Irish Literature -- Anglo-Irish Literature and the Irish Literary Revival

As England moved to increase its control over Ireland starting in the 16th century, and the use of Irish Gaelic was suppressed in Ireland by the English, especially after 1649 when Cromwell invaded Ireland, Irish literature in English, called Anglo-Irish literature, became important. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, Irish writers produced some of the great literature in the English language. Among these writers were Jonathan Swift, William Congreve, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and James Joyce.

The first major figure in Anglo-Irish literature to was Jonathan Swift in the early 18th century. Swift (1667-1745) was born in Dublin of British parents. He studied at Trinity College and went to Britain. He later returned to Dublin as an Anglican clergyman and became the head of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Swift wrote a number of critical works related to the relationship between Ireland and Britain. He wrote essays about such problems as hunger and absentee landlords in Ireland that were critical of English policies. His most famous work was the novel Gulliver's Travels.

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin but he did most his work in England. He became famous for his irony and wit. He wrote House of Widowers in 1892 in which he criticized capitalism and socialism at the same time. He wrote a number of other plays, including Ceasar and Cleopatra (1899), Man and Superman (1905), Major Barbara (1905), Pygmalion (1913), Heartbreak House (1920), and Saint Joan (1923). While some of the specific social abuses that Shaw's plays were intended to protest have disappeared, many of his plays remain powerful even today, due to his wit, his use of dramatic situation, and his characterizations.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) did not write anything related to Ireland, which was unusual because many Irish writers showed their identities as an Irish in their writing. He was born in an upper class family in Dublin and he worked in London where he wrote many famous stories. He is remembered as one of the great wits in the English language. He admitted being gay and is nearly as well known for the scandals he was involved in as for his writing. He wrote only one long novel, Portrait of Dorian Grey in 1891. He wrote four comic plays, culminating with The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. He wrote the novella The Happy Prince in 1888. He also wrote a drama entitled Salome in French.

James Joyce (1882-1941) left Ireland when he was young and went to the Continent. He published The Dubliners, a collection of short stories, in 1914. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is a novel that traces the development of an artist which made use of a stream-of-consciousness technique. Ulysses (1922) made use of the mythological framework of Homer's Odyssey and told a story of life in Dublin on June 16, 1904. He wrote Finnegans Wake in 1939. He described consciousness of people in his writings. His writing later influenced Falkner later.

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin and went to Paris when he was 20 years old. He helped Joyce to translate his work into French and was influenced by him. His drama Waiting for Godot is the most famous play, but it is not an accessible work.

Sheamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland. He was an English language teacher. He wrote Death of a Natural Child in 1966, and then he wrote many works. His work dealt with issues related to Northern Ireland. He was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, and he became the fourth Irish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The literature of the revival concerned itself with and romanticized the Gaelic past. Even though it was concerned with Gaelic culture, it was written in English. The writers realized that the language of modern Ireland was English. Their purpose was to revive the old myths, sagas, and romances in English. At the same time, they wanted the literature to be distinctly Irish in its sound and its themes. Many of the works of the poet and playwright William Butler Yeats took their themes from traditional Irish literature. Playwright Sean O'Casey tried to paint an accurate portrayal of life in the Dublin tenement districts during the revolution against British rule in the early 20th century. These and other writers helped develop a distinctively Irish literary voice.

Douglas Hyde, a poet, literary historian, professor of Irish, and later President of Ireland, organized Gaelic League in the late 19th century. The league performed folk tales, Shakespeare, etc., in Gaelic at the Abbey Theater and Gate Theater in Dublin.

William Butler Yeats and others founded the Irish Literary Society in 1892 and Irish National Literary Society later the same year. He edited a collection of Irish folktales and published Irish Fairy Tales in 1888 and Wisdom of Celts in 1890. He also published Secrets of Roses in 1896. He wrote the drama Madam Kathleen in 1892. This became the debut performance at Irish Literary Theater, where plays by Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory (1851-1932), George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge (1871-1909), Sean O'Casey (1880-1964) were produced.

However, Yeats is best known for his poetry, and he is considered one of the greatest modern poets to write in English. His poetry spanned fifty years, from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) to Last Poems and Plays (1939). Yeats was the last of the romantic poets, and his poetic works celebrated love, nature, innocence, and individual dignity. He loved Sligo in northwestern Ireland, where his mother was from better than Dublin. He is buried near there.

Lady Gregory was called the mother of Irish dramas. She wrote many dramas, mainly one-act plays and dramatizations of Irish folk tales. Among her best one-act plays were Spreading the News (1904), Hycinth Halvey (1906), The Gaol Gate (1906), and The Rising of the Moon.

John Millington Synge studied music at Dublin University, and then went to Germany and France, where he was involved in drama. He met Yeats in Paris and took his advice to go to the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland. He lived with local people there and studied Gealic. He wrote In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), based on an Aran folktale, and Riders to the Sea in 1904 and Playboy of the Western World in 1907 based on incidents in Aran life. He is called the representative of the second stage of Irish dramas. He tried to capture the speech rhythms and humor of Irish peasants in his plays.

Sean O'Casey was born in slum in Dublin and worked as construction workers, etc. He used his experiences to write dramas, and his plays dealt with themes related to revolution and civil war in modern Ireland. He wrote Juno and the Paycock in 1924 and The Plough and the Stars in 1926.