Modern Irish Literature

Reading List
 

Please note: all titles listed under 'indicative reading' below should be available in the on-campus bookshop. However, that bookshop has been extremely unreliable in the past and students are encouraged to use other outlets or electronic ordering options to purchase their books. (The hyperlinks behind some titles under 'indicative reading' below should lead you straight to the amazon ordering page for that specific book.)

The most important textbook for the course is the Modern Irish Drama anthology edited by Harrington (see below). We'll be using plays from this anthology in both autumn and spring terms. Some texts for this course will also be made available online (see timetable) but please remember that reading a long play on the screen is not to every one's taste, and that printing it off can be both time-consuming and costly!

Please get in touch with any queries you might have on your reading for this course.

1) Indicative Reading

• Beckett, Samuel, Murphy (London: Picador, 1973)

• Boland, Eavan, Outside History (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990)

• Bowen, Elizabeth, The Last September (Vintage, 1998).

• Carr, Marina, Portia Coughlan (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1996)

• Deane, Seamus, Reading in the Dark (London: Vintage, 1997)

• Harrington, John P. (ed.), Modern Irish Drama, Norton Critical Edition (London and New York: Norton, 1991) [contains playtexts we will be discussing in weeks 02, 03, 06, 07, 16, 18, 22]

• Heaney, Seamus, North (London: Faber, 1975)

• Joyce, James, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)

• Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís, Dancers Dancing (Dublin: Headline Review, 1999)

• Synge, John Millington, The Aran Islands (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)

• Yeats, William Butler, The Major Works, ed. Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)

2) Useful anthologies

• Bolger, Dermot (ed.), Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction (London: Vintage, 1995)

• Bourke, Angela et al. (eds), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vols 4 and 5: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003)

• Crotty, Patrick (ed.), Modern Irish Poetry (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995)

• Deane, Seamus (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991)

• Muldoon, Paul (ed.), The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (London: Faber, 1986)

• O'Brien, Peggy (ed.), Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry 1967-2000 (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1999)

• Ormsby, Frank (ed.), A Rage for Order. Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1992)

• Pierce, David (ed.), Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000)

3) Selected Secondary Reading

• Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988)

• Campbell, Matthew (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

• Cleary, Joe, and Claire Connolly (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

• Connolly, Claire (ed.), Theorizing Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

• Corcoran, Neil, After Yeats and Joyce. Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)

• Deane, Seamus, Celtic Revivals. Essays in Modern Irish Literature (London: Faber, 1985)

• Deane, Seamus, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson, 1986)

• Goodby, John, Irish Poetry since 1950. From Stillness into History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)

• Grene, Nicholas, The Politics of Irish Drama. Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

• Kenner, Hugh, A Colder Eye. The Modern Irish Writers (New York: Knopf, 1983)

• Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland. The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996)

• Longley, Edna, The Living Stream. Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1994)

• Murray, Christopher, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)

• Peach, Linden, The Contemporary Irish Novel: Critical Readings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

• Richards, Shaun (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)