Marvellous Grass There you were in your purple vestments half-way through the Mass, an ordained priest under your linen alb and chasuble and stole: and when you saw my face in the crowd for Holy Communion the consecrated host fell… Read More ›
Irish Literature
Analysis of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour
Set in the Anglo-Irish world of “great houses” during their days of waning influence in the first half of the 20th century, this satire attacks the emotional frigidity of a society that has allowed propriety and decorum to replace sincerity… Read More ›
Analysis of William Trevor’s Fools of Fortune
Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in the year it was published, this short novel examines Irish-English relations on the intimate scale of family life. Two “great houses,” Woodcombe Park in Dorset, England, and Kilneagh in County… Read More ›
Analysis of Joyce Cary’s First Trilogy
The three novels in this sequence include Herself Surprised (1941), To Be a Pilgrim (1942), and The Horse’s Mouth (1944); Cary’s heirs collected the three titles into one volume in 1957 and christened it First Trilogy. Joyce Cary had been… Read More ›
Analysis of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
A legendarily difficult novel, Finnegans Wake is the culmination of James Joyce’s life and work as an artist. It is a playground, a wrecking yard, a battlefield of literary experimentation and mythic allegory, placing demands on its readers that can… Read More ›
Analysis of Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy
Based on the author’s recollection of a radio play he heard as a child, this dark novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1992 and became the basis of a film adaptation by Neil Jordan in 1998. The first-person… Read More ›
Analysis of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds
Written as the first-person narration of a Dublin student who relishes multiple approaches to the representation of reality, this antirealistic novel presents a narrator living with an insufferably conventional uncle. The young man has reason to resent his uncle’s inquisitiveness:… Read More ›
Analysis of Samuel Lover’s Handy Andy
Samuel Lover was best known as a miniaturist painter and a dramatist, often performing his own written sketches and stories. Handy Andy remains his best-known novel, probably his only work to have remained palatable to later audiences. Lover writes ironically… Read More ›
Analysis of Emily Lawless’s Grania
Emily Lawless’s fourth novel, Grania: The Story of an Island, published in two volumes, was eagerly awaited by her readership. Like her third novel, Hurrish (1886), Grania focused on a poor Irish family and was intent on leading its readers… Read More ›
Analysis of Marmion Savage’s The Falcon Family
Marmion Savage’s first novel, The Falcon Family; or, Young Ireland, satirized parasitic socialites, traditionalists within the Church of England, and the Young Ireland Party, a group of extremists who campaigned for Ireland’s independence. Published anonymously, the novel proved popular, although… Read More ›
Analysis of Bram Stoker’s The Coming of Abel Behenna
This story collected in the posthumously published Dracula’s Guest is about the power of the past to haunt the present. Bram Stoker also makes use of the plot device of the fatal return, a popular narrative in many 19th-century texts…. Read More ›
Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s The Second Coming
One of the most famous poems in the English language, The Second Coming is the definitive vision of the Yeatsian apocalypse. It incorporates and intensifies ideas of cyclic creation and destruction already articulated in poems like “The Magi,” “On Woman,”… Read More ›
Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s Easter 1916
The Easter Rising of 1916 catalyzed the final phase of the Irish struggle for independence and forced Yeats to recant the stinging assessment of “September 1913” that “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.” In… Read More ›
Analysis of James Joyce’s Stephen Hero
This is the title of the novel begun by Joyce on his 22nd birthday, February 2, 1904, shortly after the editors of Dana had rejected his essay “A Portrait of the Artist” because they deemed its contents unsuitable for their… Read More ›
Analysis of James Joyce’s Exiles
Exiles is Joyce’s only extant play. It was written in Trieste during 1914 and 1915, and first published by Grant Richards in London and by B. W. Huebsch in New York on May 25, 1918. Joyce purposely waited to publish… Read More ›
Analysis of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
This is the title that Joyce gave to his first published novel, derived, as noted below, from the shorter version given to an earlier prose piece. Joyce composed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man over the course… Read More ›
Analysis of James Joyce’s Dubliners
This is the title that Joyce gave to his collection of 15 short stories written over a three-year period (1904–07). Though he finished the final story, “The Dead,” in spring of 1907, difficulties in finding a publisher and Joyce’s initial… Read More ›
Analysis of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage
It has been suggested that in The Hostage Brendan Behan is trying to “open up the stage.” This is an understatement. He would like to hack the stage to bits, crunch the proscenium across his knee, trample the scenery underfoot,… Read More ›
Analysis of Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman
Man and Superman is, of course, one of Shaw’s major plays, though it perhaps achieves that rank from being not one play, but two. Certainly without the long third-act dialogue in Hell, Man and Superman—for all that it dramatizes the… Read More ›
Analysis of James Joyce’s Novels
The leaders of the Irish Literary Revival were born of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Very few were Catholics, and none was from the urban middle class, except James Joyce. The emphasis of the Revival in its early stages on legendary or… Read More ›
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