Irish Literature – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

A Summary and Analysis of James Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Analysing James Joyce is rarely easy. The Irish modernist writer loved ambiguity, the essential mystery and unknowability of everyday life, and the slipperiness of language, and his novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake certainly attest to the last of these.

But before these novels, Joyce wrote a collection of fifteen short stories about life in Ireland’s capital city in the early twentieth century. Dubliners (1914) was Joyce’s first masterpiece, and ‘A Painful Case’ is a miniature masterpiece. You can read ‘A Painful Case’ here.

The Best James Joyce Stories Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

James Joyce’s collection Dubliners (1914) was not an initial commercial success. It sold just 379 copies in its first year of publication, and 120 of those were bought by Joyce himself. Yet Dubliners redefined the short story and is now viewed as a classic work of modernist fiction, with each of its fifteen short stories repaying close analysis. Here are five of Joyce’s very best stories from Dubliners.

A Short Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) wrote ‘Easter 1916’ in the summer of 1916, shortly after the Easter Rising in Dublin and when the events were still fresh in the memory. Yeats had conflicted feelings towards the rising – more details about which can be read here – since he deplored violence (in most cases) as a way of achieving Irish independence from the British.

A Short Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s ‘Death’

An analysis of a short Yeats poem by Dr Oliver Tearle

‘Death’ is not perhaps numbered among the most famous poems by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), but it is probably the shortest of all his finest poems. In just a dozen lines, Yeats examines human attitudes to death, contrasting them with an animal’s ignorance of its own mortality. ‘Death’ was written in 1929 and included in Yeats’s 1933 volume The Winding Stair and Other Poems. Here is ‘Death’, followed by a few words by way of analysis.

Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;

Guest Blog: Yeats the Visionary

By Dr Claire Nally, University of Northumbria William Butler Yeats is best known as a poet (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923), but he was also novelist, playwright, member of the Irish Literary Revival, manager of the Abbey Theatre, Fenian revolutionary, and Senator in the Irish Free State. He was born in … Read more