“Inventing Ireland is a major contribution to Irish literary studies, a work that at its great modern literatures is especially valuable as nationalism itself becomes social context out of which they came, he fashions a nation that is hospitable to.
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- Inventing Ireland
- Colm Tóibín reviews ‘Inventing Ireland’ by Declan Kiberd · LRB 18 April
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Inventing Ireland
Joyce shows us the underbelly of Irish society while Synge reveals the heart and soul of the peasant waiting for emancipation. Wilde celebrates his Irishness in witty displays while Shaw pierces the pretensions of the British. Kiberd sheds light on the dark corners and reveals new aspects of the strange connection between the Irish and their art forms. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. Very good for getting a grasp of the history of Irish Literature, Kiberd's writing style is very easy to read.
Colm Tóibín reviews ‘Inventing Ireland’ by Declan Kiberd · LRB 18 April
One person found this helpful 2 people found this helpful. As the old saying goes, I couldn't put it down. One person found this helpful. Declan Kiberd's is one of the few historioes of contemporary Irish literature which manages to do justice to the literature in Irish language, too.
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It is also a fascinating view on the development of the modern Irish nationalism and ideology. It is also brilliantly written. I have found it a treasure trove, also because it offers valuable analogies for a student of my own country's history. I sincerely hope you buy it, and read it, and re-read it. It is worth ten times what you pay for it.
This book offered me a lot on first reading, and even more upon re-reading.
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I'm sure I'll be going back again, as his ideas about not only Anglo-Irish literature, but the uses of history in constructing a present identity for Ireland really impressed me a great deal. My absolute favorite quote of appears on p. History thereby becomes a form of science fiction: See all 5 reviews. Customers who viewed this item also viewed.
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An Irish Literature Reader: The Teenage Dirtbag Years: A Short History of Ireland, Feedback If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us. Would you like to report poor quality or formatting in this book? Click here Would you like to report this content as inappropriate? Click here Do you believe that this item violates a copyright? There's a problem loading this menu right now. There were poems in Catalan on the death of Terence MacSwiney on hunger strike in Both Catalan and Irish politicians could, and still can, play tricks with the arithmetic of the Cortes in Madrid and the Mother of Parliaments in Westminster.
But it was the general shape and atmosphere of Catalan cultural politics between and which constantly reminded me of Ireland.
There were echoes, too, between the careers of Joyce and Picasso, who found all this rhetoric and invention too much for them, who viewed Dublin and Barcelona respectively as centres of paralysis, and who got the hell out as early as they could. Declan Kiberd tries in this vast, wide-ranging book to find various contexts in which the literature of the Irish Renaissance can be placed. To write a deliberately new style, whether Hiberno-English or Whitmanian slang, was to seize power for new voices in literature Since there were no clear protocols for a national poet, Yeats and Whitman were compelled to charm an audience into being by the very tone of their own voices, assuming a people in order to prove that they were really there.
Kiberd looks for Indian and African models for the Irish experience, so that figures such as Tagore and Rushdie, Naipaul and Achebe, Fanon and Nandy float on the surface of these pages. Kiberd loves playing with paradoxes, oppositions and juxtapositions. This results in a good deal of fine writing and exciting analysis, but the playing with fixity is, at times, a mask for some very old-fashioned views on Irish nationalism and Irish history.
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There is a good reason why there is no footnote here: In a book so concerned with flux and non-binary systems, such phrases fall with a dull thud. The arbitrary undeserved nature of suffering is something on which Beckett meditated in all his writings, and this becomes the attempt to scrutinize and fathom the mind of a God who does not feel obliged to make any clarifying appearance of explanations Kenneth Tynan once quipped that Beckett had a very Irish grudge against God, which the merely godless would never feel — a line which may indeed derive from the famous moment in Endgame when Hamm and Clove curse their creator: Feb 24, Shashi Martynova rated it it was amazing.
It is an astounding work of genious reader, critic, observer, and human being. I would give it 15 stars if I could. This book is enough to start any serious exploration of Inner personal Ireland to anyone who is at sea where to begin with this mammoth cultural treasure of a culture.
The only exasperation of mine is that my reading list became now irreperably revised and prolongued well beyond any horizon. Aug 08, Raymond M. I have learnt a lot from the work of Kiberd and admire much of what he has written.
However, in his complex review of how independent Ireland was invented I find a major blind-spot when he deals with the indigenous middle-class. His stance is not unique and has played a part in sidelining the urban native middle-class. The lack of historical analysis by the academic world has allowed Kiberd to treat the class as a caricature. A hostile attitude bubbles to the surface every time the ind A re-read: A hostile attitude bubbles to the surface every time the indigenous urbanites appear in his work.
Linked phrases like middle-class vulgarity; petty gradations of snobbery; shabby-genteel city life; hard-nosed bourgeois materialism; pretentions to respectability; the new comprador middle-class; this philistine group What seems to bug Kiberd about the Dublin native middle-class is the audacity of pretentious and ignorant country people who flood the city in the lead-up to independence and then become the elite of the new state. He claims that members of the nationalist movement for Irish political and cultural freedom It is true that all urban people can trace themselves back to the country at some stage.
But the urban elites who seized the positions of power, according to Kiberd He goes on to claim that the native middle-class of urban Ireland This is incorrect as demonstrated in Celt in the City and other sources. Jul 10, James rated it it was amazing. Recommended on a memorable evening in a pub in County Cork, thanks Cahel, this is the kind of book makes me forget all my good intentions of not giving too many five-star ratings.
The Irish literary tradition not having been a particular interest, I knew some of the authors Kiberd marshalls into his history of imaginary Ireland pretty well, but most sketchily or not at all. Kiberd has the gift, though, of writing interestingly about books I strongly suspect I would find tedious themselves, and o Recommended on a memorable evening in a pub in County Cork, thanks Cahel, this is the kind of book makes me forget all my good intentions of not giving too many five-star ratings.
Kiberd has the gift, though, of writing interestingly about books I strongly suspect I would find tedious themselves, and of deftly quoting from others I cannot now wait to read. Quite apart from its value as an account of Irish literature, Inventing Ireland serves as an admirable introduction to post-colonial literary studies, a branch of criticism I have always found to be theory-laden in the extreme, but which here is clearly demonstrated in critical practice; we see for ourselves how Irish literature serves as English literature's dreamland.
A revelation of a book. Sep 17, Barry rated it really liked it. Professor Kiberd gives a great analysis of the creation of an Irish identity in Literature. From a nation that was occupied by the British, forced to learn their language and forced to follow their rules to an independent Ireland that has created some of the greatest writers in the English language, Kiberd shows the path and makes it intensely interesting. Mar 10, Cody rated it it was amazing Shelves: Though this book has an obvious agenda what book doesn't?
I especially recommend it to anyone with postcolonial "tendencies. Aug 24, Kate rated it liked it Recommends it for: Academics, 20th Century Irish Literature. Interesting, and Kiberd is definitely high up on the list of those to read in Irish Lit Crit. Feb 07, Hilary is currently reading it. It's about damn time I read this. Worth reading, if not for the introduction alone. Mar 01, Gill marked it as unfinished. There are a lot of quality issues with the ebook version of this one. So I've had to return it for a refund. It obviously was not meant to be! Jun 19, Anna rated it really liked it.
Andrew rated it liked it Oct 03, Gabriela Gajdzica rated it it was amazing Jul 06, Joe Greenwell rated it it was amazing Jan 04,