The Literature of Ireland : Culture and Criticism (Hardcover)

Introduction; 1. The Literary Revival: historical reflections; 2. Joyce's magic lantern; 3. Music: the cultural issue; 4. Modernism and revolution: re-reading Yeats's 'Easter 1916'; 5. Shakespeare and the Irish self; 6. Irish literature and the Great War; 7. Irish modernism and the 1930s; 8. Post-modernists: Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien; 9. Patrick Kavanagh: religious poet; 10. MacNeice's Ireland: MacNeice's Islands; 11. Louis MacNeice and the Second World War; 12. MacNeice and the Puritan tradition; 13. John Hewitt and memory: a reflection; 14. Michael Longley and the Irish poetic tradition; 15. Seamus Heaney: the witnessing eye and the speaking tongue; 16. Derek Mahon: the poet and painting; 17. Telling tales: Kennelly's Cromwell and Muldoon's 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants'; 18. Redeeming the time: the novels of John McGahern and John Banvillle; 19. 'Have we a context': transition, self and society in the drama of Brian Friel; 20. Hubert Butler and nationalism; 21. The Irish Dylan Thomas: versions and influences.