Irish Literature

V

After Independence: 1949 to the Present

In 1949 the Irish Free State became the independent Ireland and Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. However, conflicts have continued between the two entities over British presence in Northern Ireland. The Irish Free State’s neutrality during World War II (1939-1945) left the new republic isolated after the war; this isolation, along with economic stagnation, brought a decade of high emigration. Membership in the European Economic Community (EEC, now called the European Union) from 1973 brought with it a more progressive social policy and economic growth that encouraged Irish people living abroad to return. But violence between nationalist Catholics and Protestant unionists continued to wrack the island and a number of peace initiatives failed.

Despite the ongoing troubles, Ireland continued to enjoy world prominence in literature. On both sides of the border, Irish people faced questions of identity, reread and reconsidered Irish history, and started to develop a pluralist society that valued the contributions of both the native and the settler traditions.

By the 1950s, new fiction writers had joined the company of Ireland’s internationally known authors. Brian Moore's novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) portrayed a Belfast spinster who suffers a nervous breakdown precipitated by her alcoholic guilt and her fantasy about a fellow lodger. It continued a theme of individual identity overwhelmed by societal pressures. Elizabeth Reegan, the heroine of The Barracks (1963) by John McGahern, tries to find meaning from her suffering as she dies of cancer in a police barracks in rural Ireland.

Coming of age in the bleak Irish countryside of the 1950s and 1960s, a period marked by high emigration and church domination, is a theme of McGahern's The Dark (1965), as it is of The Country Girls (1960) and The Lonely Girls (1962) by Edna O’Brien. The difficult choice of emigration to America lies at the center of Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), a play by Brian Friel. An Giall (1958; The Hostage, 1958), a play by Brendan Behan, called political violence into question and was one of a number of plays produced in the Damer, Dublin's Irish-language theatre.

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The publication of Nuabhéarsaíocht (New Verse, 1950), edited by Sean O'Tuama, introduced a new generation of lyric poets writing in the Irish language. This anthology contained works by the Aran poet Máirtín O'Direáin, the learned and elegant Máire Mhac an tSaoi, and the ironic, complex Seán O'Riordáin. Irish poets writing in English—John Hewitt, Thomas Kinsella, and John Montague—brought modernist sensibilities to Irish rural and urban landscapes.

Beginning in the 1970s another artistic and literary renaissance emerged from the crucible of religious and political violence in Northern Ireland. Novels dealing with the conflict proliferated. They included Shadows on Our Skin (1977) and The Railway Station Man (1984) by Jennifer Johnston; Proxopera (1977) by Benedict Kiely; Cal (1983) by Bernard MacLaverty; Fools of Fortune (1983) and The Silence of the Garden (1988) by William Trevor; Lies of Silence (1990) by Brian Moore; and Reading in the Dark (1996) by Seamus Deane.

A generation of new poets in the 1970s was led by Seamus Heaney, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995. Set in the rural Northern Ireland surroundings of his childhood, Heaney's poems are often short and punctuated by the intensity of his language. His powerful words contrast sharply with the reticence of the people he describes. The literary journal Innti (Today), which began publication in 1970 at University College in Cork, served as a primary avenue for the publication of Irish-language poetry and introduced young poets such as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Ní Dhomhnaill brought a postmodern sensibility to Irish-language poetry, and her works include Féar Suaithinseach (Marvelous Grass, 1984). Other notable Irish poets from the 1970s to the 1990s include Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Irish history and identity, matters of gender, and the relationship between poet and community are common themes of this generation of poets.

Contemporary Irish history has prompted Irish playwrights to revisit personal and community events. Friel's Translations (1981) considers the 1830s remapping of Ireland when Irish place names were translated into English. His Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) discusses personal memory in the context of communal memory and myth. Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985) by Frank McGuinness portrays the experience of Northern Irishmen fighting in World War I (1914-1918). The Steward of Christendom (1995) by Sebastian Barry depicts the mental anguish of Barry’s institutionalized and delusional great-grandfather, who was the former head of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

As the 20th century drew to a close the voices heard in Irish literature tended to be more urban and more inclusive than before, representing women, children, gays, the unemployed, and emigrants. Roddy Doyle set his Barrytown Trilogy of comic urban novels in a fictional north Dublin community of high unemployment, where witty, racy, and ironic language is often the only antidote to drabness and despair. Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), which won Britain’s Booker Prize, explored the impressionable mind of a 10-year-old boy. Doyle's novel A Star Called Henry (1999) marked the beginning of a promised new trilogy tracking Ireland's 20th-century history through the eyes of a dirt-poor character named Henry Smart.

The memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996) by Frank McCourt, an American writer of Irish descent, described—with irony, but little bitterness—a childhood of extreme poverty in Limerick in the 1930s. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for autobiography. Seamus Deane’s autobiographical novel, Reading in the Dark (1996), told of a boyhood in a working-class Catholic family in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the 1940s. Emma Donoghue, an Irish-born writer living in England, chronicled a young woman coming to terms with her sexuality in Stir-Fry (1994). As the many members of the current generation who live and work outside Ireland demonstrate, the contemporary Irish writer is defined by a voice and by a habit of mind, not by geography.

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