Inventing Ireland: ,

by Declan Kiberd

Book Overview

Just as Ireland has produced many brilliant writers in the past century, so these writers have produced a new Ireland. In a book unprecedented in its scope and approach, Declan Kiberd offers a vivid account of the personalities and texts, English and Irish alike, that reinvented the country after centuries of colonialism. The result is a major literary history of modern Ireland, combining detailed and daring interpretations of literary masterpieces...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674463633
• ISBN13: 9780674463639
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 719 Pages
• Weight: 2.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.4" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Inventing Ireland

This book is essential to my dissertation topic and was suggested by my director. It provides specific as well as general information about major Irish writers of the 19th century. The first half of the book is very readable -- even entertaining -- the second half, not so much. Any student of Yeats, Wilde, or Synge should probably own a copy.

Don't miss it!

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. 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.

A lively and thought-provoking read!

This book offered me a lot on first reading, and even more upon re-reading. 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 1998 appears on p. 293 "...History thereby becomes a form of science fiction: in order to get a fair hearing in a conservative society, the exponents of revolution had to present their intentions under the guise of a return to the idealized past..." If you're as confused as this Irish American was about how to make sense of the disparate Irish histories - you need this book!