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 ›
Irish Literature
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 ›
A Brief History of Irish Novels
Irish literature falls into two distinct categories. Written in the Irish language, the first category includes bardic poems and Celtic sagas. The second category, Irish literature written in English, includes what is often called Anglo-Irish literature because it was created… Read More ›
Analysis of William Trevor’s Stories
Like his novels, William Trevor’s (24 May 1928 – 20 November 2016) short stories generally take place in either England or the Republic of Ireland. For the most part, Trevor focuses on middle-class or lower-middle-class figures whose lives have been… Read More ›
Analysis of Liam O’Flaherty’s Stories
To experience the full range of Liam O’Flaherty’s (28 August 1896 – 7 September 1984) stories, one must deal with the exceptions in the collection The Stories of Liam O’Flaherty, notably “The Mountain Tavern,” which, like his historical novels, treats… Read More ›
Analysis of Seán O’Faoláin’s Stories
Seán O’Faoláin’s (born February 22, 1900, Cork, County Cork, Ireland—died April 20, 1991) stories are varied. The earliest ones deal with the immediate political concerns of the Irish Civil War. Others use irony, although the irony tends to be gentle… Read More ›
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