Irish Literature

AY2018/2019 Semester 2

To survey the achievement of Irish writing in English and translations of Irish litera'ture is to realise what a wide range of human experience is involved. It is expressed brilliantly in so many different ways by so many very differ'ent individuals. Many writers grappled with the notion of Irishness, and indeed many engaged in polemics. Others expressed the human condition without political engagement. Some transmuted the Celtic past; some found their inspiration in foreign cultural movements and ideas. Some claimed with Yeats that `ancient salt is [the] best packing,- while others, like Joyce and Beckett, were manifestly experimental. We shall contextualise the history of Irish writing with the history of its politics, society and ideas. This survey is chronological: from the eighteenth century, celebrated for profound philoso-phical, aesthetic and political thought, renowned for the writings of Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley and Edmund Burke, we move through the Romanticism of the nineteenth century, with its expressions of nationality and individuality, of authenticity and inauthenticity, of the Gothic and the rational, of the non-conformist New Woman and the conforming ultramontane, through the modernity, and after, of the twentieth century, to the neo-classicism of the spirited present.