James Joyce's coming-of-age story, a tour de force of style and technique

The first, shortest, and most approachable of James Joyce's novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays the Dublin upbringing of Stephen Dedalus, from his youthful days at Clongowes Wood College to his radical questioning of all convention. In doing so, it provides an oblique self-portrait of the young Joyce himself. At its center lie questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive in style,...

This book identifies the origin, the development and, ultimately, the success of the Irish literary tradition in English as one of the first literatures that is both national and colonial. It demonstrates the remarkable relationships between works as diverse as Joyce's Dubliners and Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the worlds of the French Revolution and the Irish famine. Deane also shows how almost all the activities of Irish print culture--novels, songs, typefaces, historical analyses, poems--struggle within the limits imposed by its inheritance.

Seamus Deane's first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend - the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly -...

Brian Friel was born in County Tyrone in 1929 and worked as a teacher before turning to full-time writing in 1960. His first stage success was in 1964 with Philadelphia, Here I Come, which established his claim as heir to such distinguished predecessors as Yeats, Synge, O'Casey, and Behan. In 1979 he and actor Stephen Rea formed the Field Day Theatre Company, whose first theatrical production was Friel's Translations in 1980. Also included in this selection are The Freedom of the City, set in Londonderry in 1970; Living Quarters, which Desmond MacAvok in the Evening Press called ""one of the...

These three essays each deal with a different aspect of nationalism and the role of cultural production as a force in understanding the aftermath of colonization. Focusing particularly on the contribution of Yeats, they offer an analysis of political and cultural issues in present-day Ireland.