Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

With five Nobel Prize-winners, seven Pulitzer Prize-winners and two Booker Prize-winning novelists, modern Irish writing has contributed something special and permanent to our understanding of the twentieth century. Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century provides a useful, comprehensive and pleasurable introduction to modern Irish literature in a single volume.

Organized chronologically by decade, this anthology provides the reader with a unique sense of the development and richness of Irish writing and of the society it reflected.

It embraces all forms of writing, not only the major forms of drama, fiction and verse, but such material as travel writing, personal memoirs, journalism, interviews and radio plays, to offer the reader a complete and wonderfully varied sense of Ireland's contribution our literary heritage.

David Pierce has selected major literary figures as well as neglected ones, and includes many writers from the Irish diaspora. The range of material is enormous, and ensures that work that is inaccessible or out of print is now easily available.

The book is a delightful compilation, including many well known pieces and captivating "discoveries," which anyone interested in literature will long enjoy browsing and dipping into.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Includes over 400 works by, among others

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Including more than 400 works, this collection is impressive not only in size and scope but in the chronological presentation of its contents by decade from the 1890s to the 1990s. This contextualization means that although Yeats's works, for example, are distributed over five decades rather than presented together in the usual anthology format, novel perspectives result from seeing familiar texts next to contemporaneous writings by lesser-known writers. Pierce (University College of Ripon and York St. John) further enriches the diachronic-contextual effect by organizing each decade's writing under two headings: "Critical and Documentary" and "Imaginative." The anthology contains poems, excerpts from novels and diaries, entire plays and short stories, songs, letters, newspaper and journal articles, critical essays, and literary profiles. The informative headnotes, chronology, supplementary indexes listing the contents by topic and theme, bibliographies, and tips for essay writing further make this an outstanding text for teachers, students, and researchers. Indeed, the rich and varied contents, thought-provoking presentation, and the inclusion of writing by women and diasporic Irish writers make this reader superior in many ways to volume three of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (CH, Apr'92). Undergraduates; graduate students; general readers. D. R. McCarthy Huron College