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The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction ISBN 13: 9780670854974

The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction - Hardcover

 
9780670854974: The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction
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This unique anthology illustrates the full range of Irish fiction from Gulliver's Travels to young contemporary writers like Roddy Doyle and Emma Donoghue. Including self-contained sections from novels as well as short stories, all the most important writers are represented, from Swift and Sterne through Joyce, Beckett and Wilde to modern masters like Banville and William Trevor. Colm Toibin's long introduction describes the contexts and particular strengths of Irish fiction.

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The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction, is a bumper edition edited by Colm Toibin, ranging from Jonathan Swift, (1667-1745 ) to Emma Donoghue, born in 1969.

As Toibin suggests in his splendid introduction, many events in Ireland in the 19th century resemble fiction, and therefore "most of the Irish fiction before Joyce was written for an English audience, much of it sought to describe Ireland's history and landscape and people as peculiar and alarmingly dramatic."

Understandably, dislocation is one of the many governing themes in Irish fiction and Toibin agrees with Adorno that exile is integral to writing: "Writers not in exile from Ireland are in exile within Ireland." Joyce lived out the bizarre paradox of fully addressing an Irish audience, from a place of exile and in a way that few could understand. Later, when Toibin argues that writers have an audience in Ireland for the first time, it would seem that only avant-garde writers remain outside the pale. Other features that make Irish writing so distinct, Toibin offers, are the religious consciousness of the people, the attitude towards the land and nationalism, a sense of quiet desolation and a total lack of domestic harmony at the close of most novels!

Toibin is right to note the influence of American writers like Raymond Carver and Grace Paley on Irish writing and that a less penurious existence in the diaspora has fuelled writing by the younger generation, like Colum McCann, who was born in Dublin and now lives in New York.

Although Toibin is scanty on discussing the effect of the Troubles, his selection is strong and includes the often overlooked late Mary Lavin, whose two novels and collections of short stories go oddly unnamed in the biographical notes. Her extraordinary short story, "Happiness", also in the Bolger anthology, is an affecting sample of her robust, swinging prose, her thoroughly contemporary tone and measured emotional detail. It is also good to re-encounter superbly spare writers like Leland Bardwell, whose "The Hairdresser" is a bleak urban tale straining to breakout of a realist mode. Also anthologised is "Music at Annahullion", by Eugene McCabe, a master of deadpan poignancy in Monaghan register. The story is about a woman who buys "a piana": "It's out of tune." "That's aisy fixed." "Woodworm in the back." "You can cure that too." "There's a pedal off." "What odds."

Penguin have produced an authoritative and well-researched volume that anyone who has an interest not only in Irish fiction, but in European literature, will take pleasure in owning. --Cherry Smyth

Review:
'Over 1000 pages of the best writing that this island has produced' - Irish Independent

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  • PublisherViking
  • Publication date1999
  • ISBN 10 0670854972
  • ISBN 13 9780670854974
  • BindingHardcover
  • Number of pages1120
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9780670891085: The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction

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