Inventing Ireland
By: Declan Kiberd.
Series: Convergences; Convergences (Cambridge, Mass.)
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 719
Subjects: English literature -- Irish authors -- History and criticism; English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Irish literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; National characteristics, Irish, in literature; Nationalism -- Ireland -- History -- 20th century; Nationalism in literature; Ireland -- Intellectual life -- 20th century
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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.