[1] The most popular literary form to emerge from this development was the tale, and the most notable practitioner was William Carleton (1794–1869), author of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830).
An early example in Ireland is George Moore’s collection of stories The Untilled Field (1903), which deal with themes of clerical interference in the daily lives of the Irish peasantry, and of the issue of emigration.
[3] On 7 January 1904 Joyce attempted to publish an essay-story, "A Portrait of the Artist", dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected by the free-thinking magazine Dana.
He decided, on his twenty-second birthday, to revise the story into a novel he called Stephen Hero, which was later re-written as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Examples of Seanchaí are Edmund Lenihan and Eamon Kelly (actor) Liam O'Flaherty published his first collection, Spring Sowing, in 1924, depicting the harsh life of his native Aran Islands.
[6] Important writers have continued writing stories, from the 1960s on, including Cónal Creedon, Benedict Kiely, Mary Lavin, John McGahern, and Michael McLaverty.
[10] Elke D'hoker has commented on the quality of the Irish short story in the twenty-first century, with Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Anne Enright, Bernard MacLaverty, John McGahern, Edna O'Brien, Colm Tóibín and William Trevor publishing collections – or collected stories – to great acclaim.
[13] A modernist pioneer was Patrick Pearse, language activist and revolutionary, and writer of stories of idealistic content in a contemporary European form.
Ó Conaire has been described as the true pioneer of short story writing in Irish because of his rejection of older conventions and his determination to deal fearlessly with the truths of human nature.
The Donegal Gaeltacht brought forth Séamas Ó Grianna, who wrote prolifically and idiomatically about the people of his region, though much of his work has been criticised for its predictability.
Máirtín Ó Cadhain, an idiosyncratic writer, was born in the Conamara Gaeltacht, a region rich in folklore but with no strong literary tradition.
The genre was still dominated by a masculine sensibility, but in 1955 brother and sister Donncha Ó Céileachair and Síle Ní Chéileachair published Bullaí Mhártain, stories dealing with both the Munster Gaeltacht and city life.
[citation needed] An important contemporary practitioners of the genre, the poetic realist Seán Mac Mathúna (born 1935), has published versions of his stories in both Irish and English.
The short story continues to be a favoured form for writers in Irish, possibly because it lends itself to publication in the two main literary magazines, Feasta and Comhar.
Younger readers are addressed by writers like Ré Ó Laighléis, whose stories deal with social problems such as drug abuse.
[citation needed] Recently Jack Hart declared in the preface to his collection From Under Gogol's Nose (2004) that the parameters of the short story had been set too narrowly.