The years between 1880 and 1940 were a time of unprecedented literary production and political upheaval in Ireland. It is the era of the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish Revival, and a time when many major Irish writers - Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Lady Gregory - profoundly impacted Irish and World Literature. Recent research has uncovered new archives of previously neglected texts and authors. Organized according to multiple categories, ranging from single author to genre and theme, this volume allows readers to imagine multiple ways of re-mapping this crucial period. The book incorporates different, even competing, approaches and interpretations to reflect emerging trends and current debates in contemporary scholarship. As ongoing research in the field of Irish studies discovers new materials and critical strategies for interpreting them, our sense of Irish literary history during this period is constantly shifting. This volume seeks to capture the richness and complexity of the years 1880-1940 for our current moment.

‘… a remarkably ambitious project, taking the temperature of Irish literature from 1730 to the present in approximately 2,400 pages.’

Anthony Roche Source: Irish Times

‘The overarching achievements of this collection are its extensions of the scope for critical intervention into the years during and immediately succeeding the Revival. The collection also greatly bene!ts from its inclusion of criticism on overlooked writers such as George Egerton, Katherine Cecil Thurston, and George Moore alongside regular stalwarts such as Joyce, Yeats, and Bowen. Eclectic, necessarily diverse, and rigorous, Irish Literature in Transition, 1880-1940 is an important investigation into two periods of distinctive artistic and critical creativity that manages to seamlessly survey the development of cultural discourses and identify the cultural movements that made them possible.’

Loic Wright Source: Irish Studies Review