How did such a tiny country, occupied by foreigners for most of its history, become the paragon of western literature?

How did such a tiny country, occupied by foreigners for most of its history, become the paragon of western literature?

>have 1 (one) skilled writer over a period of 700 years
>WE DA BES

Briton here, loving every laugh

You only think so because they write in English and you're a monoglot pleb.

>1 (one)
Beckett, O'Brien, the list may or may not go on.

... Yeats, maybe?

>No national epic
>No meaningful songs beyond little ditties

Don't overrate it.

To my mind what you people have that really levels out the scales is one guy: Shakespeare.

There is no doubt your country has an immense literary history, filled with great lighthouses. However, Italy, Greece, Russia, France – all of them also have many great talents.

But Shakespeare is really a great weight. Many boats have captured lot of big tuna fishes, yet you guys had luck and caught a Leviathan too.

Oh, I thought it was Englad. Sorry. But Ireland is also great.

Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, O'Brien, Swift, Heaney, Kavanagh, Wilde, O'Cadhain, William Trevor, Synge, Goldsmith, Sterne, Pat McCabe, Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, CS Lewis, O'Casey, McGahern, Le Fanu, and pic related hue

Come the fuck on.
Really?
You're giving all of us a bad name.

Shakespeare was a bunch of guys writing under a pseudonym

cos the weather is dreary as fuck and the gub'mint shits on you constantly, the neighbours are bollocks, the religion makes you feel bad for feeling bad, so you have fuck all else to do but git gud at writing.

Is my learned theory.

Gotta disappoint you m8, but Goethe > Shakespeare.

Why?

Because Shakespeare wrote the masses, first and foremost: the rabble, the plebs. Do not forget it. Shakespeare is a coal heap with a few good diamonds to be found throughout - that's what it had to be, to garner favour with the lower classes on whom his livelihood depended.

That is what Shakespeare wrote for, first and foremost - his daily bread. Not posterity, not eternity.

So you're saying that because Shakespeare wrote for the masses and still ended up with genius behind every word he put to paper, he's not as good as guys that wrote specifically to try and be geniuses?
Wew m8
You cracked it

Oh fuck, that was pleb of me to forget.

lol, ever heard of germany? goethe maybe?

>tfw Irish
>tfw barely scratched the surface of Irish lit
>tfw spend my days reading burger lit

I don't know how this happened to me.

more like the generally propagated meme

To each his one.

But to my mind Shakespeare verbal language is far more inventive and original than that of Goethe. He almost cannot think without using metaphors and imagery, and he is always either using traditional imagery in new ways or modeling new and bold metaphors, coined from his own experience.

Shakespeare created more characters, and tried to nest himself into a greater and more diverse forest of brains. Goethe does not leave his comfort zones as often as Shakespeare does.

I am a great fan of poetry, and after Shakespeare I have always fought to find the same fertility for metaphors and verbal images, the same exaggeration, the same experience of be drowning in an ocean. I have only very rarely succeeded in finding the same. Generally it happens in small places, in concentrated excerpts, in rare occasions. What happens all the time in Shakespeare is hard to encounter in other works.

Some examples would be the speech of God in the end of The Book of Job, some chapters of Moby Dick, some parts of Lolita, some parts of Memoirs of Hadrian, some poems of Blake (like The Tiger), some excerpts of Coleridge (parts of his poems), some parts of the great plays of Aeschylus, some lost poems like “Dulce et Decorum Est” or this small Kurt Vonnegut poem:

“love is a hawk with velvet claws
love is a rock with heart and veins
love is a lion with satin jaws
love is a storm with silken reins”

It is very hard to find the same exuberance of imagery. I hardly find it in Goethe. He is more classical, more organized, more measured, more marmoreal.

You became enlightened.
Don't fool yourself in to thinking you potatoe fuckers had anything useful to say.
"OI BRITS SUCK"
"OI I'm chaffin' under these Brit chains m8!"
"Brits really suck"
I mean.

>still ended up with genius behind every word he put to paper

Empirically wrong.

>empirically wrong
Emphatically stupid.

Egregiously idiotic.

>potatoe
who let dan quayle in
also it's weird you'd say that, since most great irish lit isn't strictly about muh brits

you just listed every fucking writer and called them "the best"

fuck outa here

I saw a book at my local bookstore called "How the Irish saved civilization"......its been sitting on the shelf untouched

>egregiously idiotic
Entirely incompetent

Even Ulysses, arguably the greatest single Irish work, holds many allusions to the denial of English rule in Ireland.

no, I listed Irish writers who I consider great
there are more
it's about Irish monks preserving knowledge in the """"dark ages""""

...

>no, I listed Irish writers who I consider great
pretty sure you listed every irish writer that ever existed and will exist within this side of the universe and just called them the best to "prove" that Ireland has good writers.
It's like me listing every nigger that has ever lived and say Africa has good writers (it probably has, too)

Fucking gay

I didn't list Bram Stoker, Frank O'Connor, Lady Gregory, plenty of others that could be considered great
and yes, I did it to prove that Ireland has a lot of great writers, to counter a claim that there were only 1-3

Not even who you're replying but he didn't even mention Dominic Behan or GB Shaw (who, even if I don't like, is still a widely recognized and praised author, for some reason)

i actually have this book, i to have never read it.

>It's like me listing every nigger that has ever lived and say Africa has good writers (it probably has, too)
what did he mean by this

P L E B

Táin Bó Cúailnge is the national epic. You are probably thinking of England with the borrowed (and really quite late) Beowulf.

As is OP with the >occupied by foreigners for most of its history
The most that happened to Ireland were some viking settlements that were more trading outposts than anything, even the English primarily used the Scottish (who are descended from Irish in large) to fuck shit up.

>no, I listed Irish writers who I consider great
Considering how desperately the English try to misappropriate most of them I'd say it was a p decent list.

Western literature? No

English literature? Yes

WE

>>No national epic
Táin Bó Cuailnge is the national epic, though I prefer Agallamh na Seanórach

>>No meaningful songs beyond little ditties
I can show you some if you like?

bloom pls

wuz ard rí

Beckett wrote some of the best French literature there is too.

are you an Irish speaker?

>Agallamh na Seanórach
There's also stuff like Navigatio Sancti Brendani, so there's even an Odyssey parallel (probably a rip off desu but hey, we still grew a monstrous tulip).

> wizardry

damn...

Bloom is fucking mental about Shagspire

I would argue he's top 3. But he was ostensibly a French writer, i dont know how much you can take credit for him as an Irish novelist. He needed to immerse himself in French language and culture in order to stop writing Finnegans Wake fanfic.

he invented the human, user
all your thoughts are from shakespeare

>i dont know how much you can take credit for him as an Irish novelist.
I'm smelling desperation here.

After saying shit like that and writing that Gnostic fantasy, why does he pretend the most embarrassing thing in his career is that fucking list of books in the Western Canon

yeah good call.. lolita is a Russian novel and Heart of Darkness is Polish literature

true

his greatest contribution to literature is the rowling copypasta and 'no discernible talent'

probably because he was from ireland desu

Dude you don't get it. Shakespeare is litetally the reason why English is the lingua franca of the world

Conrad's work is viewed in the English canon, not Polish.

Finnegans Wake is Swiss French, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is Bohr and the Journals of Lewis and Clarke is Native American.

Let's be clear tho, Beckett wasn't some passive agent who got filled first with Joyceness then with Frenchness, he instead injected an Irish spirit into the French existentials. He was his own man.

he singlehandedly invented english

Not just English but our actual civilised conscious minds. We fucks didn't even have souls before our Bard and saviour William Shakespeare wrote them into existence.

Part of it has to do with the strong bardic tradition, poetry and storytelling wasn't just an activity for elites and the bourgeois but a working class peasant communal activity after a days work

>no Jem Casey

I want some interviewer to ask Bloom if colonialism was worth it just to spread Shakespeare.

Meant to quote

>>no Jem Casey

a pint of plain is your only man

I think the British navy had more to do with it than Shakespeare
that and they did try to set up schools to make a middle class of professionals in the colonies they were exploiting

nothing else to do

>the British navy had more to do with it than Shakespeare
Get your resentment out of my literature.

>Be Irish
>Write in english

>be Irish
>write in Latin before you write anything lasting in Gaelic

Er, yeah, because Joyce was a Marxist nationalist hipster fuck. Ulysses is better liked abroad too, and much like U2 isn't considered the finest work just shit for tourists and Dublin wankers.

>Calling Normans Anglo
lol, wtf

english

Hiberno-English isn't real English
e.g: Hiberno-English "I will, yeah", translated to UK English is "No, I'm never doing that"

your point?

you'll miss a whole bunch of subtext even if you only read the works originally in "English"

>Joyce was a Marxist nationalist
You misspelt anarchist cosmopolitan.

You didn't read his letters or even Portrait? Or do you just assume the book agrees with your retarded opinions if Veeky Forums memes it enough?

Because of the foreigners

>Or do you just assume the book agrees with your retarded opinions if Veeky Forums memes it enough?
>implying I'm quoting my own opinion
I think the originator is John Middleton Murray, but one of those essays you get in those cheap penguin paperbacks at the start of Dubliners calls him an "anarchist cosmopolitan" outright.

I think the problem a lot of people have with reading him as bona fide nationalist is Irish nationalism being way less insular than the nationalisms of other cultures.

why would you quote a critic who's wrong? maybe your own ideas would be less shit.

Marxism in Ireland also means a different thing to even the 4th International splitters, because most of the leaders there had split at the 2nd, and you have internal battles between people like Connolly and Griffith.
Joyce eventually gave up on Marxism, but he was a renowned nationalist even past the early Marxist nationalism.
Retarded critic is retarded. He's not an anarchist at all, and being cosmopolitan would involve admitting the English are people too.

For a nationalist he sure spends a lot of time in Ulysses mocking nationalism.

Irish here. You cannot deny Ireland's best writers were anglos, often with rich English Anglican parents who just moved to Dublin or something. This is why I don't get this anti-Brit mentality except, like a lot of others things admittedly, we steal from them.
>they identify as Irish
That's all well and good, but you know that without the British cultural impact on these people there would be fuck all good literature from this wee country.
Donegal, btw.

I seriously fucked that post up but whatever it is late on my holidays and I am tired and can't sleep due to fucking heat. Wanna go home

Myles na gCopaleen tho
>mocking nationalism
Catholic nationalism, not nationalism itself. It's why he calls it "the epic of two nations", even though neither Ireland nor Israel existed as nations while he was publishing it.

I mean, apart from obvious Anglo Irish folks like Swift most of our great writers are real Irish. Joyce's family were from Cork I think

I think his dad was from Fermoy. I guess after they had Graham Norton, they switched to that instead of "Joyce's dad". Frank O'Connor's from Cork City, and I'd think they're not too busted up about Dublin claiming Joyce.

>are you an Irish speaker?
not natively but I can read in Irish

>so there's even an Odyssey parallel
It's probably not a rip off, though it may have been influenced. "Immrama" were a whole class of story, and Eachtrae were similar.

Wilde, Yeats, Swift, Burke, Beckett and probably a few others were Anglo-Irish

Joyce, Heaney, Flann O' Brian, Merriman, Raftery, and Ó Cadhain were Gaelic Irish

CS Lewis was an Ulster Scot I think as was James Orr, I'm sure they've a couple others under their belt.

Tinkers obviously have nothing.

>This is why I don't get this anti-Brit mentality except, like a lot of others things admittedly, we steal from them.
I'm not one to lament the history of the English in Ireland (besides the damage done to the language I don't give a shit) but I don't think that's a fair assessment. If anything it would be the Anglos stealing from our mythology, though that's not fair either since they identified with the Irish nation which had been multi-confessional since at least 1798, and multi-ethnic since much much earlier.

>That's all well and good, but you know that without the British cultural impact on these people there would be fuck all good literature from this wee country.
Fuck all English language literature, sure. I won't speculate on what could have been because that's pointless but if you look before the 18th century the vast majority of Irish literature belonged to the Gaelic, Catholic classes. Even after the Irish aristocracy had been banished the majority of high culture was gaelic in nature, as were the artistic classes. By the late 18th century the Anglo-Irish started to take over, largely due to the extreme poverty and illiteracy among the Catholic population.

Because it looks like a parrot

A lot of Ulysses disavows the Irish nationalist movement though, same for much of Joyce's stuff.

Nobody in Ireland thinks Joyce was nationalist, he was a cosmopolite middle class Jackeen

Is O'Malley the Ernst Junger of Ireland?

>why would you quote a critic who's wrong? maybe your own ideas would be less shit.
I'm pretty opposed to labelling in a lot of instances so the whole concept of attributing such and such ism to Joyce doesn't factor in for my thinking. I treat it more as a bit of anthropology of academia.

>and being cosmopolitan would involve admitting the English are people too.
Uh, it's not as straightforward as that but I don't think you're miles off the mark. He writes with tact on the idea of the Anglo Irish and the tendency for them to be pretenders to being the true Irish (more Irish than the Irish themselves), and that the concept of racial purity/being old Irish is tacitly ridiculous to the Irish world view. He also talks about the invitation of one of the King Henries over. While it's written like "don't forget we invited the English in" it does make me wonder if it's more about the Irish cosmopolitan spirit that Joyce was a part of. Joyce of course spent most of his life libing abroad, and in general it wasn't/isn't unusual for Irish to go off and do something like Orwell in Catalonia but more wholeheartedly. I wonder if Joyce didn't see himself in that a bit.

>It's probably not a rip off, though it may have been influenced.
It's better anyway (inb4 triggered). The Greeks made a big deal about going around the Mediterranean in a pretty snazzy boat, whereas Brendan has an entire ocean and goes around in something incredibly basic.

>Tinkers obviously have nothing
Didn't that boxing guy write an autobiography?

"Write" an autobiography.

I think you could describe him as a liberal Nationalist in that of course he believed Ireland should be self-governing but he had little time for the kind of cultural nationalism as espoused by Yeats and the 1916 rebels. His perpective was more universal, which is why I guess Dublin always fascinated him as a cosmopolitan city of Empire, although he became proficient in many languages, Gaeilge was never one, it didn't consider it important enough

The Furey's are excellent

Tinker's don't value education, which is why they've never produced much literature