Inventing Ireland (NA): The Literature of the Modern Nation: 16 (Convergences: Inventories of the Present) - Softcover

Kiberd

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674463641 ISBN 13: 9780674463646

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2020

Synopsis

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 Garc a M 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 second renaissance in the work of a new generation of authors and playwrights, from Brian Friel to the younger Dublin writers.

About this title

Review:

[A] state-of-the-art approach to Irish literature...a huge, erudite, scrupulous hermeneutics of the sacred literary texts in the Irish world...This is one of the best studies of Irish literature to come along in years.--Michael Stephens "Washington Post Book World "

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 "

Formidable, thoroughly enjoyable, always engaged, often brilliant...This is the fullest attempt we have had to date to read both Irish historical experience and the literature that this has involved in the light of post-colonial theory.--Terence Brown "The Tribune Magazine "

Kiberd's magesterial exploration of how cultural nationalism produced one of the world's great modern literatures is especially valuable as nationalism itself becomes increasingly implicated in the violence and terrorism in Northern ireland, Yugoslavia, Israel, and many African states.--Vera Kreilkamp "Irish Literary Supplement "

[A] thought-provoking and entertaining critical blockbuster...There is no doubt that this book immediately joins a small group of indispensable books on Anglo-Irish literary history. It is also typical of the best of that school in the brio and wit with which its learning and intelligence are carried.--Bernard O'Donoghue "Times Literary Supplement "

A dazzling book, a book to cherish and revisit. As you read and reread the Anglo-Irish texts, you'll find it altering them, lightening them up. It changes Beckett and Joyce; it especially changes John Millington Synge. It ends by offering to reshape Irish Studies curricula.--Hugh Kenner "Washington Times "

Kiberd's study is provocative, contentious, sly, tendentious, challenging, witty...It is a book argued with such passionate intensity that everyone with an interest in modern Irish writing will have to confront it, and in that confrontation revisions and redefinitions are likely to slouch towards birth...Kiberd's book is a resounding success. It will seduce you, bludgeon you and outrage you. Few books can boast such presence.--Gerry Dukes "Irish Independent "

An epic study in various forms of connection between literature and society, literature and history. Kiberd has set himself a mammoth task which he has undertaken with energetic erudition and accomplished with convincing style...[Kiberd's] most striking characteristic as a critic is his intellectual daring: he is capable of saying things that simply take the reader's breath away...[This book is] ebullient, monumental...epical in its aims and achievements.--Brendan Kennelly "Sunday Business Post "

Kiberd possesses one of the liveliest and sharpest minds in Ireland, and it is not surprising that his book dazzles and engages. Nor that Inventing Ireland is both an international and an Irish book.--Eileen Battersby "Irish Times "

Inventing Ireland...deserves to be read, not only by people with a special interest in Irish writing, but also by people with a strong interest in modern writing in English. Kiberd has much that is original and valuable to say.--Conor Cruise O'Brien "Sunday Telegraph "

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0674463641
• ISBN 13: 9780674463646
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 736