Irish Stories (Everyman's Library Pocket Classics) - Hardcover

 
9798217008131: Irish Stories (Everyman's Library Pocket Classics)
Hardcover
ISBN 13: 9798217008131
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A beautiful Pocket Classics collection of stories by great Irish writers past and present

Ireland has a long and glorious literary heritage, and this collection rounds up two dozen short stories from across more than two centuries. The stories here reflect both rural and urban Ireland and a variety of literary styles that Irish writers have excelled at, including humor and crime fiction. The short story form in Ireland experienced a golden age in the middle of the twentieth century, and is currently seeing a similarly remarkable resurgence. The major writers gathered here include James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Liam O’Flaherty, Mary Lavin, Frank O’Connor, John McGahern, J. S. Le Fanu, Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, and Kevin Barry.  

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free, cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CHRISTOPHER MORASH is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College, the University of Dublin. The author of numerous books on Irish literature and history, including his most recent, Dublin: A Writer’s City. Since 2019 he has chaired the judging panel for the International Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest prize for a single work in English.

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Foreword by Christopher Morash

For many years, there were two commonly accepted explanations for the extraordinary flourishing of the Irish short story--neither of which was either entirely wrong or entirely convincing.

The first starts from the premise that a centuries-old Irish-language oral story-telling tradition forms a sort of seed bed for the Irish short story, an endlessly fertile imaginative loam out of which tales continuously sprout. This is the kind of explanation that has, if nothing else, a satisfying narrative appeal of its own, and it is certainly true in some instances. The book you are holding opens with a tale by William Carleton, whose Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry were reworkings of the folk tales Carleton had heard growing up in rural County Tyrone, while the Irish-language short stories of Galway-born Padraic Conaire (one of whose stories is included here) show a deep debt to the folkloric tradition into which he was born. Other Irish writers from the early decades of the twentieth century, such as Lady Gregory, collected tales from what they saw as a disappearing folk culture, and 'The Priest That Was Called Mad' (1906), included here, has its origins in the cottages around her home in Coole Park, in County Galway.

However, like all good soils, this origin story is both rich and crumbly. It is less convincing when we rum to Carleton's near contemporary, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, who lived his entire life in Dublin's literary circles, far from folk tales told around a cottage hearth. His gothic stories - like 'The For­ tunes of Sir Robert Ardagh' (1838), included here - may have the feel of a tale told around a fire, but only if we imagine the fire laid in the marble fireplace in one of Dublin's Georgian townhouses. In other words, even when the rural folk tradi­tion was alive and thriving, it required an act of translation.

The second explanation for the continuing vitality of the Irish short story might be considered a version of the first, with a bit more historical and sociological elaboration. It goes like this: the fractured nature oflrish history, ruptured by centuries of colonization, rebellion and a devastating famine, made it difficult, if not impossible, for Irish writers to produce the long, developmental narratives - novels - that were common in other European countries with a more secure sense of their pasts and futures. Hence (the argument went), Irish writers were thrown back upon shorter forms - the lyric poem, the one-act play, and the short story.

For more than one generation of Irish writers in the aftermath of the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), and ensuing Civil War (1922-23), this was an enabling fiction. If nothing else, it helped to explain the profusion of great Irish short-story writers in the middle decades of the twentieth century, a list that includes Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Con­ nor, Liam O'Flaherty, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, and Maeve Brennan, with Edna O'Brien appearing at the end of the period with her first stories in The New Yorker in the mid-195os. In O'Faolain's case, his 1948 book, The Short Story, would establish him not simply as one of the most acclaimed practitioners of the short story in the world, but also one of its principal apologists.

Again, however, there is a problem with this argument, not least in the recognition that in those same years that the short story was being proclaimed the most appropriate literary form for the discontinuities of lrish history, there was no shortage oflrish novels, among them what is arguably the greatest novel of the twentieth century: James Joyce's Ulysses, from 1922.

With the passage of time, however, this argument, too, has lost its credibility. If Ireland in the middle decades of the twentieth was insular, under-developed, and facing an uncertain future, in the final decade of the century this sit­uation would be completely reversed. As its post-industrial economy boomed in the mid-1990s, the conflict in Northern Ireland reached a kind of resolution in 1998, and the moral authority of the Catholic Church shattered like a plaster saint being knocked from a shelf, Ireland went from being an inward-looking, repressed society, hemmed in by literary censorship and enervated by decades of outward migration, to become a prosperous, liberal, globalized, and ethnically diverse country, subject to the same pressures of most of the rest of the developed world, but no longer an outlier. In the process, the rich peaty soil of Irish peasant culture has been well and truly laid with fibre-optic cables.

If the earlier theory connecting the flourishing of the short story in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s to a fractured, under-developed culture were accurate, we should have expected the short story to have withered in the twenty-first century. Instead, however, it has thrived. What is more, it has thrived on its own terms, and not at the expense of the Irish novel, which is also experiencing a kind of golden age. Most of the recent short-story writers included in this volume are also novelists, among them recent winners of the Booker Prize and of the Dublin Literary Award, the world's richest for a single novel. Little wonder that there has been talk - and not just in the usual Dublin pubs - of a golden age of Irish fiction in the twenry-first century, cutting across forms, genres, and every imaginable version of lrishness.

The vibrant persistence of the short story in Ireland across such a history of profound social change might make us inclined to ask: is there anything that binds together the almost two centuries' worth of stories collected here as 'Irish short stories', other than the fact that their authors live or lived in Ireland, and that they are all writing about Ireland. Even the latter insistence that the stories must be set in Ire land is a self-imposed rule for this collection, and it would be equally possible to fill a book with short stories by Irish writers not set in Ireland.

And yet, if we take the longest (probably the most famous) story in the collection as a kind of exemplar - James Joyce's 'The Dead' (1914) - we begin to glimpse two distinctive features that echo across the decades.

The first is a certain insistence on the voice. 'The Dead' is a kind of symphony of voices, from its opening line: 'Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet.' It has been pointed out that, in fact, Lily is not 'literally run off her feet' (she is still standing). However, the phrase Tm literally run off my feet' is what Lily would say if she were asked, even though the sentence is ostensibly spoken by a neutral, omniscient third-person narrator. What has happened here is that the voice of the narrator has picked up the inflections, the turns of phrase, of a minor character. It is as if the voice itself were able to colour the language, like a drop of dye dripped into a glass of water, lasting only until another voice moves into earshot, is picked up and adds its tincture to a mix that is in tum shot through with overlapping threads of direct speech. The result is a story whose essential fabric is the human voice.

In this respect, Joyce's story is not alone in these pages. The earliest story here, Carleton's 'Wildgoose Lodge' (1833), hinges around the contrasting voices of the self-righteous, very proper narrator, and the wild, phonetically rendered speech of the story's peasant characters; from the opposite side of the nineteenth-century social spectrum, Edith Somerville and Martin Ross's stories (such as 'A Nineteenth­ Century Miracle', 1903) work in the same way. Flash forward almost two centuries to Lucy Sweeney Byrne's 'Echoloca­ tions' (2024), and what lingers in the mind after reading is not so much the plot, as the sense of a speaker. Dig...

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Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217008131
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Herausgeber
Morash Christopher
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