Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation

By Declan Kiberd

Book Overview

Kiberd - one of Ireland's leading critics and a central figure in the FIELD DAY group with Brian Friel, Seamus Deane and the actor Stephen Rea - 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. This is the perspective from which he views Irish culture. His history of Irish writing covers Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Heaney, Friel and younger writers down to Roddy Doyle.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 009958221X
• ISBN13: 9780099582212
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Length: 719 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 1.2" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Inventing Ireland

This book is essential to my dissertation topic and was suggested by my director. It provides specific as well as general information about major Irish writers of the 19th century. The first half of the book is very readable -- even entertaining -- the second half, not so much. Any student of Yeats, Wilde, or Synge should probably own a copy.

Don't miss it!

Declan Kiberd's is one of the few historioes of contemporary Irish literature which manages to do justice to the literature in Irish language, too. It is also a fascinating view on the development of the modern Irish nationalism and ideology. It is also brilliantly written. I have found it a treasure trove, also because it offers valuable analogies for a student of my own country's history. I sincerely hope you buy it, and read it, and re-read it. It is worth ten times what you pay for it.

A lively and thought-provoking read!

This book offered me a lot on first reading, and even more upon re-reading. I'm sure I'll be going back again, as his ideas about not only Anglo-Irish literature, but the uses of history in constructing a present identity for Ireland really impressed me a great deal.My absolute favorite quote of 1998 appears on p. 293 "...History thereby becomes a form of science fiction: in order to get a fair hearing in a conservative society, the exponents of revolution had to present their intentions under the guise of a return to the idealized past..." If you're as confused as this Irish American was about how to make sense of the disparate Irish histories - you need this book!