Irish fiction
Encyclopedia
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
. This article is concerned with the history of Irish fiction written in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
. For Irish fiction written in Irish
Irish language
Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
, see Modern literature in Irish
Modern literature in Irish
Although Irish has been used as a literary language for more than 1500 years , and in a form intelligible to contemporary speakers since at least the sixteenth century, modern literature in Irish owes much to the Gaelic Revival, a cultural movement which began in the late nineteenth century.-Early...
. For a general overview of Irish writing in all genres, see Irish literature
Irish literature
For a comparatively small island, Ireland has made a disproportionately large contribution to world literature. Irish literature encompasses the Irish and English languages.-The beginning of writing in Irish:...
.
The 18th century
Irish fiction can be said to begin with the publication in 1726 of Jonathan SwiftJonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
's masterpiece Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver's Travels
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels , is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of...
. This novel, often treated as a book for children, is one of the most savage satires in the English language and set a high standard for Irish writers to come.
The next Irish novelist of importance was Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
(1713–1768). Stern was born in Clonmel
Clonmel
Clonmel is the county town of South Tipperary in Ireland. It is the largest town in the county. While the borough had a population of 15,482 in 2006, another 17,008 people were in the rural hinterland. The town is noted in Irish history for its resistance to the Cromwellian army which sacked both...
, County Tipperary
County Tipperary
County Tipperary is a county of Ireland. It is located in the province of Munster and is named after the town of Tipperary. The area of the county does not have a single local authority; local government is split between two authorities. In North Tipperary, part of the Mid-West Region, local...
and was in his mid-forties when he published The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next 10 years....
(1759–1767). This satire on the biographical novel is one of the most innovative and influential novels in English, and its foregrounding of the authorial voice and playful refusal to accept a conventional linear timeframe mark it out as a precursor of such modernist novelists as James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
and Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
.
Oliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith was an Irish writer, poet and physician known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield , his pastoral poem The Deserted Village , and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man and She Stoops to Conquer...
's The Vicar of Wakefield
The Vicar of Wakefield
The Vicar of Wakefield is a novel by Irish author Oliver Goldsmith. It was written in 1761 and 1762, and published in 1766, and was one of the most popular and widely read 18th-century novels among Victorians...
(1766) is a moral tale based on the story of Goldsmith's own family. It is notable for rejecting the florid style of most fiction of the day in favour of a more direct, conversational mode. Although not particularly successful when published, it has become one of the most enduring works of 18th century fiction in English.
The 19th century
The 19th century was a golden age of fiction in English, and Irish writers were to participate fully. Although born in OxfordOxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
, Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe...
(1767–1849) spent most of her life in Ireland and wrote what is generally considered the first novel on an Irish theme, Castle Rackrent
Castle Rackrent
Castle Rackrent, a short novel by Maria Edgeworth published in 1800, is often regarded as the first historical novel, the first regional novel in English, the first Anglo-Irish novel, the first Big House novel and the first saga novel....
(1800). This story of landlords and tenants on an Irish estate, and of the abuse of the latter by the former, was criticised at the time for its characters' apparent lack of religious feeling or scruples, but can be seen as a reasonably accurate representation of life on a great estate at the turn of the century, drawing, as it does, on the author's own experience of managing her father's estate. She wrote a number of other novels, the most interesting being Ormond (1817).
Lady Morgan
Lady Morgan
Sydney, Lady Morgan , was an Irish novelist, best known as the author of The Wild Irish Girl.-Early life:...
(Sidney Owenson) (1776(?)-1859) was also a prolific writer but her most successful work was her third novel, The Wild Irish Girl (1806), which can be read as a direct response to Castle Rackrent. Morgan's novel, however, is much more explicitly political, displaying clear Jacobin feminist politics. She emphasizes the legacy of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland and uses the novel to promote an Irish view of Irish history and prehistory.
Some of the early novels of Charles Robert Maturin (1782–1824) covered ground similar to that covered by Edgeworth. However, he is now best remembered for Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). This is a Faust
Faust
Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend; a highly successful scholar, but also dissatisfied with his life, and so makes a deal with the devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Faust's tale is the basis for many literary, artistic, cinematic, and musical...
ian tale of a man, Melmoth, who sells his soul to the devil and then wanders round Europe trying to find someone to take on his satanic bargain for him. It is told through the accounts of those he approaches to help him. The book brought a whole new dimension to the Gothic novel and is considered a cult masterpiece.
William Carleton
William Carleton
William Carleton was an Irish novelist.Carleton's father was a Roman Catholic tenant farmer, who supported fourteen children on as many acres, and young Carleton passed his early life among scenes similar to those he later described in his books...
(1794–1869) came from a large family and his father was a poor tenant farmer. Carleton was educated at hedge schools and spent much of his youth surrounded by extreme poverty. His Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, which made him an extremely popular author, showed life on the other side of the social divide from the many 19th century Irish novels written by members of the landlord class.
John Banim
John Banim
John Banim , was an Irish novelist, short story writer, dramatist, poet and essayist, sometimes called the "Scott of Ireland." He also studied art, working as a painter of minatures and portraits, and as a drawing teacher, before dedicating himself to literature.-Early life:John Banim was born in...
(1798–1842) was born in Kilkenny
Kilkenny
Kilkenny is a city and is the county town of the eponymous County Kilkenny in Ireland. It is situated on both banks of the River Nore in the province of Leinster, in the south-east of Ireland...
into a prosperous farming family. He studied art in Dublin and then returned home to work as an art teacher. In 1820, after recovering from tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
, he went back to Dublin to pursue a career in writing. He wrote plays and poetry, but is best remembered for his novels, many of them written in collaboration with his brother Michael Banim
Michael Banim
-Works:He assisted John in the O'Hara Tales, where he used the name "Abel O'Hara," and there is difficulty in allocating their respective contributions. While John was the more experienced writer, Michael provided material based on his social observations...
(1796–1874). Their major works in fiction were the twenty-four volumes of The Tales of the O'Hara Family. One of these, The Nowlans is among the finest of all 19th century novels. The first Catholic
Catholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
Irish novelists of any note, the Banims wrote the first realistic fictional portraits of the Irish peasants and their novels spare no details of the sufferings endured by their people at the time of the Penal Laws.
Gerald Griffin
Gerald Griffin
Gerald Griffin was an Irish novelist, poet and playwright.-Biography:He was born in Limerick, Ireland, the son of a brewer. He went to London in 1823 and became a reporter for one of the daily papers, and later turned to writing fiction...
(1803–1840) was born in Limerick. Like his friend John Banim, Griffin wrote poetry and plays, and like so many other Irish dramatists
Irish theatre
The history of Irish theatre begins with the Gaelic Irish tradition. Much of the literature in that Celtic language was destroyed by conquest, except for a few manuscripts and fragments, such as the Book of Fermoy...
he moved to London in search of success. However, his reputation rests on The Collegians (1989), a novel he wrote after returning to Ireland. The Collegians is based on a real life court case in which Daniel O'Connell
Daniel O'Connell
Daniel O'Connell Daniel O'Connell Daniel O'Connell (6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847; often referred to as The Liberator, or The Emancipator, was an Irish political leader in the first half of the 19th century...
acted for the defence.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was born in Dublin into a literary family of Huguenot origins and lived there for most of his life. He is famous for his Gothic fiction
Gothic fiction
Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story"...
(some of which is based on Irish folklore) and mystery novels. He was the premier ghost story writer of the nineteenth century and had a seminal influence on the development of this genre in the Victorian era. Both his grandmother, Alice Sheridan Le Fanu and great uncle, Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan was an Irish-born playwright and poet and long-term owner of the London Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. For thirty-two years he was also a Whig Member of the British House of Commons for Stafford , Westminster and Ilchester...
, were playwrights. His niece, Rhoda Broughton
Rhoda Broughton
Rhoda Broughton was a novelist.-Life:Rhoda Broughton was born in Denbigh in North Wales on 29 November 1840. She was the daughter of the Rev. Delves Broughton youngest son of the Rev. Sir Henry Delves-Broughton, 8th baronet. She developed a taste for literature, especially poetry, as a young girl...
, would become a very successful novelist.
Charles Kickham
Charles Kickham
Charles Joseph Kickham was an Irish revolutionary, novelist, poet, journalist and one of the most prominent members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.-Early life:...
(1828–1882) was born in County Tipperary
County Tipperary
County Tipperary is a county of Ireland. It is located in the province of Munster and is named after the town of Tipperary. The area of the county does not have a single local authority; local government is split between two authorities. In North Tipperary, part of the Mid-West Region, local...
. At the age of thirteen, he was involved in a gunpowder accident, permanently injuring his sight and hearing. A Young Irelander, he was arrested in 1865 for writing 'treasonous' articles and sentenced to fourteen years penal servitude. He started writing novels in prison and his Knocknagow; or The Homes of Tipperary (1879) was the most popular Irish novel of the 19th century.
Edith Anna Somerville
Edith Anna Somerville
Edith Anna Œnone Somerville was an Irish novelist who habitually signed herself as "E. Œ. Somerville". She wrote in collaboration with her cousin "Martin Ross" under the pseudonym "Somerville and Ross"...
(1858–1949) and her cousin, Violet Florence Martin (1862–1915) published their first novel, An Irish Cousin in 1889 under the names of Somerville and Ross
Somerville and Ross
Somerville and Ross were an Anglo-Irish writing team, perhaps most famous for their series of books that were made into the TV series The Irish R.M.....
. They went on to enjoy enormous popularity with books like The Irish R.M. and The Real Charlotte, a novel of the first rank. Following in the footsteps of Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, they popularised big house novels as an Irish genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
.
Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker
Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula...
(1847–1912) was born in Dublin and studied Mathematics at Trinity College
Trinity College, Dublin
Trinity College, Dublin , formally known as the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, was founded in 1592 by letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I as the "mother of a university", Extracts from Letters Patent of Elizabeth I, 1592: "...we...found and...
. Although he wrote some 18 books, he is best known as the author of Dracula
Dracula
Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker.Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to relocate from Transylvania to England, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor...
. His work represents a continuation of the Irish Gothic tradition of Maturin and Le Fanu.
By the 1880s, the main outline of the Irish novel had been drawn up. Typically, the best novels of the 19th century addressed the 'national question' via the relationship between landlord and tenant and was written either by a member of the landlord class who used fiction to call for an improved relationship based on mutual respect, or by a member of the Catholic middle class who was sympathetic to the tenants. This situation may be seen as not atypical of colonial literature, the colonists attempt to absorb the colonised into a unified world picture while the colonised attempt to promote a sense of separate identity. This 19th century novel was soon to face two challenges, one from the emergence of modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
, the other from the collapse of colonial rule and the emergence of the Irish Free State
Irish Free State
The Irish Free State was the state established as a Dominion on 6 December 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed by the British government and Irish representatives exactly twelve months beforehand...
.
Into the Modern
George Moore (1852–1933) spent much of his early career in ParisParis
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and was one of the first writers to use the techniques of the French
French literature
French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in French language, by citizens...
realist novelists in English. His novels were often controversial. A Drama in Muslin (1886) was banned from public libraries because it dealt with lesbianism. Esther Waters (1894), the book that finally established his reputation as a novelist in the tradition of Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
, had as its subject extramarital sex and illegitimacy, and The Brook Kerith (1916) imagined a Christ who did not die on the cross but who was nursed back to health and then travelled to India to study mysticism. Moore was involved in the setting up of the Abbey Theatre
Abbey Theatre
The Abbey Theatre , also known as the National Theatre of Ireland , is a theatre located in Dublin, Ireland. The Abbey first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904. Despite losing its original building to a fire in 1951, it has remained active to the present day...
and wrote several volumes of memoirs. His short stories helped popularise the form among Irish authors and he can be seen as one of the precursors of the most famous Irish novelist of the 20th century, James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
.
Joyce (1882–1941) is often regarded as the father of the literary genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
"stream of consciousness" which is best exemplified in his famous work, Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
. Joyce also wrote Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...
, Dubliners
Dubliners
Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They were meant to be a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century....
, and the semi-autobiographical
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialised in the magazine The Egoist from 1914 to 1915, and published first in book format in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch, New York. The first English edition was published by the Egoist Press in February 1917...
. Ulysses, often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century, is the story of a day in the life of a city, Dublin. Told in a dazzling array of styles, it was a landmark book in the development of literary modernism. If Ulysses is the story of a day, Finnegans Wake is a night epic, partaking in the logic of dreams and written in an invented language which parodies English, Irish and Latin and is called Joycespeak, deemed virtually unreadable at the time of its release, it became a cult classic with the emergence of the beat generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
, particularly William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Joyce's high modernism had its influence on coming generations of Irish novelists, most notably Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
(1906–1989), Brian O'Nolan (1912–1966), who published as both Flann O'Brien
Flann O'Brien
Brian O'Nolan was an Irish novelist, playwright and satirist regarded as a key figure in postmodern literature. Best known for novels such as At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman and An Béal Bocht and many satirical columns in The Irish Times Brian O'Nolan (5 October 1911 – 1 April 1966) was...
and Myles na Gopaleen, and Aidan Higgins
Aidan Higgins
-Life:His upbringing in a landed Catholic family in Celbridge, County Kildare, Ireland, provided material for his first experimental novel, Langrishe, Go Down...
(born 1927). Beckett, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, is one of the great figures in 20th century world literature. Perhaps best known for his plays, he wrote many works of fiction and his trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, written, like Waiting for Godot, in the period between 1947 and 1949, is perhaps the greatest of all second generation modernist fiction.
O'Nolan was bilingual and his fiction clearly shows the mark of the native tradition, particularly in the imaginative quality of his storytelling and the biting edge of his satire. These traits are especially evident in At Swim-Two-Birds
At Swim-Two-Birds
At Swim-Two-Birds is a 1939 novel by Irish author Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It is widely considered to be O'Brien's masterpiece, and one of the most sophisticated examples of metafiction....
(1939), which was highly praised by Joyce, in An Béal Bocht
An Béal Bocht
An Béal Bocht is a 1941 novel in Irish by Brian O'Nolan, published under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest Irish-language novels of the 20th century. An English translation by Patrick C...
(1941), written in Gaelic, and in The Third Policeman
The Third Policeman
The Third Policeman is a novel by Irish author Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It was written between 1939 and 1940, but after it initially failed to find a publisher, the author withdrew the manuscript from circulation and claimed he had lost it. The book remained...
, published in 1967, after his death.
Cathal Ó Sándair
Cathal Ó Sándair
-Biography:Born in Weston-super-Mare, England to an English father and Irish mother, his family moved to Ireland when he was a child. While still a school boy, Ó Sandair published a story in the first issue of the magazine Gael Óg in 1938. His first novel appeared in 1943 and featured Réics Carló,...
(1922–1996), one of the most prolific Irish language authors, produced over one hundred novels, many of them westerns featuring cowboys and gun fights. Born in Weston Super Mare, England to an English father and Irish mother. His first novel appeared in 1943 and featured Réics Carló, the most famous Irish language detective. Ó Sándair is reputed to have published 160 books and sold more than 500,000 copies.
The big house novel prospered into the 20th century, and Aidan Higgins' first novel Langrishe, Go Down is an experimental example of the genre. Higgins later fiction tended towards greater disjunction and experimentation. He has also published short stories and several volumes of memoirs.
More conventional exponents of the big house novel include Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE was an Irish novelist and short story writer.-Life:Elizabeth Bowen was born on 7 June 1899 at 15 Herbert Place in Dublin, Ireland and was baptized in the nearby St Stephen's Church on Upper Mount Street...
(1899–1973), whose novels and short stories include Encounters (1923), The Last September (1929), and The Death of the Heart (1938) and Molly Keane
Molly Keane
Molly Keane was an Irish novelist and playwright . She grew up at Ballyrankin in County Wexford and was educated at a boarding school in Bray, County Wicklow . She married Bobby Keane, one of a Waterford squirearchical family in 1938 and had two daughters...
(1904–1996) (writing as M.J. Farrell), author of Young Entry (1928), Conversation Piece (1932), Devoted Ladies (1934), Full House (1935), and The Loving Without Tears (1951) among others.
Francis Stuart
Francis Stuart
Henry Francis Montgomery Stuart was an Irish writer. His novels have been described as having a thrusting modernist iconoclasm. Awarded the highest artistic accolade in Ireland before his death in 2000, his unwillingness to take a clear moral stance with regard to his years spent in Nazi...
(1902–2000) started his literary life as a protege of W. B. Yeats and married Isuelt, daughter of Maude Gonne. He published his first novel, Women and God in 1931. Stuart was a prolific novelist, but many of his books are now long out of print. He went to work in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
in the late 1930s, and declined to leave with the outbreak of the Second World War. During the war, he broadcast anti-British talks on German radio. The controversy surrounding these actions was to stay with Stuart until his death. However, his finest and most enduring novel, Black List, Section H (1971), is a barely fictionalised account of those years.
With the rise of the Irish Free State
Irish Free State
The Irish Free State was the state established as a Dominion on 6 December 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed by the British government and Irish representatives exactly twelve months beforehand...
and the Republic of Ireland
Republic of Ireland
Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...
, the terms of the 'national question' shifted. The issue of land ownership had been more or less resolved and the real question now was how to build a nation state. Inevitably, novelists from the so-called lower social classes began to dominate. Frequently, these authors wrote of the narrow, circumscribed lives of the lower-middle classes and small farmers. Exponents of this style range from Brinsley MacNamara
Brinsley MacNamara
Brinsley MacNamara was an Irish writer.Born as John Weldon near Delvin, County Westmeath, he worked for the Abbey Theatre from 1909, and later as the registrar of the National Gallery of Ireland....
(1890–1963) (real name John Weldon), whose 1918 The Valley of the Squinting Windows could be said to have created the genre, to John McGahern
John McGahern
John McGahern was one of the most important Irish authors of the latter half of the twentieth century. Before his death in 2006 he was hailed as "the greatest living Irish novelist" by The Observer.-Life:...
(born 1934), whose first novel, The Dark (1965), a portrayal of child abuse in a rural community, cost him his job as a teacher.
Brian Moore
Brian Moore (novelist)
Brian Moore was a Northern Irish novelist and screenwriter who emigrated to Canada and later lived in the United States. He was acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland after the Second World War, in particular his explorations of the inter-communal divisions of The...
(1921–1999) was born in Belfast
Belfast
Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...
but became a citizen of Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
in 1953. He wrote a series of scrupulously written novels examining the Catholic conscience in the modern world.
In the 1960s, Ann Moray
Ann Moray
Ann Moray was a singer and novelist. A native of Wales, Moray married Juan Lopez de Ceballos, a Venezuelan diplomat.While biographical information is difficult to find, according to liner notes on her recording, “The Love Songs of Robert Burns” , she studied music in Vienna. During World War II,...
returned to her Irish roots in Rising of the Lark (1964), A Fair Stream of Silver (1965), and Gervase (1970), as well as by turning to traditional Irish song in her concerts.
The short story
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
has also proven popular with Irish fiction writers. Well known short story writers include Frank O'Connor
Frank O'Connor
Frank O’Connor was an Irish author of over 150 works, best known for his short stories and memoirs.-Early life:...
(1903–1966) and Sean O'Faolain (1900–1991).
Irish Fiction Now
Contemporary Irish fiction has moved to reflect the changes in the society that produces it. There are fewer novels set in the countryside and more urban fiction is being written. The last few years have also seen a rise in the volume of popular fiction being published across a range of genres from romantic novels to hardboiled detective stories set in New York. Some notable names are John BanvilleJohn Banville
John Banville is an Irish novelist and screenwriter.Banville's breakthrough novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011...
, Sebastian Barry
Sebastian Barry
Sebastian Barry is an Irish playwright, novelist, and poet. He has been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and has won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year....
, Maeve Binchy
Maeve Binchy
Maeve Binchy is an Irish novelist, newspaper columnist and speaker. Educated at University College Dublin, she worked as a teacher then a journalist at The Irish Times and later became a writer of novels and short stories.Many of her novels are set in Ireland, dealing with the tensions between...
, Dermot Bolger
Dermot Bolger
Dermot Bolger is an Irish novelist, playwright and poet born in Finglas, a suburb of Dublin.His work is often concerned with the articulation of the experiences of working-class characters who, for various reasons, feel alienated from society. Bolger questions the relevance of traditional...
, John Boyne
John Boyne
John Boyne is an Irish novelist.- Biography :He was educated at Terenure College, before heading to trinity college, dublin, and studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where he won the Curtis Brown prize. But it was during his time at Trinity that he began to get published...
, Eoin Colfer
Eoin Colfer
Eoin Colfer is an Irish author. He is most famous as the author of the Artemis Fowl series, but he has also written other successful books. His novels have been compared to the works of J. K. Rowling...
, Seamus Deane
Seamus Deane
Seamus Deane is an Irish poet, novelist, and critic.Born in Derry, Northern Ireland, Deane was born into a Catholic nationalist family. He attended St. Columb's College in Derry, Queen's University Belfast and Pembroke College, Cambridge University . At St...
, Roddy Doyle
Roddy Doyle
Roddy Doyle is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Several of his books have been made into successful films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. He won the Booker Prize in 1993....
, Anne Enright
Anne Enright
Anne Enright is a Booker Prize-winning Irish author. She has published essays, short stories, a non-fiction book and four novels. Before her novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, Enright had a low profile in Ireland and the United Kingdom, although her books were favourably reviewed...
, Jennifer Johnston
Jennifer Johnston
Jennifer Johnston is an Irish novelist, winner of the Whitbread Book Award for The Old Jest in 1979, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977...
, Patrick McCabe, Mike McCormack
Mike McCormack (Irish writer)
Mike McCormack is an Irish author. He has published a collection of short stories, Getting It In The Head, and two novels - Crowe's Requiem and Notes From A Coma....
, John McGahern
John McGahern
John McGahern was one of the most important Irish authors of the latter half of the twentieth century. Before his death in 2006 he was hailed as "the greatest living Irish novelist" by The Observer.-Life:...
, Joseph O'Connor
Joseph O'Connor
Joseph Victor O'Connor is an Irish novelist. He is known for his 2002 historical novel Star of the Sea. Before success as an author he was a journalist with the Sunday Tribune newspaper and Esquire magazine...
, Keith Ridgway
Keith Ridgway
Keith Ridgway is a Dublin-born award-winning writer. He currently lives in Edinburgh.-Writings:Ridgway's first published fictional prose work was Horses, which appeared in Faber First Fictions Volume 13 in 1997. In 1998 The Long Falling, was published by Faber & Faber, London...
, Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín is a multi-award-winning Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic, and, most recently, poet.Tóibín is Leonard Milberg Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton University in New Jersey and succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the...
, William Trevor
William Trevor
William Trevor, KBE is an Irish author and playwright. He is considered one of the elder statesman of the Irish literary world and widely regarded as the greatest contemporary writer of short stories in the English language....
, and William Wall
William Wall
William "Bill" Wall is an Irish novelist, poet and short story writer. He was born in Cork City in 1955, but grew up in the coastal village of Whitegate. He received his secondary education at the Christian Brothers School in Midleton. He progressed to University College Cork where he graduated in...
. There are many upcoming writers including Gerard Beirne
Gerard Beirne
Gerard Beirne is an Irish author currently living in Canada.His novel The Eskimo in the Net was published by Marion Boyars in 2003 and was short-listed for the 2004 Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award...
and Claire Keegan
Claire Keegan
Claire Keegan is an Irish short story writer. She was born in County Wicklow in 1968, the youngest of a large Roman Catholic family. She travelled to New Orleans, Louisiana when she was seventeen and studied English and Political Science at Loyola University...
. There has also been an increasing emphasis on writing by women which found concrete expression in the founding of the Arlen House publishing venture.
Fiction by Irish authors has won considerable acclaim recently with two winners of the Booker Prize: John Banville's The Sea
The Sea
-Films:*La Mer , an 1895 French short, black-and-white, silent documentary film directed by Louis Lumière*The Sea , a 1933 Polish short, documentary film directed by Wanda Jakubowska...
in 2005 and Anne Enright's The Gathering
The Gathering (Enright novel)
The Gathering is the fourth novel by Irish author Anne Enright. It won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, eventually chosen unanimously by the jury after having largely been considered an outsider to win the prize...
in 2007. Several more authors, including Colm Tóibín, Patrick McCabe, and Sebastian Barry have all been shortlisted twice. Barry lost out on the Booker Prize in 2008 but was awarded the Costa Book Prize
Costa Book Awards
The Costa Book Awards are a series of literary awards given to books by authors based in Great Britain and Ireland. They were known as the Whitbread Book Awards until 2005, after which Costa Coffee, a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship....
for his novel The Secret Scripture
The Secret Scripture
The Secret Scripture is a 2008 novel written by Irish playwright Sebastian Barry.-Plot summary:The main character is a one-hundred year old woman, Roseanne McNulty, who now resides in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital. Having been a patient for some fifty years or more, Roseanne decides to...
in 2009. J. G. Farrell
James Gordon Farrell
James Gordon Farrell , known as J.G. Farrell, was a Liverpool-born novelist of Irish descent. Farrell gained prominence for his historical fiction, most notably his Empire Trilogy , dealing with the political and human consequences of British colonial rule...
won the award twice for his novels Troubles
Troubles (novel)
Troubles is a 1970 novel by the English author J.G. Farrell. It won the Lost Man Booker Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Troubles concerns the dilapidation of a once grand Irish hotel , in the midst of the political upheaval during the Irish War of Independence .The novel is the first...
and The Siege of Krishnapur
The Siege of Krishnapur
The Siege of Krishnapur is a novel by the author J. G. Farrell, published in 1973.Inspired by events such as the sieges of Cawnpore and Lucknow, the book details the siege of a fictional Indian town during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 from the perspective of the British residents...
(published in 1970 and 1973, respectively).
Writers such as John Boyne, Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes
Marian Keyes
Marian Keyes is an Irish Book Awards-winner Irish novelist and non-fiction writer, best known for her work in women's literature. She has sold over more 22 million copies worldwide and been translated into 32 languages...
, and Cecilia Ahern have had considerable commercial success not only in Ireland but also internationally.
See also
- Irish literatureIrish literatureFor a comparatively small island, Ireland has made a disproportionately large contribution to world literature. Irish literature encompasses the Irish and English languages.-The beginning of writing in Irish:...
- Irish poetryIrish poetryThe history of Irish poetry includes the poetries of two languages, one in Irish and the other in English. The complex interplay between these two traditions, and between both of them and other poetries in English, has produced a body of work that is both rich in variety and difficult to...
- Irish theatreIrish theatreThe history of Irish theatre begins with the Gaelic Irish tradition. Much of the literature in that Celtic language was destroyed by conquest, except for a few manuscripts and fragments, such as the Book of Fermoy...
- List of Irish novelists
- List of Irish poets
- List of Irish short story writers
- List of people on stamps of Ireland