Author Description

"Irish literature remains, in the popular imagination, a matter of Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Yeats and Joyce. Its mythology is rooted in the South and in the nineteenth century. This book proposes a new view of Irish literary tradition. The recent prominence of Seamus Heaney and other poets from the north of Ireland, and the complex Irish, British and cosmopolitan contexts of their work, have altered our sense of the nature and development of Irish literature in English. It is no longer sufficient or helpful to think in terms of a tradition largely excluding northern Ireland and originating only in the nineteenth century. While the importance of Yeats and Joyce is indisputable, it is misleading to insist that the whole course of Irish literature culminates in their work. By tracing a broader stream of tradition to its sources in the seventeenth century, Norman Vance offers new perspectives on the vexed question of Irish national and cultural identity, an issue which has become more problematic in the light of contemporary political and sectarian hostilities in northern Ireland."--BOOK JACKET.