“... College Dublin, was rejecting ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ by a young troublemaker called James Joyce. He wasn’t turned down by everyone: his description of the Irish Homestead as ‘the pigs’ paper’ may have been a way of covering his blushes – early versions of three Dubliners stories appeared there, one of them under the pseudonym ‘Stephen ...”

“... of Eliot’s poetry. F.R. Leavis championed Eliot, Pound and D.H. Lawrence, and taught Joyce’s Ulysses while it was publicly banned. William Empson edited an undergraduate magazine called Experiment, producing a Joyce issue which was also banned. Richards’s experiments in Practical Criticism reflected the ...”

“... had proved so golden for them over the years. The same inertia is evident with the works of Woolf, Joyce, Hardy and Yeats. With much hoo-hah the world was informed in the late Eighties that the text of Ulysses was a disgrace, and a new perfected text would be introduced to coincide with the termination of copyright (this was the ill-fated Gabler ...”

“... of life – the last resort of the artist without a true subject. In Australia, realism – what Patrick White, condemning the national literature in 1958, called the ‘dreary dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism’– was the obvious method, because anything else would have seemed fancy: and White himself was one of the very few writers down ...”

“... cost of writing a verse novel, it would seem, is to turn a blind eye to virtually all that Hardy, Joyce, Lawrence and their successors have done in prose. The result is a strange blend of racy, colloquial literary enterprise and static neo-Victorian values. Despite its neo-gothic title, The Haunted House betrays no hint of anachronism. Rebecca Brown explores ...”

“... whereas Cavan and even Monaghan have a less decided orientation. I cannot, for example, think of Patrick Kavanagh as a Northern writer, any more than I would wish to allocate Peadar O’Donnell to the South.’ Donegal is part of the North, yes, but it’s also the place many Northerners go to escape from ‘Norn Ireland’, as we sometimes call ...”

“... imagination, little interest in anything that was not its chosen subject’. In, Paris, Synge and Joyce are supposed to have had lively arguments about literature, drama, language, and such things: or so Stanislaus Joyce reported in My Brother’s Keeper. But he wasn’t much interested in ...”

“... of a wake with only a single mourner. Also, there is the extent of Beckett’s inheritance from Joyce, which is by no means confined to his early work and is now perhaps due for reappraisal. For to end yet again (translated into English in 1976) ends with the following sentence: ‘Through it who knows yet another end beneath a cloudless sky same dark it ...”

“... Quartet’ referred back to Einstein and Proust, the comic anarchy of the Avignon novels is post-Joyce, post-Pynchon and post-Flann O’Brien. In terms of subject-matter, Durrell has a shrewd eye for the sensational. Readers of the ‘Avignon Quintet’ can steep themselves in the secrets of the Templars, gypsy folklore, Nazi atrocities, the mysteries of the ...”

“... is too little with us – that all issues are reduced to the level of the parish pump. Yet, as Patrick Kavanagh warned, Irish writers turn outward at their peril. Disgusted by the loud quarrels of his Monaghan neighbours, he wrote:That was the year of the Munich bother. WhichWas more important? I inclinedTo lost my faith in Ballyrish and GortinTill ...”

“... The Victorian and modern ‘major authors’ were all to be found in their accustomed places – Joyce, conventionally enough, was the one addition to the strict Leavisite canon – and Eagleton’s contribution was to show them, not as great literary mentors, but as crippled and distorted ideological freaks. ‘The guarantor of a scientific criticism,’ he ...”

“... the Auden group, the Marxists, Max Eastman, Edmund Wilson, and most significantly, the later Joyce) whom Leavis judged to have fallen by the wayside. Few if any of his later books were as clear-minded as this, and there is no other work in the last half-century of English literary criticism which can measure up to its avant-garde credentials. As Graham ...”

“... own terms, setting them within an Irish imaginative space made habitable largely by the example of Patrick Kavanagh, and finding a thick, costive, consonantal music for the task (‘the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat’). He was especially struck by a book called The New Poetic (1964) by the New Zealand poet C.K. Stead that portrayed an Eliot very different ...”

“... Seamus Heaney so skilfully used in both his poems and his prose, he relates (in an essay on Patrick Kavanagh from 1985) that one of his aunts ‘planted a chestnut in a jam jar’ in the year of his birth. In due course the seedling was planted out and grew to a fine height. Heaney says that ‘over the years I came to identify my own life with the life ...”

“... Cambridge introductions to ‘British and Irish Authors’, a high-quality series which includes Patrick Parrinder on James Joyce and John Batchelor on H.G. Wells. Barnard gets a great deal into his short book, presenting a rather different Keats from that of the many other Keats scholars and biographers. Keats’s ...”