Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing

In Changing States Robert Welch examines the work of the major authors of modern Irish literature in the context of the transformation from Gaelic to twentieth-century post-industrial culture. The force of Irish writing, uniting authors as various as Yeats, Heaney, Synge, Beckett, Joyce and Mairtin O Cadhain, largely derives, Welch argues, from their need to respond to the challenges of this transformation. Writing against a sense of loss, their work is distinguished by certain key features...