For the Love of Ireland - A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers

Informationen zum Autor Susan Cahill, PhD, is the editor of many highly praised anthologies, including Desiring Italy, For the Love of Ireland, Wise Women, The QPB Anthology of Writing by Women, and Women and Fiction . Author of the novel Earth Angels and co-author with Thomas Cahill of A Literary Guide to Irleand, she has taught at Queens College and Fordham University. She lives in New York City and, for part of the year, Rome. Klappentext Welcome to the Ireland of its Writers Walk the streets of Dublin with Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Roddy Doyle. Contemplate the wild glens of Wicklow with John Millington Synge and Seamus Heaney. Wander the thrilling Cliffs of Moher with Wallace Stevens. Visit antic Limerick with Frank McCourt; mysterious Coole Park with Lady Gregory; breathtaking Sligo with William Butler Yeats; wild Donegal with Brien Friel; and hidden Clare with Edna O'Brien. No place has inspired more great literature than Ireland, which in each new generation gives birth to an astonishing number of poets, storytellers, and dramatists. For the literary pilgrim to arrive, book in hand, at the pub where Joyce set a scene or the mountain where Yeats imagined a myth is to uncover fresh meaning in the works of writers in love with their native landscape. In For the Love of Ireland, Susan Cahill offers the jewels of Irish literature. Each selection is followed by traveler's advice on how to find and fully experience the place that's about. Whether you take this book with you to Ireland or savor it in your armchair, you will be enriched, ennobled, and entertained by writers of remarkable range and at the top of their form.Jonathan Swift 1667—1745 The first great Irish writer to work in English, Jonathan Swift was born and died a Dubliner. He never knew his father, who died before he was born. Separated from his mother as a baby, he was supported by a stingy uncle who paid his fees at Trinity College, where he reacted against what he considered the pedantry of the curriculum and a foolishly authoritarian discipline. Known as a rebel, he earned his degree "by special grace." For the next twenty-five years, he went back and forth between Ireland and England, playing a variety of roles: antiwar journalist, participant in Whig and Tory political intrigues, advocate for the Church of Ireland (the Irish branch of the Anglican Church, in which he'd been ordained in 1694), London wit and writer who hoped to rise into a bishopric in the Church of England. Instead, he was made the dean of Saint Patrick's Cathedral in his native Dublin. The appointment horrified him. As he wrote to his friend Alexander Pope, he'd been sentenced to exile, "to die like a poisoned rat in a hole." But as the following writings show, the Irish exile had a change of heart. Disappointment and despair were overcome by the dean's passionate commitment to justice on behalf of the Irish people and the Dublin poor in particular. Later on he wrote again to Pope, inviting him to take up residence with him in his deanery where daily life offered contentment (as well as an outlet for his sense of humor). By this time, Swift himself (he failed to mention) had become a popular hero in Dublin city. Dublin is a walker's city and Swift on foot was a famous Dublin sight. "I walk the streets in peace . . . and am reputed the best walker in this Town and 5 miles around. . . . I seldom walk less than 4 miles, sometimes 6 or 8 or 10 or more, never beyond my own limits." Hearty literary travelers, equipped with a few of his writ- ings as well as a street map, will find Swift's Dublin. (And Joyce and Beckett's, too, who also walked the length and breadth of it, at all hours, in any weather.) from the legion club* As I stroll the city, oft I Spy a building large and lofty, Not a bow-shot from the College, Half the globe from sense and knowledge. By the prudent architect Placed aga...

Product details

• Authors: Susan Cahill
• Assisted by: Susan Cahill (Editor)
• Publisher: Ballantine
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 13.02.2001
• EAN: 9780345434197
• ISBN: 978-0-345-43419-7
• No. of pages: 480
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 209 mm x 27 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Travel > Travel guides > Europe