IRISH LITERATURE

Literature written either in Gaelic (see Celtic Languages; Gaelic Literature) or in English by writers of Irish birth who remain identified with Irish life and culture. For discussions of the work of those Irish-born writers in English who are closely identified with English life and literature, such as Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce, see also Western Theater in Drama and Dramatic Arts; English Literature.

18TH- AND 19TH-CENTURY IRISH LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

The beginnings of Irish literature in the English language coincided with a decline in the use of written and spoken Gaelic, which began about the end of the 18th century.

Early Irish-English Literature.

The earliest Irish-English literature was of two types: the pastoral, patriotic, convivial, and humorous verse written by anonymous poets of the people and including such well-known examples as “The Wearin' O' the Green” (1798), “The Boyne Water,” and “Irish Molly O”; and sophisticated verse written by known poets. The principal writers of the latter type of poetry were Thomas Moore, the author of Irish Melodies (1807–34), a group of 130 poems containing such familiar titles as “The Last Rose of Summer” and “The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls”; Gerald Griffin (1803–40), the author of “Aileen Aroon” and many other poems; and Francis Sylvester Mahony (1804–66), better known as Father Prout, the author of the famous “Bells of Shandon.” Two writers who were better known as novelists (see below), Charles James Lever (1806–72) and Samuel Lover (1797–1868), wrote the verses for two of the best-known Irish comic songs, “The Widow Malone” and “The Widow Machree,” respectively.

19th-Century Literature.

From about the middle to the end of the 19th century, the work of patriotic and lyric poets dominated Irish poetry written in English. Seriocomic novels, often caricaturing Irish life and character, were also a popular form of 19th-century Irish literature.

Patriotic and lyric poetry.

To the patriots, the need to arouse the Irish people to a sense of nationalism was stronger than the impulse to write poetry distinguished for its formal or aesthetic perfection. The work of these poets was characterized by flamboyant diction and fiery emotion and was important for its political effect. Many of them contributed poems to the Nation (founded 1842), a journal devoted to the promotion of the cause of Irish nationalism. They include Thomas Osborne Davis (1814–45), who wrote “Lament of Owen Roe O'Neill”; Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), who also wrote novels (see below); Denis Florence MacCarthy (1817–82), who wrote The Bell-Founder (1857); Jane Francesca Elgee, Lady Wilde (c. 1820–96), who wrote under the name of Speranza; and Thomas D'Arcy McGee (1825–68). The most outstanding of the lyrical poets, listed chronologically, are Jeremiah Joseph Callanan (1795–1829); James Clarence Mangan (1803–49), author of “Dark Rosaleen”; Edward Walsh (1805–50); Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810–86), author of Lays of the Western Gael (1865); Aubrey Thomas de Vere (1814–1902), author of The Foray of Queen Maeve and Other Legends of Ireland's Heroic Age (1882); and William Allingham (1824–89), who wrote Irish Songs and Poems (1887).

Protestant and Roman Catholic fiction.

Much distinguished fiction was written in the 19th century by Irish authors writing in English. Protestants treated Irish life from the point of view of the Anglo-Irish upper classes or gentry, and Roman Catholic writers, mainly of Celtic ancestry, dealt principally with the lives of the Irish Roman Catholic peasantry.

Among the important Protestant writers were Maria Edgeworth, whose Castle Rackrent (1800) was one of the first regional novels in English; it gives a realistic picture of social conditions, tempered with understanding and ironic humor. Later writers included Lady Sydney Morgan (1776–1859), author of The Wild Irish Girl (1806); William Hamilton Maxwell (1792–1850), writer of tales of military life, including Stories of Waterloo (1834); Samuel Lover (1797–1868), whose Rory O'Moore, A National Romance (1837) and Handy Andy (1842) were stories of the Irish peasantry; and Charles James Lever (1806–72), writer of the picaresque novels The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer (1837) and Jack Hinton (1843).

Among the Roman Catholic fiction writers were two brothers, John Banim (1798–1842) and Michael Banim (1796–1874), noted for their stories depicting the life of the poverty-stricken Irish peasant, as in Tales of the O'Hara Family (6 vol., 1825–26); Gerald Griffin (1803–40), The Collegians (1829), a tale of middle-class Irish life; and William Carleton (1794–1869), author of Fardorougha the Miser (1839).

Other eminent Irish novelists of the 19th century were Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), who wrote Uncle Silas (1864); Charles J. Kickham (c. 1826–82), the author of Sally Cavanagh (1869); and Emily Lawless (1845–1913), the author of Hurrish (1886).

IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL

The so-called Irish Renaissance—a remarkable revival in Irish literature inspired by the Celtic and Irish tradition, folk poetry, legends, and beliefs—began in the last decade of the 19th century and flourished until the 1920s. In contrast to earlier fiction and poetry, the mood now was one of conscious dedication to the Irish national cause.

Turn of the Century.

The principal Irish writers in English who are identified with the Irish Renaissance are the poets William Butler Yeats, Æ (George William Russell), and Padraic Colum; the playwrights Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, John Millington Synge, and Sean O'Casey; the novelist, poet, and playwright George Augustus Moore; and the novelist and poet James Stephens. For further discussions of their work, see also Abbey Theatre.

Notable translations of Gaelic epic material were made by Lady Gregory in Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) and Gods and Fighting Men (1904); by Thomas William Rolleston (1857–1920) in Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race (1911); and by Douglas Hyde in Legends of Saints and Sinners from the Irish (1915).

Among representative fiction writers of the period are Standish James O'Grady (1846–1928), author of historical romances; James Owen Hannay (1865–1950), who, under the pen name of George A. Birmingham, wrote such novels as The Seething Pot (1905) and Wild Justice (1930); and Edith Anna Oenone Somerville (1858–1949) and Violet Florence Martin (1862–1915). Somerville and Martin were cousins who, under the joint pen name Somerville and Ross, wrote travel books, books for children, and other works. Two of their best-known collaborations were the humorous Some Experiences of an Irish R. M. (1899), observations of Irish country life by a bemused Englishman who has been appointed a resident magistrate; and The Real Charlotte (1894), a novel of upper-class society in late Victorian Ireland.

Mid-20th Century Literature.

With the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 the excitement generated in the earlier years had largely subsided, but many writers continued to produce distinguished works on Irish life. Notable among them was the playwright O'Casey, author of such plays as Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926), realistic pictures of Dublin slum life. He also wrote six books about his life that, combined under the title Mirror in My House (2 vol., 1956), represent a major contribution to Irish literary history. Other significant historical and personal recollections were written by the critic and short-story writer Mary Colum (1887?–1957), whose Life and the Dream (1947) recalls the personages and concerns of the literary revival; and by the playwright and manager-director (1910–14; 1919–23) of the Abbey Theatre, Lennox (Esmé Stuart) Robinson, in Ireland's Abbey Theatre 1899–1950 (1951) and I Sometimes Think (1957).

Post–Revival Fiction and Nonfiction.

At the same time, several new Irish writers came on the scene, including the novelists Liam O'Flaherty, author of powerful tales of Irish life such as The Informer (1925; film, 1935) and Famine (1937); and Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen (1899–1973), author of such perceptive novels of personal relationships as Death of the Heart (1939) and Eva Trout, or Changing Seasons (1968), and of a number of short stories. Molly Keane (1904–96) enjoyed a vogue in the 1930s for her novels about Anglo-Irish society, such as Mad Puppetstown (1931) and The Rising Tide (1937)—published under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell. After a 30-year hiatus she returned to writing with the mordantly funny Good Behaviour (1981) and Time after Time (1983). Another popular novelist, writing from the rural Catholic tradition, is Edna O'Brien (1936– ), author of the trilogy The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), filmed as The Girl with Green Eyes (1965), and The Girls in Their Married Bliss (1963). Most of her novels and short stories, many of which have appeared in The New Yorker, are autobiographical explorations of rebellious young women's attempts to come to grips with their roots and their unsuccessful searches for emotional fulfillment.

Not to be overlooked is the immensely versatile Brian O'Nolan (1911–66), familiar as the author of the Irish Times column “Cruiskeen Lawn” under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen, and also the author of such brilliantly complex comic novels as At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Dalkey Archive (1964), and the surrealistic The Third Policeman (written 1940, pub. posthumously 1967) under another pen name, Flann O'Brien.

Among Irish short-story writers, one of the best known is Frank O'Connor, who wrote Traveler's Samples (1951) and Domestic Relations (1957). William Trevor (originally named William Trevor Cox) is a short-story writer, novelist, dramatist who writes hauntingly of modern Irish life, loneliness, and disillusion. Among his short-story collections are Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories (1976), Other People's Worlds (1981), and The Hill Bachelors (2000). Bernard MacLaverty (1942– ) established his reputation as a short-story writer with Secrets and Other Stories (1977) and the novella Lamb (1980), a poignant, possibly allegorical tale of the doomed relationship between an Irish teaching Brother and one of his pupils.

The biography, the literary essay, and the short story are represented, respectively, in the following books by Seán O'Faoláin: The Great O'Neill: A Biography of Hugh O'Neill Earl of Tyrone, 1550–1616 (1942); The Vanishing Hero: Studies in Novelists of the Twenties (1957), and The Talking Trees and Other Stories (1971).

Two 20th-century Irish writers, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, although not usually associated with the literary revival in their country of birth, are recognized as major figures in world literature. Joyce deliberately isolated himself from the Irish literary revival and was one of its severest critics, but all his fiction and his only play, Exiles (1918), are set in Dublin; they are profound explorations of the Irish character and social environment in the early years of the century. Like Joyce, Beckett left Ireland after university for permanent exile in Europe; living in Paris, he went on to create some of the world's most influential modern experimental literature. Most of his major fiction is set in Ireland and depends heavily on Irish speech rhythms and Dublin argot, as does his celebrated play, Waiting for Godot (1952).

Post–Yeats Poetry.

The dominant figure of 20th-century Irish poetry, and a major world poet, was William Butler Yeats. After his death in 1939, the stream of vital poetry he fostered continued to flow. The Roman Catholic poets Austin Clarke (1896–1974), whose poetry had already been published in Collected Poems (1936), produced Orphide and Other Poems (1971), and Thomas Kinsella (1928– ), author of Downstream (1962) and Nightwalker and Other Poems (1968), are notable in a group of writers of difficult, lyrical, passionate poetry. Another member of the group is Patrick Joseph Kavanagh (1931– ), a caustic iconoclast whose verses appear in Collected Poems (1964).

The divisiveness and sectarian violence between the Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants of Northern Ireland brought the need for a poetry of reconciliation, of which Seamus Heaney, an Irish Catholic, is an exponent. Part of what was called the Northern School of Irish writing, Heaney first attracted international attention with the publication of North (1975), and eventually won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1995. His passion for words and vivid imagery that reflect the tragic conflicts of the Irish experience is evinced in his Selected Poems: 1965–1975 (1980), and in the longer verse cycles Sweeney Astray (1982), a version of an early medieval Gaelic work, and Station Island (1984). His later poetry collections include The Haw Lantern (1987), New Selected Poems: 1966–1987 (1990), Seeing Things (1991, containing his translation from Latin of parts of Virgil's Aeneid), and The Spirit Level (1996).

Drama.

The robust vitality of the Irish theater continued in the ironic works of Denis William Johnston (1901–84), such as The Old Lady Says “No”! (1929) and The Moon in the Yellow River (1931), and in the writings of Brendan Behan, notably The Quare Fellow (1956) and the raucous play The Hostage (1958). Behan is also the author of the autobiographical Borstal Boy (1958).

Brian Friel, author of Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), Living Quarters (1978), and Translations (1980), among other plays, and of several short stories, has continued the themes of national introspection that are central to all Irish writing of the 20th century. H.F., HAROLD FERRAR, Ph.D.