Though men dominated early Irish society, women dominated the supernatural. Goddesses of war, fertility, and sovereignty ordered human destiny. Christian monks, in recording the old stories, turned these pagan deities into saints, like St Brigit, or into mortal queens like Medb of Connacht.
Soon after her death, Lady Gregory seemed to be virtually forgotten, and the words on her gravestone – "she shall be remembered for ever" – had a very hollow ring about them. It has only been in the last fifty years that Lady Gregory’s reputation has turned round.
William Carleton (1794-1869) is the greatest author to have written about the Irish peasant and the Ireland of the period immediately preceding it: he enables the reader to think back past the Famine into the culture – particularly the peasant culture – of that time, confused, rich, tortured, bilingual, that made him as a writer.
Perhaps nothing is more fascinating to the student of literature than an insight into a writer's creative process, a study of how the published works, from All That Fall to Footfalls, came to be as they are. Theatre of Shadows both defines and takes as its subject the middle period of Samuel Beckett's dramatic writing.
In 1829 Mrs S.C.Hall, an Irishwoman living in England, published a book of sketches set mainly in her native Wexford. Sketches of Irish Life and Character was an immediate success both with literary critics and the general public.
This volume publishes the papers given at the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature's 1993 conference, hosted by the Ain Shams University, Cairo.
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