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: an intense awareness of the power of language; a provisionality in regard to character; a preoccupation with change and an obsession with the past and its meaning. Robert Welch draws attention to the crucial but often hidden aspects of modern Irish writing. He examines its flexibility; its scepticism; its concern with form; and ultimately the need for change, and the fear of it. He provides a unique in-depth study of individual authors in the context of cultural and linguistic developments, that will be an invaluble text for anyone interested in Irish life and literature or in language and translation.

Robert Welch is Professor of English at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. He is the author of a number of books on Irish literature; editor of The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature and a poet and translator. Muskerry, a volume of his poetry, appeared in 1991.