Ireland. Eire. Part III. Фомина И.В. - 9 стр.

teenth-century writers, while Bram Stoker, creator of Dracula, was a magnifi-
cent literary aberration in the Gothic horror style. Towards the end of the cen-
tury the voice of flippant witticism emerged, in the guise of Oscar Wilde. He
was punished for being far outside the social mores of the time and died penni-
less in Paris in 1900, saying that either he or the awful wallpaper in his hotel
room would have to go. Building on the tradition of brilliant wit, Oscar Wild
(1854–1900) and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) wrote major works for the
London stage. Shaw won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925. With his friends
Lady Gregory (1852–1932) and Edward Martyn (1859–1924) he established an
Irish National Theare (the Abbey Theatre) to create an identifiably Irish litera-
ture in English. Some of the theatre’s early works created a storm of controversy
but are now firm favourites in the repertoire, for example John Millington
Synge’s (1871–1909) work, The Playboy of the Western World (1907) and Seán
O’Casey’s (1880–1909) The Plough and the Stars (1926).
       With the dawning of this century, Ireland enjoyed a great literary renais-
sance that reflected the country’s political awakening. Trough the nineteenth
century a growing interest in Ireland’s ancient Celtic culture influenced Irish
writers, most significantly William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) who was the
greatest apostle of the Celtic Twilight. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for lit-
erature in 1923. Other writers of considerable influence included George Moore,
who wanted to do for literature in Ireland what Turgenev had done in Russia.
George Russel (AE), a native of Lurgan, was imbued with the spirit of Celtic
mysticism, while James Stephens wrote fantasies such as The Crock of Gold.
Among playwrights, John Millington Synge was the greatest and the most con-
troversial, with such plays as Riders to the Sea and Playboy of the Western
World, heavily influenced by the idioms of the Aran Islands. The greatest Irish
writer of all, James Joyce (1882–1941), no admirer of the Yeatsian literary re-
vival, found Ireland too suffocating. He had to leave Ireland in the early years
of the twentieth century setting ultimately in Paris to ruminate at ease on his
mental picture of the entire streetscape of Dublin. The year 1922 saw the publi-
cation of Joyce’s Ulisses, the greatest novel of the twentieth century. His pio-
neering modernist novel grafts the street life of his native Dublin onto the plot of
Homer’s Odyssey to chronicle a single day in the lives of its protagonists Leo-
pold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Joyce’s parodic playfulness in-
spired the work of Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien) (1911–1966), who also wrote
in Irish.
       With the creation of the Irish Free State, regional writing became more
important. Cork produced three great story-writers, Daniel Corkery, Frank
O’Connor and Seán O’Faoláin. Liam O’Flaherty was inspired, like Synge, by
the Aran Islands, while much of Mary Lavin’s work has been centred in the Irish
midlands. Two natives of County Tyrone have influenced twentieth-century
Irish literature: Brian O’Nolan, otherwise Myles na Gopaleen, author of At
Swim-Two-Birds and other comic masterpieces, came from Strabane, while Ben
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