The first lecture was devoted to consideration of the origins, character and standing of modern Irish literature in English. Consideration was given to the rise of romantic nationalism in 19th-century Ireland and the epoch-making moment on 25th Nov. 1892 when W. B. Yeats and others convened the first Dublin meeting of the Irish Literary Society, thus heralding the beginning of the Irish Literary Revival, which may be conveniently dated 1892-1922, thus marking the origins and the conclusion of the classical 'independence movement' in Irish culture and society.

The strategy and success of that revival in putting an Irish literature in English into place as part of the wider field of literature in English was considered in relation to the metropolitan market-place. Some emphasis was placed on the no-less significant (if not essentially more important) question of the contribution of the revival to the self-awareness of Irish people, whose role in British culture had been subaltern and tributary - especially catering to the needs of comic diversion and stereotypical comparison with the literary 'Englishman' of the period.

In this connection the writings of Yeats but also Seamus Heaney (at a considerably later date) provide illustrations of the thesis that Ireland and the Irish had been caught between the 'millstones' of England and America and reduced not only in their economic and social viability but also in their self-esteem by the hegemonic system of the imperialist period. In modern Irish writing, a first fruit of the reflection of Irish life and Irish language (viz., Hiberno-English) is a validation of Irish experience and what Seamus Heaney called an 'empowering' of the marginalised so that Irish writers and readers no longer 'look up tO’ the metropolis but look beyond their own national situation with the equable gaze of equals.

In this way the nationalist projects in culture and in politics are are inseparably bonded, although many cultural nationalists withheld themselves from political activism in the revolutionary period. Douglas Hyde, for instance, spoke out against the 'flaming indiscretions' of the Gaelic League in 1913 (which he had founded in 1893) when political separation was espoused as a goal of the association, thus making it a training-ground for the gunmen of the 1910s and 1920s.

Once kick-started by Yeats, however, the Irish literary revival quickly began to produce writers who did not share his ideals in either literature or politics. In other words, the theme of 'revivalism' - i.e., a ceaseless reverence for what was most ancient in Irish imagination - was not their object so much as modernisation. James Joyce, in particular, rejected the 'romantic' tendency of the revival and struck for a hard, classical kind of writer which incidentally entailed a remorseless critique of Irish society, nationalist or otherwise.

A little later, Samuel Beckett worked in an existentialist vein quite independently of Irish nationalism and paused to consider it only to castigate the national habit of picking up the 'turds' of history to carry them reverentially in procession. He sought a literature that engaged with the grounds of being, not the essence of Irishness, however conceived.

The novels of Liam O’Flaherty and Kate O’Brien represent difference ways of constructing the Irish social community largely depending on whether 'the people' is identified with the successful bourgeois-nationalist (and Catholic) community or with the working-class agrarian masses who were conventionally referred to as the 'peasantry' and who were the chief victims of the famine. Differences in dialect (style) and ideolect (beliefs) are evident in these novels. There have been virtually no successors to Kate O’Brien's project as an Irish writer and the bourgeois novel in Ireland may be said to have been still-born with her Ante-Room.

The case of Flann O’Brien, who embodies in himself the dual elements of modern Irish culture (Gaelic and Hiberno-English) is especially revealing as illustrating the inevitable 'tip' of Irish writing into satirical self-exposure. There is, in his novels, no narrative voice which can be identified as a stable guide to experience - a negative feature shared by virtually all Irish writers of any standing - but equally, there is a remorseless and often hilarious caricature of the different 'voices' that have been summoned up by polemicists and ideologues to represent Irishness in the world of culture debate: voices such as the translation-mode of Anglo-Irish literature or the 'pure' voice of the Irish peasant. If the treatment of these matters in his novels is not manifestly tragic, the predicament in question genuinely is and readers much look for the traces of that tragedy in his mordant way of writing.

Modern Irish poetry since Yeats has grown out of the shadow of a very great imaginative writer who laid down imperiously the defining terms of Irish writing for his generation and some generations after. Only with the resurgence of Irish poetry marked by the emergence of the Ulster poets in the 1960s and after can it be said with confidence that a post-Yeatsian tradition has emerged. Seamus Heaney and John Montague deal in different ways with the legacy of colonialism in Ireland of which, as Ulstermen, they are so keenly aware. Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, as members of the 'colonising' community (i.e., the Protestants of Ireland), show how poorly such categories serve to define consciousness and how richly the Irish historical condition imbues its writers with a complex, sympathetic and lyrically vital sensibility.

The women poets Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill effect on the 'distaff' side something like the revolution that the literary revivalists and the Ulster poets brought about in relation to the conventionally-gendered 'masculine' conception of the poet in Ireland. In fiction, the emergence of the modern can be traced in the writings of Colm Toibin and Patrick mcCabe, writers of widely difference temperament and interests, while Jennifer Johnston and Emma Donoghue represent widely divergent possibilities of female vision in the same period and national circumstances.

Because of the breadth of the period in question and the open-ended character of contemporary writer, this course places some reliance on anthologies such as Patrick Crotty's edited compilation of Modern Irish Poetry and Dermot Bolger's Contemporary Irish Fiction. The use of these as 'testers' (or even 'tasters') is always available to students but those wishing to answer assessment questions on the individual authors covered had better examine those authors in complete editions and collections.

Students are advised that there is a module website - at the present address - and that lecture material is reflected on it in various forms according to the preference and resources of the lecturers. In most instances, the undertaking given is to supply a sampler of the texts considered and quotations employed to illustrate the lectures.

This is so because most lecturers associated with the module prefer to deliver their views of the material, spell out the connecting narrative, and articulate the questions and the judgements which arise in reflecting on these matters in the lecture-hall without committing all to paper. I believe that this method of disclosure is both fresher and more inspiring than the conventional 'typescript' lecture and I hope that you will agree by the time that we have finished. It is, further, an incentive to regard the lecture as a special kind of event, not to be missed and not to be made up by application to this website.

May I end by wishing you joy and excitement in tracing the legacy of Irish writing from the 1930s to the present, as we attempt to do in this module. It is my constant hope and my conviction that students, working independently or with guidance, invariably bring back from their reading of primary and secondary material the very best observations and the most interesting quotations and I have no hesitation in including these on the EIRData website - a resource which I hope you will all use - when they reach me in written form.

When I do so, I take care to make proper acknowledgement and where possible to notify the student so that the citation can be quoted in a CV context. We are all scholars here and this is a communal undertaking. How far Irish writing is actually communal it is for us all to decide in the weeks ahead!