There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History (New York Review Books Classics) - Hardcover

Thomas Flanagan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590171063 ISBN 13: 9781590171066

Publisher: NYRB Collections, 2004

Synopsis

Thomas Flanagan became famous as the author of a trilogy of novels, starting with The Year of the French, about Ireland from the rebellion of 1798 to the civil war of the 1920s. But the novelist who began by reimagining the mental and physical world of eighteenth-century County Mayo had long been immersing himself, as a scholar, essayist, and reviewer, in the literature and history of his ancestral land.
In the nonfiction writings collected here, many of them unpublished in his lifetime, Flanagan brings what Christopher Cahill calls his "keen eye and strong gaze and sharp tongue" to reassessments of key figures of Irish culture. They range from Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, through W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Collins, to contemporaries and friends like Brian Moore and Frank O Connor, and American Irish like the Molly Maguires and the director John Ford.
Flanagan probes the tragically intertwined origins of celebrity and literary modernism in the careers of Irish-American writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O Neill, and John O Hara. He reflects on what his own novels have taught him about the possibilities of historical fiction. And his thoughts on Irish-American identity sum up the long-pondered mixture of experience and scrutiny he brought to his heritage.
Witty, lively, and learned, this collection reveals that Thomas Flanagan was not only as a master of the historical novel but a writer who meditated broadly and deeply on the Ireland he once described as "a complex, profound, historical society, woven of many strands, some bright and some dark."

About this title

Review:

'Flanagan’s essays are unencumbered by the fashionable critical baggage' -- The Irish Independent

'Tough-talking, amusing, wry and scholarly... The thinking is lucid, the sentiments sharpened by a moral curiosity and rigour' --Scotland on Sunday

'luminous pages' --Declan Kiberd (author of The Irish Writer and the World), The Irish Times

‘A handsome collection of essays... This is critical writing of the highest order, illuminating and exact’ --The Leeds Guide

Synopsis:

Thomas Flanagan once said: 'It is not the romantic, rather sentimental Ireland of many Irish-Americans that I love, but the actual Ireland, a complex, profound, historical society, woven of many strands, some bright and some dark.' In There You Are, Flanagan reflects on journeys through his own favourite parts of Ireland, on past and present Irish history, on writers such as Yeats, O'Neill, Brian Moore, and O'Hara, as well as on Fitzgerald and Hemingway and the films of John Ford.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Collections
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1590171063
• ISBN 13: 9781590171066
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 508
• Editor: Christopher Cahill