Irish literature after Yeats and Joyce, from the 1920s onwards, includes texts that have been the subject of much contention. For a start, how should Irish literature be defined: as works which have been written in Irish or as works written in English by the Irish? It is a period in which ideas of Ireland--of people, community, and nation--have been both created and reflected, and in which conceptions of a distinct Irish identity have been articulated, defended, and challenged; a period which has its origins in a time of intense political turmoil. Corcoran focuses his chapters on various...

Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return offers an imaginative new reading of the work of a writer still too little known. Neil Corcoran considers the theme of "return" in her work in various senses, examining her treatment of Ireland, children, and war. Relating her work to some significant non-fictional material, he offers a view of her as a writer who returns us anew to the history of her time, and of ours.

Elizabeth Bowen is a writer who is still too little appreciated. Neil Corcoran presents here a critical study of her novels, short stories, family history, and essays, and shows that her work both inherits from the Modernist movement and transforms its experimental traditions.
Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return explores how she adapts Irish Protestant Gothic as a means of interpreting Irish experience during the Troubles of the 1920s and the Second World War, and also as a way of defining the defencelessness of those enduring the Blitz in wartime London. She employs versions of the...

Part of the "Longman Literature in English" series which aims to provide students of literature with a critical introduction to the major genres in their historical and cultural context. This text examines English poetry since 1940.

Neil Corcoran's book is a major survey and interpretation of modern British poetry since 1940, offering a wealth of insights into poets and their work and placing them in a broader context of poetic dialogue and cultural exchange. The book is organised into five main parts, beginning with a consideration of the late Modernism of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden and ranging, decade by decade, from the poetry of the Second World War and the New Romanticism' of Dylan Thomas to the Movement, the poetry of Northern Ireland, the variety of contemporary women's poetry and the diversity of the...

In 2016, Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature 'for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'. This collection of essays by leading poets and critics examines Dylan's poetic genius, as well as his astounding cultural and musical influence

In 'Ballad of a Thin Man' in 1966, Dylan launched a withering attack on the myopic critic of culture: 'Something is happening here/ And you don't know what it is, / Do you, Mister Jones?' Yet Dylan has been a subject of consuming interest to many of the most significant poets and critics over the...