Awards

• Winner of Irish Times Literary Prize 1997
• Winner of Irish Times Literary Prize 1997.

Overview

INVENTING IRELAND is the most ambitious critical history of modern Irish literature to have been published for many years. Declan Kiberd 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. He develops his story through subtle and surprising readings of Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Heaney, Friel and younger writers to Roddy Doyle. 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.

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9780099582212

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Reviews

An epic study in various forms of connection between literature and society, literature and history. Kiberd has set himself a mammoth task which he has undertaken with energetic erudition and accomplished with convincing style...[Kiberd's] most striking characteristic as a critic is his intellectual daring: he is capable of saying things that simply take the reader's breath away...[This book is] ebullient, monumental...epical in its aims and achievements.--Brendan Kennelly Sunday Business Post

Author Information

Declan Kiberd was born in Dublin in 1951. He took a degree in English and Irish at Trinity College, Dublin, and he holds a doctorate from Oxford University. Among his books are Synge and the Irish Language, Men and Feminism in Modern Literature and Idir Dha Chultur. He writes regularly for Irish newspapers, has prepared literary scripts for the BBC, and is a former director of the Yeats International Summer School. He has lectured on Irish culture in more than twenty countries and has taught at University College, Dublin, for sixteen years. He is married with three children.

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