This book examines writing in English, Irish, and Spanish by women living in Ireland and by Irish women living on the continent between the.
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Classical, Early, and Medieval Prose and Writers: Classical, Early, and Medieval World History: Civil War American History: Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. More This book examines writing in English, Irish, and Spanish by women living in Ireland and by Irish women living on the continent between the years and Bibliographic Information Print publication date: Authors Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Though English was the dominant Irish literary language in the twentieth century, much work of high quality appeared in Irish. Most attention has been given to Irish writers who wrote in English and who were at the forefront of the modernist movement, notably James Joyce , whose novel Ulysses is considered one of the most influential of the century. The playwright Samuel Beckett , in addition to a large amount of prose fiction, wrote a number of important plays, including Waiting for Godot.
A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature
Writing in Irish has also continued to flourish. Irish has one of the oldest vernacular literatures in western Europe after Greek and Latin. The Irish became fully literate with the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century. Before that time a simple writing system known as "ogham" was used for inscriptions. The introduction of Latin led to the adaptation of the Latin alphabet to the Irish language and the rise of a small literate class, both clerical and lay. The earliest Irish literature consisted of original lyric poetry and versions of ancient prose tales.
The earliest poetry, composed in the 6th century, illustrates a vivid religious faith or describes the world of nature, and was sometimes written in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. The Book of Armagh is a 9th-century illuminated manuscript written mainly in Latin, containing early texts relating to St Patrick and some of the oldest surviving specimens of Old Irish.
It is one of the earliest manuscripts produced by an insular church to contain a near complete copy of the New Testament. The manuscript was the work of a scribe named Ferdomnach of Armagh died or Ferdomnach wrote the first part of the book in or , for Patrick's heir comarba Torbach.
It was one of the symbols of the office for the Archbishop of Armagh. The Annals of Ulster Irish: The Ulster Cycle written in the 12th century, is a body of medieval Irish heroic legends and sagas of the traditional heroes of the Ulaid in what is now eastern Ulster and northern Leinster , particularly counties Armagh , Down and Louth. The stories are written in Old and Middle Irish , mostly in prose, interspersed with occasional verse passages.
The language of the earliest stories is dateable to the 8th century, and events and characters are referred to in poems dating to the 7th. After the Old Irish period, there is a vast range of poetry from mediaeval and Renaissance times. By degrees the Irish created a classical tradition in their own language. Verse remained the main vehicle of literary expression, and by the 12th century questions of form and style had been essentially settled, with little change until the 17th century.
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Medieval Irish writers also created an extensive literature in Latin: The literary Irish language known in English as Classical Irish , was a sophisticated medium with elaborate verse forms, and was taught in bardic schools i. Much of the writing produced in this period was conventional in character, in praise of patrons and their families, but the best of it was of exceptionally high quality and included poetry of a personal nature.
Every noble family possessed a body of manuscripts containing genealogical and other material, and the work of the best poets was used for teaching purposes in the bardic schools.
Women were largely excluded from the official literature, though female aristocrats could be patrons in their own right. Prose continued to be cultivated in the medieval period in the form of tales. The Norman invasion of the 12th century introduced a new body of stories which influenced the Irish tradition, and in time translations were made from English. Irish poets also composed the Dindsenchas "lore of places" , [14] [15] a class of onomastic texts recounting the origins of place-names and traditions concerning events and characters associated with the places in question.
Since many of the legends related concern the acts of mythic and legendary figures, the dindsenchas is an important source for the study of Irish mythology. There are four principal epic cycles in early Irish literature. Fourth is the Historical Cycle , or Cycle of the Kings, stemming from Irish court bards' duty to recount the histories and genealogies of the dynasties they served.
Eliot and Flann O'Brien , among others.
Unusually among European epic cycles, the Irish sagas were written in prose, with verse interpolations expressing heightened emotion. Although usually found in recensions of the later mediaeval period, many of these works are linguistically archaic, and thus throw light on pre-Christian Ireland. The 17th century saw the tightening of English control over Ireland and the suppression of the traditional aristocracy.
This meant that the literary class lost its patrons, since the new nobility were English speakers with little sympathy for the older culture. The elaborate classical metres lost their dominance and were largely replaced by more popular forms.
The consequences of these changes were seen in the 18th century. Poetry was still the dominant literary medium and its practitioners were often poor scholars, educated in the classics at local schools and schoolmasters by trade. Such writers produced polished work in popular metres for a local audience. A certain number of local patrons were still to be found, even in the early 19th century, and especially among the few surviving families of the Gaelic aristocracy.
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Irish was still an urban language, and continued to be so well into the 19th century. There is little evidence of female literacy for this period, but women were of great importance in the oral tradition. They were the main composers of traditional laments. Well after the introduction of printing to Ireland, works in Irish continued to be disseminated in manuscript form.
The first printed book in Ireland was the Book of Common Prayer. Access to the printing press was hindered in the s and the s by official caution, although an Irish version of the Bible known as Bedell 's Bible after the Anglican clergyman who commissioned it was published in the 17th century. A number of popular works in Irish, both devotional and secular, were available in print by the early 19th century, but the manuscript remained the most affordable means of transmission almost until the end of the century.
Manuscripts were collected by literate individuals schoolmasters, farmers and others and were copied and recopied. They might include material several centuries old. Access to them was not confined to the literate, since the contents were read aloud at local gatherings. This was still the case in the late 19th century in Irish-speaking districts. Manuscripts were often taken abroad, particularly to America.
Marie-Louise Coolahan
In the 19th century many of these were collected by individuals or cultural institutions. Jonathan Swift — , a powerful and versatile satirist, was Ireland's first earliest notable writer in English. Swift held positions of authority in both England and Ireland at different times. Many of Swift's works reflected support for Ireland during times of political turmoil with England, including Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufacture , Drapier's Letters , and A Modest Proposal , and earned him the status of an Irish patriot. Oliver Goldsmith — , born in County Longford, moved to London, where he became part of the literary establishment, though his poetry reflects his youth in Ireland.
Edmund Burke — was born in Dublin and came to serve in the House of Commons of Great Britain on behalf of the Whig Party, and establish a reputation in his oratory and published works for great philosophical clarity as well as a lucid literary style. Scots , mainly Gaelic -speaking, had been settling in Ulster since the 15th century, but large numbers of Scots -speaking Lowlanders, some ,, arrived during the 17th century following the Plantation , with the peak reached during the s. In Ulster Scots-speaking areas the work of Scottish poets, such as Allan Ramsay — and Robert Burns —96 , was very popular, often in locally printed editions.
This was complemented by a poetry revival and nascent prose genre in Ulster, which started around They were inheritors of the same literary tradition and followed the same poetic and orthographic practices; it is not always immediately possible to distinguish between traditional Scots writing from Scotland and Ulster. In the 19th century English was well on the way to becoming the dominant vernacular. Down until the Great Famine of the s, however, and even later, Irish was still used over large areas of the south-west, the west and the north-west.
The copying of manuscripts continued unabated. The Great Famine of the s hastened the retreat of the Irish language. Many of its speakers died of hunger or fever, and many more emigrated. The hedge schools of earlier decades which had helped maintain the native culture were now supplanted by a system of National Schools where English was given primacy. Literacy in Irish was restricted to a very few. A vigorous English-speaking middle class was now the dominant cultural force. A number of its members were influenced by political or cultural nationalism, and some took an interest in the literature of the Irish language.
One such was a young Protestant scholar called Samuel Ferguson who studied the language privately and discovered its poetry, which he began to translate. Maria Edgeworth — furnished a less ambiguous foundation for an Anglo-Irish literary tradition. Though not of Irish birth, she came to live there when young and closely identified with Ireland.
She was a pioneer in the realist novel. Their works tended to reflect the views of the middle class or gentry and they wrote what came to be termed "novels of the big house". Carleton was an exception, and his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry showed life on the other side of the social divide. Bram Stoker , the author of Dracula , was outside both traditions, as was the early work of Lord Dunsany.
One of the premier ghost story writers of the nineteenth century was Sheridan Le Fanu , whose works include Uncle Silas and Carmilla.
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The novels and stories, mostly humorous, of Edith Somerville and Violet Florence Martin who wrote together as Martin Ross , are among the most accomplished products of Anglo-Irish literature, though written exclusively from the viewpoint of the "big house". In they published The Real Charlotte. George Moore spent much of his early career in Paris and was one of the first writers to use the techniques of the French realist novelists in English.
Oscar Wilde — , born and educated in Ireland, spent the latter half of his life in England. His plays are distinguished for their wit, and he was also a poet. The growth of Irish cultural nationalism towards the end of the 19th century, culminating in the Gaelic Revival , had a marked influence on Irish writing in English, and contributed to the Irish Literary Revival. This can be clearly seen in the plays of J.
Synge — , who spent some time in the Irish-speaking Aran Islands , and in the early poetry of William Butler Yeats — , where Irish mythology is used in a personal and idiosyncratic way. There was a resurgence of interest in the Irish language in the late 19th century with the Gaelic Revival. This had much to do with the founding in of the Gaelic League Conradh na Gaeilge. The League insisted that the identity of Ireland was intimately bound up with the Irish language, which should be modernised and used as a vehicle of contemporary culture. This led to the publication of thousands of books and pamphlets in Irish, providing the foundation of a new literature in the coming decades.
Patrick Pearse — , teacher, barrister and revolutionary, was a pioneer of modernist literature in Irish. One of the finest writers to emerge in Irish at the time was Seosamh Mac Grianna — , writer of a powerful autobiography and accomplished novels, though his creative period was cut short by illness.
He produced short stories, two novels and some journalism. Academic Skip to main content. Choose your country or region Close. Ebook This title is available as an ebook. To purchase, visit your preferred ebook provider. Oxford Scholarship Online This book is available as part of Oxford Scholarship Online - view abstracts and keywords at book and chapter level.
Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland Marie-Louise Coolahan Despite the huge advances made in constructing women's literary history in recent decades, we still lack a cohesive account of women's writing in early modern Ireland. Coolahan redresses this gap Includes texts in original languages with English translations Organized around literary genres.
Containing Multitudes Gary Schmidgall.