42 Facts About Irish literature

The earliest recorded Irish literature writing dates from the seventh century and was produced by monks writing in both Latin and Early Irish literature.

The outstanding modernist prose writer in Irish literature was Mairtin O Cadhain, and prominent poets included Caitlin Maude, Mairtin O Direain, Sean O Riordain and Maire Mhac an tSaoi.

Irish-language literature continues to flourish in the modern day with Eilis Ni Dhuibhne and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill being prolific in poetry and prose.

Several Irish literature writers have excelled at short story writing, in particular Edna O'Brien, Frank O'Connor, Lord Dunsany and William Trevor.

Irish literature became fully literate with the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century.

Related searches

The earliest literature in Irish consisted of original lyric poetry and prose sagas set in the distant past.

Medieval Irish writers created an extensive literature in Latin: this Hiberno-Latin literature was notable for its learned vocabulary, including a greater use of loanwords from Greek and Hebrew than was common in medieval Latin elsewhere in Europe.

Irish literature poets composed the Dindsenchas, a class of onomastic texts recounting the origins of place-names and traditions concerning events and characters associated with the places in question.

Irish literature was still an urban language, and continued to be so well into the 19th century.

Irish literature is best known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield, his pastoral poem The Deserted Village, and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man and She Stoops to Conquer .

Down until the Great Famine of the 1840s and even later, Irish literature was still used over large areas of the south-west, the west and the north-west.

Irish literature was preceded by James Hardiman, who in 1831 had published the first comprehensive attempt to collect popular poetry in Irish.

Carleton was an exception, and his Traits and Stories of the Irish literature Peasantry showed life on the other side of the social divide.

Novels and stories, mostly humorous, of Edith Somerville and Violet Florence Martin, are among the most accomplished products of Anglo-Irish literature, though written exclusively from the viewpoint of the "big house".

Irish literature's plays are distinguished for their wit, and he was a poet.

Synge, who spent some time in the Irish literature-speaking Aran Islands, and in the early poetry of William Butler Yeats, where Irish literature mythology is used in a personal and idiosyncratic way.

Irish literature was followed by, among others, Padraic O Conaire, an individualist with a strongly European bent.

Irish literature produced short stories, two novels and some journalism.

The traditional Irish literature-speaking areas are now less important as a source of authors and themes.

Urban Irish speakers are in the ascendancy, and it is likely that this will determine the nature of the literature.

Irish literature was a leading authority on Mid Ulster English .

Irish literature employs an orthography that presents the reader with the difficult combination of eye dialect, dense Scots, and a greater variety of verse forms than employed hitherto.

Irish literature has produced a trilogy of novels Wake the Tribe o Dan, The Back Streets o the Claw and The Man frae the Ministry, as well as story books for children Esther, Quaen o tha Ulidian Pechts and Fergus an tha Stane o Destinie, and two volumes of poetry Alang the Shore and Oul Licht, New Licht .

Irish literature received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 and was a member of the Irish Senate from 1922 to 1928.

Total of four Irish writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature – W B Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney.

Related searches

Irish literature is best known both for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.

Irish literature's faith had a profound effect on his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.

Irish literature was part of the generation of "thirties poets" that included W H Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, nicknamed "MacSpaunday" as a group – a name invented by Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco .

John Hewitt, whom many consider to be the founding father of Northern Irish literature poetry, was born in Belfast, and began publishing in the 1940s.

Irish literature's collections include The Day of the Corncrake and Out of My Time: Poems 1969 to 1974 and his Collected Poems in 1991.

Irish literature has published a number of volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories and two volumes of memoir.

Irish literature's is the winner of the 1989 Cheltenham Prize for her collection On Ballycastle Beach, and has translated into English The Water Horse, a selection of poems in Irish by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill.

Irish literature held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004.

Irish literature was acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland after the Second World War, in particular his explorations of the inter-communal divisions of The Troubles.

Irish literature was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1975 and the inaugural Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1987, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times .

Bernard MacLaverty, from Belfast, has written the novels Cal; Lamb, which describes the experiences of a young Irish literature Catholic involved with the IRA; Grace Notes, which was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize, and The Anatomy School.

Irish literature won the Irish Times Prize for Poetry in 1995 for his Collected Poems, and subsequently he moved to Dublin when he was elected a member of Aosdana.

Irish literature won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 1979 and 1980.

Irish literature's short story "Light of Other Days" was a Hugo Award nominee in 1967, as was his novel The Ragged Astronauts in 1987.

Irish literature was commissioned by RTE to write Insurrection, a 50th anniversary dramatic reconstruction of the Irish uprising of Easter 1916.

Irish literature's plays include the historical epic Famine, which deals with the Great Famine between 1846 and spring 1847, The Sanctuary Lamp, The Gigli Concert and Bailegangaire .

Drama in Irish literature has since encountered grave difficulties, despite the existence of interesting playwrights such as Mairead Ni Ghrada.