The modern Irish short story arrived in 1903 with the publication of The Untilled Field by George Moore. Moore combined contemporary themes of emigration, clerical interference, poverty, and rural loneliness with psychological characterization and narrative economy. In doing so, he severed the modern Irish story from its nineteenth-century roots, particularly the Gothic tales of Sheridan Le Fanu and the loosely-constructed stories of William Carleton, whose model had been the Irish seanchái, the famed oral storyteller of Irish tradition. James Joyce’s Dubliners, published in 1914, further modernized the Irish story through greater artistic economy and precise, realistic representation of Irish life....

Many of the stories written by Daniel Corkery, Frank O’Connor, and Sean O’Faolain that portray Irish revolutionary events, especially the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, were written in the mode of romantic nationalism. This literary mode was designed to be the exact counterpart—an “objective correlative”—for the emotions of excitement, hope, idealism, romance, and thrilling danger that these writers felt as young men during their participation in Ireland’s struggle for independence. The romantic stories were thus intended to recreate in the reader, particularly the Irish reader, the intense emotions associated with revolution and nationalism. A second intended...

The literary reaction against the stories of romantic nationalism came not from writers with opposing political stances, but rather from two of the writers of the stories of romantic nationalism, O’Connor and O’Faolain, and from Liam O’Flaherty. All three of these writers chose to fight with the republicans in the Civil War—only to become deeply disillusioned with the republican endeavor. Corkery, on the other hand, never lost his republican ideals, perhaps because he did not experience the violence at first hand. It is also true, however, that he wrote no more stories about the revolution after The Hounds of....

The Civil War was just ending as the playwright Sean O’Casey turned his comic and satiric gaze on the Troubles of 1916–1923. In rapid fashion, O’Casey wrote, and the Abbey Theatre produced, the three plays that make up his Dublin Trilogy, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars—works that ensured that humor, wit, and satire would not be absent in dramatic and literary treatments of the Troubles. Not that such was even a remote possibility: as Vivian Mercier says, “no aspect of life is too sacred to escape the mockery...

In the period between the end of the Civil War in 1923 and the outbreak of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, Irish writers crafted somber stories about Ireland’s Troubles, in addition to the humorous and satiric ones. A few of these stories look back to the revolutionary events of 1916–1923; most depict more contemporary events related to the issue of partition and the simmering tensions in sectarian relations. A study of these stories provides insight into the hostilities and tensions that flowed out of the partitioning of Ireland and the ensuing Civil War and that...

In the 1970s and 1980s a new type of Troubles story appeared: the story of sectarian violence and terrorism. In these stories Irish writers represent the brutal phenomenon, then frequently occurring in Northern Ireland and occasionally in the Irish Republic, of violence perpetrated by Catholic and Protestant militants. Using a style of stark realism that depicts fictional characters in situations that resemble real-life incidents, these authors probe the many facets of sectarian violence and terrorism: the roots and causes, the traumatic social and psychological impact on innocent victims, the moral choices forced upon people, and the extraordinary acts of moral...

Throughout Irish history, and especially since the late nineteenth century, women have played significant, albeit unsung, roles in the revolutionary struggle for Ireland’s independence. And ever since the first stories of the Troubles in the early twentieth century, women have been depicted in revolutionary roles. In actual life, Irish women have served in various revolutionary capacities—though rarely as the equals of men. In the early stories of the Troubles, they are represented mostly as secondary characters who support the male rebels and rarely as central characters, heroic in their own right. Often too, as discussed in the first chapter,...

By the end of the twentieth century, the stories of the Irish Troubles were again showing signs of changing in character, as they had continually throughout the century in response to new events and to shifting attitudes of the Irish people toward the Troubles. Political developments in the 1990s, particularly the declarations of ceasefire by the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries in 1994 and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, held out the prospect of a peaceful resolution to a quarter century of conflict in Northern Ireland. The hope generated by these events, however, was attenuated by the sporadic violence of militant...