[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 138: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 150: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 151: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 152: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 153: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 154: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 155: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 156: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 157: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 158: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 159: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 160: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 161: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4130: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3009) [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4130: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3009) [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4130: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3009) [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4130: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3009) The Internet Book Database of Fiction - Detailed view for the Book: Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing
Seamus Deane is the editor of this anthology. Field Day is an affiliation of writers and poets from the North and South of Ireland, founded by the playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea. Its purpose is to present a version of Ireland"s history, past and present. Under the editorship of scholar and poet Seamus Deane, 1500 years of writing by the Irish and the Anglo-Irish, in English, Latin, French and Gaelic, is here assembled. In making the selections, says Deane in his introduction, "we avoid the narrow sense of the word "literature," extending it to cover various other kinds of writing" -- speeches and songs as well as poems, short stories, drama and excerpts from novels. Volume III is a treasure trove of modern Irish literature -- everyone is here, including a few now rehabilitated as Irish poets, such as Louis MacNeice; the essays that accompany each section, even the ones on those objects of literary industry, Joyce and Beckett, manage to situate various literary accomplishments against the sweep of Irish, British and European history. Perhaps the anthology"s most important achievement, when all three volumes are taken as a whole, is what Deane refers to as the "meta-narrative," in which a culture struggles against and within a colonizing presence (and language) to discover its own voice while extending the canon of the dominant literature. How this struggle was waged -- in letters, in the streets, in the reaches of song -- is the long, stirring testimony of this invaluable collection.