Farming in modern Irish literature /
"This innovative study analyzes the range of representation of farming in Irish literature in the period since independence/partition in 1922, as Ireland moved from a largely agricultural to a developed urban society. In many different forms, poetry, drama, fiction, and autobiography, writers h...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Oxford ; New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
2021.
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "This innovative study analyzes the range of representation of farming in Irish literature in the period since independence/partition in 1922, as Ireland moved from a largely agricultural to a developed urban society. In many different forms, poetry, drama, fiction, and autobiography, writers have made literary capital by looking back at their rural backgrounds, even where those may be a generation back. The first five chapters examine some of the key themes: the impact of inheritance on family, in the patriarchal system where there could only be one male heir; the struggles for survival in the poorest regions of the West of Ireland; the uses of childhood farming memories whether idyllic or traumatic; the representation of communities, challenging the homogeneous idealizing images of the Literary Revival; the impact of modernization on successive generations into the twenty-first century. The final three chapters are devoted to three major writers in whose work farming is central: Patrick Kavanagh, the small farmer who had to find an individual voice to express his own unique experience; John McGahern in whose fiction the life of the farm is always posited as alternative to an arid and rootless urban milieu; Seamus Heaney who re-imagined his farming childhood in so many different modes throughout his career"--Publisher's description. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource : illustrations, maps |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780191893353 0191893358 9780192605528 0192605526 |