Critical Anthology for the Study of Modern Irish Literature [antikvár]

Preface The present collection entitled Critical Anthology for the Study of Modem Irish Literature contains extracts from a selection of articles and books that were published by scholars from Ireland and other English-speaking countries. All were written within the last 16 years, and most of them within the last couple of years, so the volume intends to offer up-to-date critical material dealing with modern Irish literature from the century to the present, understanding "modern" in the broader sense. The inclusions are hoped to represent a range of critical approaches and perspectives from the more traditional to the theoretical, therefore some of them concerning the same areas may enter into fruitful dialogue with each other. Together they also represent the richness and diversity of the contemporary inquiry into modern Irish literature written in English. The anthology is divided into three parts: the first one focuses on aspects of the Irish cultural background, the second one offers material on Irish literature in the colonial period and during the Literary Revival, and the third one, which proves to be the largest, includes extracts from critical texts that deal with literature written after independence to the present. The extracts from the works were selected with the intention of representing the core argument of the respective articles and book chapters, hopefully not sacrificing important portions of them. Because of omitting parts of the original texts, which is marked by a sequence of three dots, references and "works cited" items were rearranged, while footnotes and endnotes were renumbered to make them continuous in the anthology. The idea of selecting material for a Critical Anthology for the Study of Modern Irish Literature and publish it as textbook arose from teaching experience. Since the 1980s there has been an increasing interest in the teaching and studying of Irish literature at the English departments of Hungarian universities and teachers' training colleges. A significant problem, however, has been posed by the relative lack of cridcal texts available to both teachers and students. Fortunately, in recent years the Irish Embassy of Budapest has donated books to the institutions of higher educadon where courses in