This innovative study analyzes the range of representation of farming in Irish literature in the period since independence/partition in 1922, as Ireland moved from a largely agricultural to a developed urban society. In many different forms including poetry, drama, fiction, and autobiography, writers have made literary capital by looking back at their rural backgrounds, even where those may be a generation back. The first five chapters examine some of the key themes: the impact of inheritance on family in the patriarchal system where there could only be one male heir; the struggles for survival in the poorest regions of the West of Ireland; the uses of childhood farming memories whether idyllic or traumatic; and the representation of communities, challenging the homogeneous idealizing images of the Literary Revival; the impact of modernization on successive generations into the twenty-first century. The final three chapters are devoted to three major writers in whose work farming is central: Patrick Kavanagh, the small farmer who had to find an individual voice to express his own unique experience; John McGahern in whose fiction the life of the farm is always posited as alternative to a rootless urban milieu; and Seamus Heaney who re-imagined his farming childhood in so many different modes throughout his career. Farming in Modern Irish Literature yields original insights into the literary iconography of rural Ireland and its interplay with social and cultural history, opening up fresh vistas on the achievements of Irish writers in different genres, styles, and historical eras.

About the Author
Nicholas Grene taught at the University of Liverpool before being appointed to a lectureship at Trinity College Dublin, where he was Professor of English Literature from 1999, until his retirement in 2015. A Senior Fellow of the College and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, he has held visiting professorships in Dartmouth College, University of New South Wales, and the Sorbonne. His books include The Politics of Irish Drama (1999), Yeats's Poetic Codes (2008), Home on the Stage (2014), and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, (co-edited with Chris Morash, 2016).

Reviews
Readers will find in this book a very complete set of references to representations of farm-life in Ireland in the past century, under the pen of writers who, for the most part, experienced this kind of life first-hand. To readers for whom the experience of farm-life is only literary, Nicholas Grene's book offers a wonderful journey in time, in words and in the world of small family-run farms of early 20th-century Ireland, bridging time-wise the congested districts of the Famine and the globalised urban lifestyle of post Celtic-Tiger Ireland. * Marie Mianowski, Universite Grenoble Alpes, Etudes irlandaises *
With this ambitious publication, grounded in a sustained and dedicated engagement with Irish literature, Nicholas Grene has commenced a long overdue conversation about Irish farm writing. * Heather Laird, Dublin Review of Books *
While this is an academic work, it is no dry read. For the student of Irish literature, it will be an invaluable resource. For anyone reared on a family farm, it will evoke smiles, grimaces, laughter and more than the occasional shudder. * Jim O'Brien, Irish Independent *
Grene ultimately answers why a nation that, although belatedly, has exchanged an agricultural existence for common modernity, is still preoccupied by farming in its literature. Both thoughtful and accessible, he shows us how the story of the Irish farm is the story of Ireland itself. * Ryan Dennis, Irish Times *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198861294
Author Nicholas Grene
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 508g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 161mm * 18mm