Irish Literature Since 1800

Vance moves from a brief survey of Irish literature prior to 1800 onto the contexts of Irish writing since 1800 covering, romanticism, the Victorian period, the Literary Revival and contemporary Irish writing. He also looks at Ireland in Europe and the Atlantic world, Irish cultural debates and current affairs as contexts for recent and contemporary literature.

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This book surveys Irish writing in English over the last two centuries, from Maria Edgeworth to Seamus Heaney, to give the literary student and the general reader an up-to-date sense of its variety and vitality and to indicate some of the ways in which it has been described and discussed.

It begins with a brief outline of Irish history, of Irish writing in Irish and Latin, and of writing in English before 1800. Later chapters consider Irish romanticism, Victorian Ireland, W.B.Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, new directions in Irish writing after Joyce and the literature of contemporary Ireland, north and south, from 1960 to the present.