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Alan Titley said that “the twentieth century has been the century of prose in Irish literature par excellence; there has been more prose written and read and thought about in the twentieth century in Irish than in all the previous centuries put together for all our two thousand years” and this is why our primary task set for the last week of the course is going to be Modern Irish prose. In the course of the lectures we will be looking at four specimens of the Irish autobiographical writing, firstly, My Story (Modern Irish Mo Scéal Féin) written by a learned Corkman, Canon Peter O’Leary, secondly, a very plain and unadorned story of a Blasket fisherman’s life, The Islandman (Modern Irish An tOileanach) by Tomás Ó Crohan, thirdly, An Old Woman’s Reflections, a biography of a housewife and a storyteller, Peig Sayers, originally from Dunquin in Dingle peninsula, but married into a family on the Great Blasket Island, and, last but not least, a daft and amusing piece of parodic literature, exaggerated yet comical, The Poor Mouth (Modern Irish An Beal Bocht).
The recommended literature include the
following publications:
A. de Blácam, Gaelic Literature Surveyed, Dublin, 1973, 387-405: Ó hAnluain, E. ‘The Twentieth Century: Prose and Verse’;
P. O’Leary, Gaelic Prose in the Irish Free State 1922-1939. Dublin, 2004, select chapters.
A. Titley, ‘Modern Irish Prose: A Necessary Introduction for the Uninitiated’, in Dawe, G., & Williams, J. (eds.) Krino 1986-1996. Dublin, 1996, 122-30.
A. Titley, ‘Contemporary Literature in the Irish Language’,in Hogan, R. (ed.) Dictionary of Irish Literature: Revised and Expanded Edition. Connecticut-London, 1996, 63-72.
A. Titley, ‘The Novel in Irish’, in Foster, J.W. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to The Irish Novel. Cambridge, 2006, 171-88.