Irish Literary Culture in English

For much of the twentieth century, the reputation of Irish literary writers (beyond the acknowledged ‘greats’ of Yeats, Joyce or Beckett) suffered from their treatment by critics as failed or partly-successful imitators of literary forms successfully realized in the mainstream English tradition. In the past decade, a contrasting critical tendency has tended towards the celebration, and at times the valorization, of Irish writers’ innovations in genre, theme and form. Such reappraisals, supported by significant literary and cultural retrieval projects, in turn have enlivened older debates as to what are the distinctive, common and enduring features of an ‘Irish’ literary tradition.