Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature

Written over the past decade by one of Ireland's leading literary critics, these brilliant and erudite essays examine the close connection between literature and politics in Ireland. The evidence is ambiguous and complex but Seamus Deane sifts it with exceptional analytic clarity. He begins by locatiing the roots of modern Irish literature in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Celtic revivals as perceived by two commentators, Burke and Arnold. We are then shown the differing attitudes of Yeats, Joyce, Synge, and O'Casey. Professor Deane then considers the bequest of these writers to the modern generation, from Beckett to Seamus Heaney. A more recent third literary revival coincided with the return of the Irish political crisis in Northern Ireland-a crisis which confronted writers as various as Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Brian Friel and Derek Mahon, demanding that they should come to terms with it in their different ways. All the writers discussed are seen first as individuals, then as exemplars of a common fate with its own peculiar risks, burdens and responsibilities.