Abstract: At first glance, the outlook for literary work in the Ireland of 1940 was not propitious. The international situation's constriction of the English publishing industry, on which most Irish writers depended for a living, together with the constraints placed on domestic literary activity, created an environment that was unpromising, to say the least. In the case of imaginative prose, the prospects appeared to be particularly gloomy, with silence and exile the ostensible order of the day. The departure into exile of Samuel Beckett, in 1939, and Francis Stuart, in 1940, was accompanied by the silence created by Joyce's death in 1941. And the self-imposed silence and internal exile of Flann O'Brien following the 1941 rejection of his second novel, The Third Policeman (published posthumously in 1967), also made it difficult for the Irish novel to sustain the international reputation it enjoyed in the inter-war period. For Irish novelists the absence of such figures, and of the possibility of a genuinely independent Irish novel their innovative work exemplified, gave rise to problems of continuity and change both conceptually and thematically.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-03-02
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 6
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