The result is a major literary history of modern Ireland, combining detailed and daring interpretations of literary masterpieces with assessments of the wider role of language, sport, clothing, politics, and philosophy in the Irish revival.
This is the perspective from which he views Irish culture. His history of Irish writing covers Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Heaney, Friel and younger writers down to Roddy Doyle.
This is the most comprehensive and lively history of Ireland's writers ever to be published. It is a controversial survey of the whole course of Irish literature in English since...
Inventing Ireland
In closing, Kiberd outlines an agenda for Irish Studies in the next century and detects the signs of a second renaissance in the work of a new generation of authors and playwrights, from Brian Friel to the younger Dublin writers.