Declan Kiberd's is one of the few historioes of contemporary Irish literature which manages to do justice to the literature in Irish language, too. It is also a fascinating view on the development of the modern Irish nationalism and ideology. It is also brilliantly written. I have found it a treasure trove, also because it offers valuable analogies for a student of my own country's history. I sincerely hope you buy it, and read it, and re-read it. It is worth ten times what you pay for it.

This book offered me a lot on first reading, and even more upon re-reading. I'm sure I'll be going back again, as his ideas about not only Anglo-Irish literature, but the uses of history in constructing a present identity for Ireland really impressed me a great deal.

My absolute favorite quote of 1998 appears on p. 293 "...History thereby becomes a form of science fiction: in order to get a fair hearing in a conservative society, the exponents of revolution had to present their intentions under the guise of a return to the idealized past..." If you're as confused as this Irish American was about how to make sense of the disparate Irish histories - you need this book!

This penetrating collection of essays about Irish literary history offes a quirky overview of much of Irish literature in it English and Gaelic incarnations. One country, two languages, and a sequence of great artists in every generation. From the Gaelic bards to the Belfast Agreement, Irish writers have drawn equally on two traditions to heal the rifts of their land. A celebration of the enduring Irish classics, this book by one of their most eloquent and adept readers offers an unusually brilliant and accessible survey of the greatest works since 1600 in Gaelic and English. Together, they have shaped one of the world's most original literary cultures. For the great seventeenth﷓ and eighteenth﷓century Gaelic poems of dispossession, and for later work in that language, Declan Kiberd provides vivid and idiomatic translations into English. Irish poets and writers, early and modern, confronted modernity as a cataclysm and responded by using traditional forms in novel and radical ways. Kiberd's book embraces the works of the Gaelic bards, Yeats, Synge, Beckett, and Joyce; the myths such as the Cuchulain story, the lament for Art O'Laoghaire, and Dracula; and works that have exerted a palpable influence on the course of human action, such as Swift's Drapier's Letters, the speeches of Edmund Burke, or the autobiography of Wolfe Tone. The book closes with a moving and daring coda on the Anglo﷓Irish agreement, claiming that the seeds of such a settlement were sown in the works of Irish literature.

New Voices is -- of course -- a collection of younger scholars' work in Irish critical studies. The freshness of the voices, and their variety, is part of what gives this collection its charm. Cogent argument, along with willingness to take on accepted views to look anew, completes the picture. This is a fine collection of contemporary views.

This is a good book to read for those who are very interested in the uprising. It is NOT a good idea to read this book before reading a current and comprehensive book about the Easter Rising. This would be a good follow up to either Coogan's or De Rosa's books on the subject. It was written and compiled by the Irish Times who was decisively against the uprising and this is very clear in some of the analysis in the book. It also has some inaccuracies and errors that can be explained by both its political prejudice and the proximity in time to the Rising in which it was compiled. It is a mandatory book for those of us who are hopelessly obsessed with those events so long ago in 1916