Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Convergences) - Hardcover

Kiberd, Declan

4.3

208 ratings by Goodreads

9780674463639: Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Convergences)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674463633 ISBN 13: 9780674463639

Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr, 1996

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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. In dazzling comparisons with the experience of other postcolonial peoples, the author makes many overdue connections. Rejecting the notion that artists such as Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett became modern to the extent that they made themselves European, he contends that the Irish experience was a dramatic instance of experimental modernity and shows how the country's artists blazed a trail that led directly to the magic realism of a Garci a Ma rquez or a Rushdie. Along the way, he reveals the vital importance of Protestant values and the immense contributions of women to the enterprise. Kiberd's analysis of the culture is interwoven with sketches of the political background, bringing the course of modern Irish literature into sharp relief against a tragic history of conflict, stagnation, and change. 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 secondrenaissance in the work of a new generation of authors and playwrights, from Brian Friel to the younger Dublin writers.

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Review:

A critical study laced with wit, energy and unrelenting adroitness of discourse...Mr. Kiberd possesses a special gift for patient exploration of works of art in relationship to their surroundings...Wit, paradox, and an almost indecent delight in verbal jugglery place Mr. Kiberd himself in a central Irish literary tradition that also includes Swift, Joyce, and Beckett...Impudent, eloquent, full of jokes and irreverence, by turns sardonic and conciliatory, blithely subversive but, without warning, turning to display wide and serious reading, a generosity of spirit, a fierce and authentic concern for social and political justice. Rather like Wilde and Shaw...A remarkable achievement. -- Thomas Flanagan "New York Times Book Review"

Book Description:

INVENTING IRELAND is the most ambitious critical history of modern Irish literature to have been published for many years. Declan Kiberd argues that the Irish literary revival of the 1890-1922 period embodied a spirit and a revolutionary, generous vision of Irishness that is still relevant to post-colonial Ireland. He develops his story through subtle and surprising readings of Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Heaney, Friel and younger writers to Roddy Doyle.

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