(View entire post here)

Penguin Continues the Week-Long Ode to Ireland

By the end of the 19th century, British occupation led to increased social unrest and a rising support for the fight for political autonomy. An invigorated nationalism and a renewed interest in the Gaelic literary heritage of Ireland prompted an Irish Literary Renaissance. With Dublin at the center of this revival, poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats established the Abbey Theater with another Irish playwright, Lady Augusta Gregory. Social and moral issues dominated the stage at the Abbey in the plays of AE (a/k/a George Russell), Sean O'Casey, and J. M. Synge whose work The Playboy of the Western World incited riots.

At the helm of the Abbey Theater Yeats wrote more than 30 plays, but he is best remembered as a visionary poetic alchemist of the highest order. A literary descendant of William Blake, and spiritually connected with the mythology of Ireland, Yeats' poems were unexampled in the 20th century for their technical brilliance and rarefied beauty, and are now recognized as some of the finest poetry ever written in the English language.

The stages of London in the late 19th century were riven with the bullets of Oscar Wilde's deadly wit whenever his drawing room comedies were performed. But Wilde, while in self-imposed exile in Paris, turned to the French language and Levantine exoticism for the setting of his last play, Salome.

George Bernard Shaw (who won the Nobel Prize for literature two years after Yeats in 1925) was a scintillating intellect who wrote brilliant criticism and plays that established him as one of the greatest dramatists of the 20th century.

And pagan ritual and Christian iconography clashed wickedly in Bram Stoker's Dracula, a defining work of the horror genre.

The Irish Literary Revival paved the way for the revolutionary expression of James Joyce, a towering figure of the 20th century literature who ushered in a new literary era with the publication of his novel Ulysses in 1922. His stream of consciousness method propelled the novel into near fantastical regions of the interior monologue and opened up new narrative possibilities for every writer after him. His work, which Joseph Campbell characterized as "the process of a total transmutation of the whole world of human experience", ascended to dizzying heights with his meta-mythological Finnegans Wake.

Posted by: Clinton Wilson, Online Customer Retention Manager

St. Patrick's Day, History of Ireland Penguin Bloggers, Clinton Wilson