Irish Literature

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Fiction and Non-fiction

At the same time, several new Irish writers came on the scene, including the novelists Liam O'Flaherty, author of powerful tales of Irish life such as The Informer (1925), later made into a famous film, and Famine (1937); and Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, author of such perceptive novels of personal relationships as Death of the Heart (1939) and Eva Trout (1968) and of a number of short stories. Molly Keane enjoyed a vogue in the 1930s for her novels about Anglo-Irish society, such as Mad Puppetstown (1931) and The Rising Tide (1937)—published under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell. After a 30-year hiatus she returned to writing with the mordantly funny Good Behaviour (1981) and Time after Time (1983). Another popular novelist, writing from the rural Catholic tradition, is Edna O'Brien, author of The Country Girls (1960) and The Lonely Girl (1962), filmed as The Girl with Green Eyes (1965). Most of her novels and short stories, many of which have appeared in the New Yorker, are autobiographical explorations of rebellious young women's attempts to come to grips with their roots and their unsuccessful searches for emotional fulfilment.

Not to be overlooked is the immensely versatile Brian O'Nolan, familiar as the author of the Irish Times column “Cruiskeen Lawn” under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen, and also the author of such brilliantly complex comic novels as At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Dalkey Archive (1964), and the surrealistic The Third Policeman (1967)—under another pen name, Flann O'Brien.

Among Irish short-story writers, one of the best known is Michael O'Donovan, pen name Frank O'Connor, who wrote Traveller's Samples (1951) and Domestic Relations (1957). William Trevor (originally named William Trevor Cox) is a short-story writer and dramatist who writes hauntingly of modern Irish life, loneliness, and disillusion. Collections of his stories have been published under the titles Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories (1976) and Other People's Worlds (1981). Bernard MacLaverty established his reputation as a short-story writer with Secrets and Other Stories (1977) and the novella Lamb (1980), a poignant, possibly allegorical tale of the doomed relationship between an Irish teaching Brother and one of his pupils.

The biography, the literary essay, and the short story are represented, respectively, in the following by Seán O'Faoláin: The Great O'Neill (1942), The Vanishing Hero (1957), and The Talking Trees (1971).

Two 20th-century Irish writers, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, although not usually associated with the literary revival in their country of birth, are recognized as major figures in world literature. Joyce deliberately isolated himself from the Irish literary revival and was one of its severest critics, but all his fiction and his only play, Exiles (1918), are set in Dublin; they are profound explorations of the Irish character and social environment in the early years of the century. Like Joyce, Beckett left Ireland after university for permanent exile in Europe; living in Paris, he went on to create some of the world's most influential modern experimental literature. Most of his major fiction is set in Ireland and depends heavily on Irish speech rhythms and Dublin argot, as does his celebrated play, Waiting for Godot (1952).

Beginning in the 1970s another artistic and literary renaissance emerged from the crucible of religious and political violence in Northern Ireland. Novels dealing with the conflict proliferated. Along with Trevor’s Fools of Fortune (1983) and The Silence of the Garden (1988), and MacLaverty’s Cal (1983), these included Shadows on Our Skin (1977) and The Railway Station Man (1984) by Jennifer Johnston; Proxopera (1977) by Benedict Kiely; Lies of Silence (1990) by Brian Moore; and Reading in the Dark (1996) by Seamus Deane.

In recent years, John Banville has been acclaimed as one of the finest contemporary Irish novelists. His The Book Of Evidence (1989), a first-person narrative of a murderer, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation Award that year. Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995) continue to voice Banville's interest in the relationship between art and life.

As the 20th century drew to a close the voices heard in Irish literature tended to be more urban and more inclusive than before, representing women, children, homosexuals, the unemployed, and emigrants. Roddy Doyle set his Barrytown Trilogy of comic urban novels in a fictional north Dublin community of high unemployment, where witty, racy, and ironic language is often the only antidote to drabness and despair. Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), which won the Booker Prize, explored the impressionable mind of a 10-year-old boy. Doyle's novel A Star Called Henry (1999) marked the beginning of a promised new trilogy tracking Ireland's 20th-century history through the eyes of a dirt-poor character named Henry Smart.

The memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996) by Frank McCourt, an American writer of Irish descent, described—with irony, but little bitterness—a childhood of extreme poverty in Limerick in the 1930s. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for autobiography. Seamus Deane’s autobiographical novel, Reading in the Dark (1996), told of a boyhood in a working-class Catholic family in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the 1940s. The Irish-born writer Emma Donoghue chronicled a young woman coming to terms with her sexuality in Stir-Fry (1994). As the many members of the current generation who live and work outside Ireland demonstrate, the contemporary Irish writer is defined by a voice and by a habit of mind, not by geography.

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Poetry

The dominant figure of 20th-century Irish poetry, and a major world poet, was William Butler Yeats, some of whose work was published as Collected Poems (2nd ed., 1952). After Yeats's death, the stream of vital poetry he fostered continued to flow. The Roman Catholic poets Austin Clarke, whose poetry was published in Collected Poems (1936) and Orphide and Other Poems (1971), and Thomas Kinsella, author of Downstream (1962) and Nightwalker and Other Poems (1968), are notable in a group of writers of difficult, lyrical, passionate poetry. Another member of the group is Patrick Joseph Kavanagh, a caustic iconoclast whose verses appear in Collected Poems (1964).

A generation of new poets in the 1970s was led by Seamus Heaney, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. 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, and Station Island (1984). Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978 (1980) contains Heaney's sensitive literary criticism and other essays. His 1995 collection The Spirit Level won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, as did his “re-creation” of the Anglo-Saxon classic Beowulf (1999).

The literary journal Innti (Today), which began publication in 1970 at University College in Cork, served as a primary avenue for the publication of Irish-language poetry and introduced young poets such as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Ní Dhomhnaill brought a Postmodern sensibility to Irish-language poetry, and her works include Féar Suaithinseach (1984; Marvellous Grass). Other notable Irish poets since the 1970s include Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Irish history and identity, matters of gender, and the relationship between poet and community are common themes of this generation of poets.

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Drama

The robust vitality of the Irish theatre continued in the ironic works of Denis William Johnston, such as The Old Lady Says “No”! (1929) and The Moon in the Yellow River (1931), and in the writings of Brendan Behan, notably The Quare Fellow (1956) and the raucous play The Hostage (1958). Behan is also the author of the autobiographical Borstal Boy (1958). Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark (1961) unnerved English audiences with its depiction of familial animosity among expatriate Irish workers living in Coventry.

Contemporary Irish history has prompted Irish dramatists to revisit personal and community events. Translations (1981) by Brian Friel considers the 1830s remapping of Ireland when Irish placenames were translated into English. The same author’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) discusses personal memory in the context of communal memory and myth. Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985) by Frank McGuinness portrays the experience of northern Irishmen fighting in World War I. The Steward of Christendom (1995) by Sebastian Barry depicts the mental anguish of Barry’s institutionalized and delusional great-grandfather, who was the former head of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Small-town betting shops and pool halls provide the setting for Billy Roche’s trio of finely observed plays, the Wexford trilogy (A Handful Of Stars, 1988; Poor Beast In The Rain, 1989; Belfry, 1991).

New playwrights to emerge in the 1990s include Dublin-born Conor McPherson, and Martin McDonagh, born in London of Irish parentage. McPherson first came to wider attention with the monologue St Nicholas (1997) and won the 1999 Olivier Award for Best New Play with The Weir (1997), a collection of ghostly stories recounted by the denizens of a remote Irish pub. In his Leenane trilogy (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, 1996; A Skull in Connemara, 1997; The Lonesome West, 1997) McDonagh combines elements of melodrama and farce to present a violent, surreal, and blackly comic picture of rural life in the west of Ireland. Stones in his Pockets (1999) by Belfast playwright Marie Jones, about the disruptive effect of a Hollywood production on a small Irish community in County Kerry, became a long-running success in London’s West End and won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2001. Jones’ other plays include A Night in November (1994) and Women on the Verge of HRT (1997).