Travel, Ireland, landscapes in literature, Irish authors -- homes and haunts, English literature -- Irish authors, literary landmarks, Intellectual life 

The landscape of Ireland has had a profound and creative influence on its literature, from the heroic epics of its distant past to its recent flowering in the magnificent works of Synge, Yeats, and James Joyce. In A Writer's Ireland, William Trevor, the distinguished Irish-born novelist, takes the reader on a personal journey through the island, a journey that not only includes the familiar literary figures in their context but introduces many voices of perhaps lesser fame though of abiding significance.

Trevor follows the path of Irish literature and history from the anonymous sagas of Ireland's Celtic origins to the writings of the early Christian scribes; from the Viking and Norman invasions to the advent of Ireland's most disturbing and enduring visitors: the English. He shows how the establishment of an Anglo-Irish ascendancy brought a new look, language, and literature to Ireland: Spenser describing a man-made landscape in The Faerie Queene, Swift amid his garden at Laracor. Trevor speaks of the native Irish poets mourning the encroachment of their own wild landscapes by the English builders of grand country houses.

In the nineteenth century, love of place was central to the songs and fiction of Irish revolutionary movements. Writers life Samuel Ferguson and James Clarence Maugan fused landscape and nationalism. Out of famine, evictions, and poverty sprang a poignant view of Ireland: the poetry of exile. And then, towards the end of the century, the giants of the Celtic Revival and their successors found rich inspiration not only in the unchanged landscapes of the past but also in the brash hurly-burly of Dublin.

Trevor's last chapters concern the extraordinary Ireland of Joyce, Yeats, Synge, O'Connor, Bowen, Heaney, and O'Brien - and he includes the tragic landscape of war that is modern Belfast.

Throughout this evocative and deeply felt book, William Trevor has included quotations from Irish poetry and prose of all periods, so that A Writer's Ireland becomes something of an anthology as well - a treasure that readers will return to again and again.

William Trevor was born in County Cork in 1928, and educated at St. Columba's College, County Dublin, and Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He has written many plays for television, radio, and the stage, and his recent books include The Ballroom of Romance (1972), Elizabeth Alone (1973), Angels at the Ritz (1975; Royal Society of Literature Award), The Children of Dynmouth (1976; Whitbread Award), Other People's Words (1980), Beyond the Pale (1981), and Fools of Fortune (1983). William Trevor is married, has two sons, and lives in Devon.

Taken from the inside flaps.