Irish prose fiction
Such fiction was an adaptation and elaboration of earlier oral material and was the work of a learned class who had acquired literacy with the coming of Latin Christianity.
Its greatest exponent was James Joyce, a highly influential modernist whose only rival in Irish was Máirtín Ó Cadhain.
The earliest Irish prose fiction is a branch of heroic literature: stories dealing with supernatural personages and human heroes.
Among these were Merugad Uilis mac Leirtis, a prose adaptation from the Odyssey via Latin, and Stair Ercuil agus a bhás, a fifteenth century composition translated from the English version of a French work.
[2] The outstanding fictional prose work of seventeenth century Ireland is Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis, a Rabelaisian satire written by members of the Gaelic elite on what they saw as the upstart lower classes, who were taking advantage of the disruption to the social order caused by the weakening of the old Irish nobility.
[3] The late seventeenth century saw the birth in Dublin of Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), a satirist and clergyman who in 1726 published the first great work by an Anglo-Irish writer, Gulliver's Travels.
The eighteenth century saw the birth in Ireland of two distinguished novelists, Laurence Sterne (1713 – 1768) and Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774), both of whom, however, made their careers in England.
Edith Anna Somerville (1858–1949) and her cousin, Violet Florence Martin (1862–1915) wrote in collaboration and popularised the "big house" novel, based on the life of the Irish gentry class to which they themselves belonged.
George Moore (1852–1933) spent much of his early career in Paris and was one of the first writers to use the techniques of the French realist novelists in English.
The persistence of traditional genres in Irish can be seen in the papers of Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin, a Kilkenny schoolteacher, merchant and diarist of the early nineteenth century.
Best known for his plays, he also wrote works of fiction, including his trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (originally written in French).
More conventional exponents of the big house novel include Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), whose novels and short stories include Encounters (1923), The Last September (1929), and The Death of the Heart (1938) and Molly Keane (1904–1996) (writing as M.J. Farrell), author of Young Entry (1928), Conversation Piece (1932), Devoted Ladies (1934), Full House (1935), The Loving Without Tears (1951) and other works.
He went to work in Germany in the 1930s and his reputation was affected by his decision to remain there during World War II, broadcasting anti-British talks on German radio.
With the rise of the Irish Free State and the Republic of Ireland, some authors began to write of the lives of the lower-middle classes and small farmers.
[5][6] Brian O'Nolan (known by the pen name Flann O'Brien) is best known for two works in English, the surrealistic and satirical At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), highly praised by Joyce, and The Third Policeman, published in 1967, after his death.
Notable names straddling the late 20th and early 21st-century include John Banville, Sebastian Barry, Gerard Beirne, Dermot Bolger, Seamus Deane, Dermot Healy, Jennifer Johnston, Eugene McCabe, Patrick McCabe, John McGahern, Edna O'Brien, Colm Tóibín, William Trevor and William Wall.
Writers to have emerged in the 21st-century include Claire Keegan, Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Cónal Creedon, Jamie O'Neill and Keith Ridgway.
[8][9][10][11] There has been a rise in the amount of popular fiction being published in a range of genres, including romantic novels and detective stories set in New York.
Irish writers of a commercial bent include Cecelia Ahern (PS, I Love You), Maeve Binchy (Tara Road), John Boyne (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas), Marian Keyes (Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married) and Joseph O'Connor (Cowboys and Indians, Desperadoes).
He was followed by Father Peadar Ua Laoghaire, who in the 1890s published, in a serialised form, a folkloristic novel strongly influenced by the storytelling tradition of the Gaeltacht, called Séadna.
Among the many writers who published prose fiction in Irish in the first decades of the twentieth century, two stood out: Patrick Pearse and Pádraig Ó Conaire.
Ó Conaire was a realist, dealing with urban as well as rural life, but also wrote an absurdist novel called Deoraíocht, unlike anything else published at the time.
Donncha Ó Céileachair and Síle Ní Chéileachair, brother and sister, published the influential collection Bullaí Mhártain in 1955.
The work of Daithí Ó Muirí is distinguished by its black humour and absurdist quality, a contrast to the social realism of much modern writing in Irish.
