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Irish Literature
Irish literature comprises writings in the Irish, Latin, English and Scots ( Ulster Scots) languages on the island of Ireland. The earliest recorded Irish writing dates from the 7th century and was produced by monks writing in both Latin and Early Irish. In addition to scriptural writing, the monks of Ireland recorded both poetry and mythological tales. There is a large surviving body of Irish mythological writing, including tales such as The Táin and Mad King Sweeny. The English language was introduced to Ireland in the 13th century, following the Norman invasion of Ireland. The Irish language, however, remained the dominant language of Irish literature until the 19th century, despite a slow decline which began in the 17th century with the expansion of English power. The latter part of the nineteenth century saw a rapid replacement of Irish by English in the greater part of the country, largely due to the Great Famine and the subsequent decimation of the Irish populatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish Satire, satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whig (British political party), Whigs, then for the Tories (British political party), Tories), poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean (Christianity), Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, "Dean Swift". Swift is remembered for works such as ''A Tale of a Tub'' (1704), ''An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity'' (1712), ''Gulliver's Travels'' (1726), and ''A Modest Proposal'' (1729). He is regarded by the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' as the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms—such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier—or anonymously. He was a master of two styles of satire, the Satire#Classifications, Horatian and Juvenalian styles. His deadpan, ironic writing style, partic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pádraic Ó Conaire
Pádraic Ó Conaire (28 February 1882 – 6 October 1928) was an Irish writer and journalist whose production was primarily in the Irish language. In his lifetime he wrote 26 books, 473 stories, 237 essays and 6 plays. His acclaimed novel '' Deoraíocht'' has been described by Angela Bourke as 'the earliest example of modernist fiction in Irish'. Life Ó Conaire was born in the Lobster Pot public house on the New Docks in Galway on 28 February 1882. His father was a publican, who owned two premises in the town. His mother was Kate McDonagh. He was orphaned by the age of eleven. He spent a period living with his uncle in Gairfean, Ros Muc, Connemara. The area is in the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area) and Ó Conaire learned to speak Irish fluently. He emigrated to London in 1899 where he got a job with the Board of Education. He became involved in the work of the Gaelic League (; historically known in English as the Gaelic League) is a social and cultural organisation wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as ''Man and Superman'' (1902), ''Pygmalion'' (1913) and '' Saint Joan'' (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kate O'Brien (novelist)
Kate O'Brien (3 December 1897 – 13 August 1974) was an Irish novelist and playwright. Biography Kathleen Mary Louise "Kate" O'Brien was born in Limerick City in 1897 to a middle-class family. Following the death of her mother when she was five, she joined her three older sisters as a boarder at Laurel Hill Convent becoming the youngest pupil at the school. She graduated in 1919 in English and French from the newly established University College, Dublin, and she then moved to London, where she worked as a teacher for a year. In 1922–23, she worked as a governess in Bilbao, Basque Country, in the north of Spain, where she began to write fiction.A.L. Mentxaka, ''Kate O'Brien and the Fiction of Identity'' (McFarland, 2011) Upon her return to England, O'Brien worked at the ''Manchester Guardian''. She married Dutch journalist Gustaff Reiner in 1922 but the marriage ended within a year. After the success of her play ''Distinguished Villa'' in 1926, she took to full-time wr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen CBE (; 7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Irish-British novelist and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London. Life Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was born on 7 June 1899 at 15 Herbert Place in Dublin, daughter of barrister Henry Charles Cole Bowen (1862–1930), who succeeded his father as head of their Irish gentry family traced back to the late 1500s, of Welsh origin, and Florence Isabella Pomeroy (died 1912), daughter of Henry FitzGeorge Pomeroy Colley, of Mount Temple, Clontarf, Dublin, grandson of the 4th Viscount Harberton. Florence Bowen's mother was granddaughter of the 4th Viscount Powerscourt. Elizabeth Bowen was baptised in the nearby St Stephen's Church on Upper Mount Street. Her parents later brought her to her father's family home, Bowen's Court at Farahy, near Kildorrery, County Cork, where she spent her summers. When her father became me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. It became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria). Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel ''Ulysses'' (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's ''Odyssey'' are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection ''Dubliners'' (1914), and the novels ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' (1916) and ''Finnegans Wake'' (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism. Joyce was born in Dublin into a middle-class family. He attended the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, then, briefly, the Christian Brothers-run O'Connell School. Despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's unpredictable finances, he excelled at the Jesuit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bram Stoker
Abraham Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) was an Irish author who is celebrated for his 1897 Gothic horror novel '' Dracula''. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Sir Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, which Irving owned. In his early years, Stoker worked as a theatre critic for an Irish newspaper, and wrote stories as well as commentaries. He also enjoyed travelling, particularly to Cruden Bay where he set two of his novels. During another visit to the English coastal town of Whitby, Stoker drew inspiration for writing ''Dracula''. He died on 20 April 1912 due to locomotor ataxia and was cremated in north London. Since his death, his magnum opus ''Dracula'' has become one of the most well-known works in English literature, and the novel has been adapted for numerous films, short stories, and plays. Early life Stoker was born on 8 November 1847 at 15 Marino Crescent, Clontarf, on the northside of Dubli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel ''The Picture of Dorian Gray'', and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46. Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. A young Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, Wilde read Literae Humaniores#Greats, Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional Classics, classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire
Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire or the ''Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire'' is an Irish keen composed in the main by his wife Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, a member of the Gaelic gentry of County Kerry in the 18th century. It has been described as the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century. Eibhlín composed it on the subject of the death of her husband Art on 4 May 1773. It concerns the murder at ''Carraig an Ime'', County Cork, of Art, at the hands of the Irish MP Abraham Morris, and the aftermath. It is one of the key texts in the corpus of Irish oral literature. The poem was composed extempore and follows the rhythmic and societal conventions associated with keening and the traditional Irish wake respectively. The ''Caoineadh'' is divided into five parts composed in the main over the dead body of her husband at the time of the wake and later when Art was re-interred in Kilcrea. Parts of the ''Caoineadh'' take the form of a verbal duel between Ei ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill
Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill (also known as Eileen O'Connell, ) was a member of the Irish gentry and a poet. She was the main composer of ''Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire'', a traditional lament in Irish described (in its written form) as the greatest poem composed in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century. Ní Chonaill was a member of Muintir Chonaill of Derrynane, County Kerry, being one of twenty-two children of Dómhnaill Mór Ó Conaill and Máire Ní Dhonnchadha Dhuibh, and an aunt of Daniel O'Connell. Life Her first marriage at age fifteen was arranged by her parents. Her elderly husband died after only six months and they had no children. In 1767 she fell in love with Captain Art Ó Laoghaire of Rathleigh, Macroom, County Cork. He had recently returned from service in the Hungarian Hussars. Eileen was 23; she had been married to "old O'Connor of Firies" when she was 15, and widowed within six months of that marriage. With the marriage against the ex ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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