The Wrong Country: Essays on Modern Irish Writing [Hardcover]

This engagingly personal chronicle by poet Gerald Dawe explores the lives and times of leading Irish writers, including W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Kavanagh, James Plunkett, John McGahern, Stewart Parker and Leontia Flynn, alongside lesser-known names from the earlier decades of the twentieth century, such as Ethna Carberry, Alice Milligan, Joseph Campbell and George Reavey.The Wrong Countryalso portrays the changing cultural backgrounds of the author's contemporaries, such as Thomas Kilroy, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Colm Tóibín, Hugo Hamilton, Sinead Morrissey and Michelle O'Sullivan.

Gerald Dawe presents an accessible and jargon-free view of modern Irish literature, filtered perceptively through his own, warmly personal, lens, and raises important questions about cultural belonging, the commercialisation of contemporary writing, and the influence of Irish literary culture in a digital age, to reposition our understanding of Irish writing in a wider context for today's readers.

"While these essays are excellent and entertaining in themselves, the most substantial achievement of this book is that it will send readers back to—or ignite an interest in—the writers and works that are so enthusiastically featured. In this [Gerald] Dawe has done the Irish literary world some service." —John P. Sullivan,The Sunday Times
 

"At their best, these essays are fluent and full of interest, offering glimpses into Dawe’s education and life while sharing with readers the benefit of his nuanced literary judgements. Even passing observations on writers such as Patrick Kavanagh, John McGahern and Eavan Boland are worth our attention." —Clare Connolly,The Irish Times
 

"Gerald Dawe in truth shows himself to be an astute observer and surveyor of thl#ò