to survive and make sense of the violence. The pieties of revolutionary
nationalism do not come off well in these plays. In 1926, with the fourth
performance of The Plough and the Stars, O’Casey gave the Abbey its second
great set of riots; Yeats confronted the audience and, reminding them of
the Playboy riots of 1907, famously declared: “You have disgraced yourselves
again.”

Brendan Behan, another Dublin playwright, stepped straight out of the

tenement world depicted by O’Casey. As a young volunteer in the Irish
Republican Army, he was arrested in England in 1939; he later turned these
prison experiences into an acclaimed memoir, Borstal Boy (1959). A
further stint in prison, this time in Dublin, inspired his finest play, The Quare
Fellow (1954), the story of a hanging and a protest against capital punishment.

Irish fiction became largely concentrated in a newly embraced

national genre after independence: the short story. Frank O’Connor and Sean
O’Faolain, both from Cork, had been pupils of the nationalist writer Daniel
Corkery, whose account of 18th-century Irish literary history, The Hidden
Ireland (1925), was a key moment in the development of a native Irish literary
criticism. O’Connor and O’Faolain, however, rejected their early affinities with
republicanism and nationalism and began to produce stories that dealt squarely
and realistically with the contemporary condition of their country. O’Faolain
also founded a literary magazine, The Bell, in 1940, and it remained a crucial
outlet for the best Irish writers, particularly during World War II, when
Ireland’s neutrality isolated it even further from wider European literary
currents. Work in the short story similar to that of O’Connor and O’Faolain was
done by Liam O’Flaherty, Michael McLaverty, and Mary Lavin. McLaverty was
for a time the lone Roman Catholic literary voice in Protestant and unionist-
dominated Northern Ireland, while Lavin, born in the United States, made
middle-class domestic life her subject. Elizabeth Bowen, who was born in
Dublin but spent much of her adult life in London, began publishing volumes of
short stories in the 1920s.
What might be called a “counterrevival” in response to the Irish literary
renaissance continued also in the field of poetry. Patrick Kavanagh, an
impoverished and largely self-educated farmer from County Monaghan,
produced an extraordinary body of work in which he managed to represent the
grim realities of Irish rural life in language that is also luminous with a simple
Catholic spirituality. Landscape and the reality of place—as opposed to an ill-
defined, misty version of the west of Ireland—dominate Kavanagh’s vision. His
greatest work is his long poem The Great Hunger (1942), in which the celibate,
lonely life of a farmer is laid out in a bleak, earthy lyricism. Kavanagh powerfully
shaped the poetry of a later generation of writers, in particular that of Seamus
Heaney.

Hear about Austin Clarke's Mnemosyne Lay in Dust, a long poem recounting the poet's
experience of mental disorder
See all videos for this article
A more cerebral poet than Kavanagh, and one who had to work harder to throw
off the long shadow of Yeats, was Austin Clarke. Like Kavanagh’s, Clarke’s life as
a writer was materially difficult. The high point of his poetry came late, with the
long poem Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (1966), about the nervous breakdown
Clarke had suffered almost 50 years previously. The masterpiece of exiled
Ulsterman Louis MacNeice, who is generally associated with the W.H.
Auden generation of English leftist poets, is Autumn Journal (1939), its attack
on Irish parochialism mingled with a powerful Modernist meditation on the rise
of fascism in Europe. While James Stephens was a novelist and short-story
writer, he also wrote poetry; his collections include Insurrections (1909)
and Reincarnations (1918).

The 1960s and beyond

The 1960s changed Irish culture, often painfully. In literary terms, the
government censorship of the preceding 30 years began to be challenged in a
more sustained fashion. In 1960 Edna O’Brien published The Country Girls, the
first novel in a trilogy that helped open up discussion of the role of women and
sex in Irish society and of Roman Catholicism’s oppressive force upon women.
The novel was banned, and O’Brien left Ireland shortly thereafter. John
McGahern too had his early work banned, but he continued to produce novels
that subtly probed the changes rapidly transforming Ireland. Amongst
Women (1990) is his most critically acclaimed and moving novel.

In a number of novels published in the late 1980s and ’90s, it seemed that Irish
writers for the first time were finally able to explore the political and
cultural transformations their country had undergone in the previous 60 years.
Among these, the work of Patrick McCabe, in particular The Butcher Boy (1992)
and The Dead School (1995), stands out. So too does that of John Banville,
among Ireland’s preeminent novelists at the end of the 20th century. His
extraordinary novel Birchwood (1973) is a postmodern, post-Joycean
revisitation of the Big House novel, a genre that has endured throughout
modern Irish fiction.
But the main cultural and political crisis in Ireland in the 1960s and beyond was
the explosion of the “Troubles,” a term used to describe the violence between
Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. This violence was accompanied
by a necessarily urgent literary reaction—some 800 Troubles-related novels, for
instance, had been published by the early 21st century—and there began in
Northern Ireland an extraordinary poetic flowering. The American-born John
Montague initiated this process with the long poem The Rough Field (1972),
a milestone in contemporary Irish poetry, but his reputation was soon eclipsed
by the arrival of Seamus Heaney, who in 1995 became Ireland’s fourth winner of
the Nobel Prize for Literature. Heaney’s lyrical, muscular, aural poetry, like
Montague’s, delved into the Irish past and into what Heaney called the “word-
hoard” of the Irish landscape. His frequent use of traditional forms (as in his
sonnet sequences) produced a body of work as accessible and beautiful as it is
demanding.

The Troubles yielded other literary and cultural engagements that shaped the
ways in which Irish literature as a whole is now understood. The Field Day
Theatre Company, founded in 1980 in Londonderry (Derry) by playwright Brian
Friel and actor Stephen Rea, instigated a new movement both in drama and in
cultural politics that sought to undo some of the damage done by partition to
modern Irish self-perception and self-representation. Friel, already established
as Ireland’s leading playwright, wrote and in 1980 produced Field Day’s
landmark play Translations; it is set in mid-19th-century Donegal, where
British Ordnance Survey engineers are remapping and translating the Irish
landscape into English. The play’s performance was a key moment in the
transformation of Irish writing into a self-consciously postcolonial national
literature.

Abbey Theatre
Given its geographical and demographic diminutiveness and its catastrophic
history, Ireland occupies an unexpectedly elevated position in European
literature. Despite the country’s apparently endless preoccupation with its past,
its literary present and future at the beginning of the 21st century appeared
vibrant and promising. Prominent poets included Paul Muldoon, Medbh
McGuckian, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and Thomas Kinsella. McCabe,
Banville, Jennifer Johnston, William Trevor, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, Neil
Jordan, and Seamus Deane wrote fiction, and Friel, Frank McGuinness, Tom
Murphy, Martin MacDonagh, and Marina Carr wrote for the theatre.