James Joyce and Irish prose
The play is punctuated by songs that lampoon Irish piety, by dances and jokes, and, finally, by the gunfire of a police raid in which the hostage is tragically killed, Characters frequently address the audience, the accompanist remains onstage throughout, and no pretense is made that this is anything but theater; yet it captures the emotions anyway, having dispensed with every theatrical convention except the heart's truth.
James Joyce (1882-1941), the titan of Irish prose, exempted himself from the Literary Renaissance he referred to Yeats's Celtic Twilight as the Cultic Toilette and at age 22 expatriated himself to the Continent. He took with him a handsome but intellectually unprepossessing shopgirl,
Nora Barnacle, who became for him the personification of Dublin, in the environs of which Joyce set everything he ever wrote, Joyce's insistence on fixing his most obscure works to the real, even trivial, details of the city he remembered amounted to the most creative obsession in modern letters.
As a young man, growing up in a middle class, home, educated in Catholic prep schools and at Trinity College, Joyce had been attracted to the realism of Ibsen and learned Norwegian to read his plays in the original tongue, Ulysses, the huge novel that established Joyce's pre-eminent reputation, follows Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew, his wife, Molly, and young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's surrogate, in their minut-by-minute progress through a single day June 16, 1904 in Dublin. Joyce employed a stream of consciousness technique to record the random associations of his characters' thoughts. Readers were shocked by the eroticism of these interior monologues, and the book was until quite recently banned in Ireland.
James Joyce and Dublin
Yet Dubliners who managed to obtain copies were fascinated by the many living personalities parading across the pages and by the accuracy with which Joyce had observed and remembered the city, its features, and its speech. What few realized was how brilliantly Joyce had transformed the details of Dublin life newspaper articles from June 16, 1904, brand-name household goods, idioms of local patois into symbols of Europe's mythological and psychic heritage represented by The Odyssey, the novel's controlling metaphor.
Nor do many readers appreciate Joyce's love for his characters until Molly Bloom's long interior soliloquy on the edge of sleep, On Bloomsday, June 16 of every year, dedicated Joyceans gather in Dublin to retrace the routes followed by Ulysses's characters: from the Martello tower (a Napoleonicera fortress) where Joyce, like Stephen Dedalus, lived briefly in his student days, through the city, past nearly every point of interest or importance, to Eccles Street, where the Blooms resided.
Fans of Joyce's next and last book, Finnegans Wake, are rather few. It is probably the most frustrating and impenetrable book ever written, for language itself is the subject Nearly everyone of the book's 237,600 words has several meanings at once. Joyce, master of almost every European language, enlisted them all to create this huge stream•of•consciousness work the sleeping, dreaming thought flow of the Earwicker family of Dublin, whose matriarch, Ann (known also as Anna Livia Plurabelle), is at once the spirit of the river Liffey and the form of the book.
Joyce's works belong to the Red Branch line comic, cosmic, larger than life but Samuel Beckett (1906-89), briefly his secretary in the 1930s and another Dublin expatriate who lived on the Continent, beldngs to no tradition, though he shows the influence of Joyce and Synge. A founding member of the avantgarde and Ireland's third Nobel Prize winner (after Yeats and Shaw), Beckett's enigmatic plays and novels seem less overtly Irish than the works of his compatriot, although here and there in Waiting for Godot one hears echoes of the Irish music hall, and the astute reader or listener will realize that Play is set in Foxrock, a Dublin suburb. Beckett, the quintessential absurdist, displays in works as dauntingly obtuse in starkness as Finnegans Wake the characteristic daring and individualism of the Irish.
Modern Ireland and famous writers
Ireland has dispensed fine writing to the world this is no provincial tradition with astonishing abundance in this century. Among the lesser• known luminaries, some of whom have fallen into the shadows of the gods, are Frank O'Connor, memoirist, essayist, translator, and chronicler nonpareil of literary Ireland; Patrick Kavanagh, Ireland's only beat poet; Louis Macneice, the Belfast poet; Flann O'Brien (At Swim Two Birds), surrealist virtuoso; Denis O'Donoghue, the literary critic; playwrights Brian Friel and Hugh Leonard, who have enjoyed notable successes on Broadway; poets Thomas Kinsella John Montague, Derek Mahon, and Seamus Heaney; and, to run on and on, Padraic Colum, J. P.
Dunleavey (who also writes under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen), Denis Johnstone, Iris Murdoch, Brian Moore, Edna O'Brien, Liam O'Flaherty, Sean O'Faolain ... as though all the vital energies of the nation, pent up through 700 years of oppression, were erupting. The spectacle of the Irish literary explosion is without parallel in history.
Irish architecture
Ireland is full of picturesque ruins and ancient structures, which are I part of its charm for Americans unaccustomed to architecture older than a few centuries. Along every Irish road and river lie Stone Age tombs, ruined abbeys, decayed or restored castles, Palladianstyle manor houses, and stately Georgian mansions.
And the thatch-roofed and whitewashed or fieldstone cottages in the remoter regions are most appealing for their timeless, homespun simplicity.
County Donegal and County Sligo
The oldest structures, some of which have been dated to 3000 BC, are the megalithic monuments the tumuli and stone circles at Carrow more in County Donegal and Carrow keel in County Sligo; the passage grave complex at Brugh na Boinne in County Meath; and the decorated standing stones and dolmens scattered about the countryside.
Whether these monuments were built by an indigenous people or by immigrants is not known, but they are similar to those found in Europe and England (Stonehenge is perhaps the best-known example). It is thought that these structures were prehistoric shrines and that the Celts, who began arriving in Ireland around 500 BC, also endowed the sites with religious or magical significance.
The earliest Celtic structures are the duns, fortresses enclosed by drystone walls and often built atop megalithic shrines or ring forts. The walls served both to keep cattle in and to protect the settlement from attack. The most famous and impressive of the fortresses is Dun Aengus on the Aran isle of Inishmore in Galway Bay.
Dun Aengus
Dun Aengus is a semi-circle; its open side is a cliff that drops precipitously 266 feet to the roiling Atlantic, giving the impression that the missing half of the circle had collapsed into the ocean in some terrible cataclysm. Other notable ringed fortresses include Tara in County Meath and Griamin of Aileach in County Donegal.
Early Celtic dwellings were built of timber and wattle and have not survived. In treeless areas people lived in stone dwellings; their clochfms (beehive huts) were constructed in corbeled fashion, with the stones overlapping each other. The early Christian churches were also built in the beehive style, although some variations were introduced such as a rectangular shape and a pitched roof. Two examples are Skellig Michael, off the Kerry coast, and the Gallarus Oratory in County Kerry; both are thought to date from the 8th century.
The round tower is another relic of early Christian architecture. Ranging in height from 70 to 120 feet, slightly tapered, and topped by a conical roof, these were bell towers as well as places of refuge from the attacks of Viking invaders. (The doorway was located high above the ground; when besieged, inhabitants withdrew the adjoining ladder for safety.) A fine example of an early Christian round tower is the freestanding 11 thcentury structure at Glendalough in County Wicklow.
Monastic architecture in Ireland
Irish monastic and ecclesiastic architecture further developed with the introduction to Ireland of the Romanesque style during the 12th century. It was embraced with some enthusiasm by native artisans, and ornate stone carvings human and animal heads, chevrons, interlace, and foliagedecorate the arches, doorways, capitals, and sometimes windows of the churches of this period. The Chapel of Cormac, situated on the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary, is the earliest Irish Romanesque structure in the country, and Clonfert Cathedral in County Galway is perhaps the most ornate; both have heavily embellished portals.
Airport car rentals in Ireland
Airport car rentals and car hire can be pre-booked from the airport in Ireland, and if you want to enjoy the diverse architecture and places of interest in Ireland, you should take your time to drive around the cities and countryside, including Dublin, Limerick and Galway.
The Normans and Irish architecture
The invasion of the Normans in 1170 changed the face of Irish architecture forever, for they brought with them from England and Wales the designs and styles, proportions, shapes, and decorative devices prevalent there. Eager to colonize, they began a flurry of cathedral and castle building that lasted from the 12th to the 17th century. The numerous churches constructed during this period tended to be large and Gothic in style, with tall lancet windows and pointed arches; St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin is a fine example. The typical Norman fortress had a square stone keep enclosed by curtain walls linking four circular corner towers.
King Johns Castle in Limerick City
King John's Castle in Limerick City, built in 1210, combines all of these features. The towerhouse, a structure favored by both Norman and native Irish, dates from the 15th to the 17th century. Most of them were built, however,just after the Statute of 1429, which offered a £10 subsidy to any person building such a tower within the Pale. The so-called £ 10 houses were fortified dwellings built of stone, four or five stories high, with narrow slitted windows and steeply pitched roofs. A very simple Norman-built towerhouse is Donore Castle in County Meath.
During the late 17th century, domestic dwellings began to look less like fortresses and more like the classical mansions popular in England. This meant that houses were often built of brick, with hipped roofs and dormer windows, as exemplified by Beaulieu in County Louth. Very soon, however, the Irish and English imagination was captured by Palladianism, a re-interpretation of the design principles evolved by Italian architect Andrea Palladio in the mid-16th century. The arrangement of columns and arches in the facade of Bellamont Forest in County Cavan is a typical Palladian motif.
Architecture in Dublin Cork Belfast Limerick and Waterford
The 18th century saw the architectural expansion and enhancement of Ireland's urban centers Belfast, Cork, Dublin, Limerick, and Waterford. During this period Dublin received a heady endowment of new buildings designed in the classical style incorporating elements from ancient Greek and Roman architecture such as Trinity College, the Four Courts, the Custom' House, and the Parliament buildings (now the Bank of Ireland).
James Joyce (1882-1941), the titan of Irish prose, exempted himself from the Literary Renaissance he referred to Yeats's Celtic Twilight as the Cultic Toilette and at age 22 expatriated himself to the Continent. He took with him a handsome but intellectually unprepossessing shopgirl,
Nora Barnacle, who became for him the personification of Dublin, in the environs of which Joyce set everything he ever wrote, Joyce's insistence on fixing his most obscure works to the real, even trivial, details of the city he remembered amounted to the most creative obsession in modern letters.
As a young man, growing up in a middle class, home, educated in Catholic prep schools and at Trinity College, Joyce had been attracted to the realism of Ibsen and learned Norwegian to read his plays in the original tongue, Ulysses, the huge novel that established Joyce's pre-eminent reputation, follows Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew, his wife, Molly, and young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's surrogate, in their minut-by-minute progress through a single day June 16, 1904 in Dublin. Joyce employed a stream of consciousness technique to record the random associations of his characters' thoughts. Readers were shocked by the eroticism of these interior monologues, and the book was until quite recently banned in Ireland.
James Joyce and Dublin
Yet Dubliners who managed to obtain copies were fascinated by the many living personalities parading across the pages and by the accuracy with which Joyce had observed and remembered the city, its features, and its speech. What few realized was how brilliantly Joyce had transformed the details of Dublin life newspaper articles from June 16, 1904, brand-name household goods, idioms of local patois into symbols of Europe's mythological and psychic heritage represented by The Odyssey, the novel's controlling metaphor.
Nor do many readers appreciate Joyce's love for his characters until Molly Bloom's long interior soliloquy on the edge of sleep, On Bloomsday, June 16 of every year, dedicated Joyceans gather in Dublin to retrace the routes followed by Ulysses's characters: from the Martello tower (a Napoleonicera fortress) where Joyce, like Stephen Dedalus, lived briefly in his student days, through the city, past nearly every point of interest or importance, to Eccles Street, where the Blooms resided.
Fans of Joyce's next and last book, Finnegans Wake, are rather few. It is probably the most frustrating and impenetrable book ever written, for language itself is the subject Nearly everyone of the book's 237,600 words has several meanings at once. Joyce, master of almost every European language, enlisted them all to create this huge stream•of•consciousness work the sleeping, dreaming thought flow of the Earwicker family of Dublin, whose matriarch, Ann (known also as Anna Livia Plurabelle), is at once the spirit of the river Liffey and the form of the book.
Joyce's works belong to the Red Branch line comic, cosmic, larger than life but Samuel Beckett (1906-89), briefly his secretary in the 1930s and another Dublin expatriate who lived on the Continent, beldngs to no tradition, though he shows the influence of Joyce and Synge. A founding member of the avantgarde and Ireland's third Nobel Prize winner (after Yeats and Shaw), Beckett's enigmatic plays and novels seem less overtly Irish than the works of his compatriot, although here and there in Waiting for Godot one hears echoes of the Irish music hall, and the astute reader or listener will realize that Play is set in Foxrock, a Dublin suburb. Beckett, the quintessential absurdist, displays in works as dauntingly obtuse in starkness as Finnegans Wake the characteristic daring and individualism of the Irish.
Modern Ireland and famous writers
Ireland has dispensed fine writing to the world this is no provincial tradition with astonishing abundance in this century. Among the lesser• known luminaries, some of whom have fallen into the shadows of the gods, are Frank O'Connor, memoirist, essayist, translator, and chronicler nonpareil of literary Ireland; Patrick Kavanagh, Ireland's only beat poet; Louis Macneice, the Belfast poet; Flann O'Brien (At Swim Two Birds), surrealist virtuoso; Denis O'Donoghue, the literary critic; playwrights Brian Friel and Hugh Leonard, who have enjoyed notable successes on Broadway; poets Thomas Kinsella John Montague, Derek Mahon, and Seamus Heaney; and, to run on and on, Padraic Colum, J. P.
Dunleavey (who also writes under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen), Denis Johnstone, Iris Murdoch, Brian Moore, Edna O'Brien, Liam O'Flaherty, Sean O'Faolain ... as though all the vital energies of the nation, pent up through 700 years of oppression, were erupting. The spectacle of the Irish literary explosion is without parallel in history.
Irish architecture
Ireland is full of picturesque ruins and ancient structures, which are I part of its charm for Americans unaccustomed to architecture older than a few centuries. Along every Irish road and river lie Stone Age tombs, ruined abbeys, decayed or restored castles, Palladianstyle manor houses, and stately Georgian mansions.
And the thatch-roofed and whitewashed or fieldstone cottages in the remoter regions are most appealing for their timeless, homespun simplicity.
County Donegal and County Sligo
The oldest structures, some of which have been dated to 3000 BC, are the megalithic monuments the tumuli and stone circles at Carrow more in County Donegal and Carrow keel in County Sligo; the passage grave complex at Brugh na Boinne in County Meath; and the decorated standing stones and dolmens scattered about the countryside.
Whether these monuments were built by an indigenous people or by immigrants is not known, but they are similar to those found in Europe and England (Stonehenge is perhaps the best-known example). It is thought that these structures were prehistoric shrines and that the Celts, who began arriving in Ireland around 500 BC, also endowed the sites with religious or magical significance.
The earliest Celtic structures are the duns, fortresses enclosed by drystone walls and often built atop megalithic shrines or ring forts. The walls served both to keep cattle in and to protect the settlement from attack. The most famous and impressive of the fortresses is Dun Aengus on the Aran isle of Inishmore in Galway Bay.
Dun Aengus
Dun Aengus is a semi-circle; its open side is a cliff that drops precipitously 266 feet to the roiling Atlantic, giving the impression that the missing half of the circle had collapsed into the ocean in some terrible cataclysm. Other notable ringed fortresses include Tara in County Meath and Griamin of Aileach in County Donegal.
Early Celtic dwellings were built of timber and wattle and have not survived. In treeless areas people lived in stone dwellings; their clochfms (beehive huts) were constructed in corbeled fashion, with the stones overlapping each other. The early Christian churches were also built in the beehive style, although some variations were introduced such as a rectangular shape and a pitched roof. Two examples are Skellig Michael, off the Kerry coast, and the Gallarus Oratory in County Kerry; both are thought to date from the 8th century.
The round tower is another relic of early Christian architecture. Ranging in height from 70 to 120 feet, slightly tapered, and topped by a conical roof, these were bell towers as well as places of refuge from the attacks of Viking invaders. (The doorway was located high above the ground; when besieged, inhabitants withdrew the adjoining ladder for safety.) A fine example of an early Christian round tower is the freestanding 11 thcentury structure at Glendalough in County Wicklow.
Monastic architecture in Ireland
Irish monastic and ecclesiastic architecture further developed with the introduction to Ireland of the Romanesque style during the 12th century. It was embraced with some enthusiasm by native artisans, and ornate stone carvings human and animal heads, chevrons, interlace, and foliagedecorate the arches, doorways, capitals, and sometimes windows of the churches of this period. The Chapel of Cormac, situated on the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary, is the earliest Irish Romanesque structure in the country, and Clonfert Cathedral in County Galway is perhaps the most ornate; both have heavily embellished portals.
Airport car rentals in Ireland
Airport car rentals and car hire can be pre-booked from the airport in Ireland, and if you want to enjoy the diverse architecture and places of interest in Ireland, you should take your time to drive around the cities and countryside, including Dublin, Limerick and Galway.
The Normans and Irish architecture
The invasion of the Normans in 1170 changed the face of Irish architecture forever, for they brought with them from England and Wales the designs and styles, proportions, shapes, and decorative devices prevalent there. Eager to colonize, they began a flurry of cathedral and castle building that lasted from the 12th to the 17th century. The numerous churches constructed during this period tended to be large and Gothic in style, with tall lancet windows and pointed arches; St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin is a fine example. The typical Norman fortress had a square stone keep enclosed by curtain walls linking four circular corner towers.
King Johns Castle in Limerick City
King John's Castle in Limerick City, built in 1210, combines all of these features. The towerhouse, a structure favored by both Norman and native Irish, dates from the 15th to the 17th century. Most of them were built, however,just after the Statute of 1429, which offered a £10 subsidy to any person building such a tower within the Pale. The so-called £ 10 houses were fortified dwellings built of stone, four or five stories high, with narrow slitted windows and steeply pitched roofs. A very simple Norman-built towerhouse is Donore Castle in County Meath.
During the late 17th century, domestic dwellings began to look less like fortresses and more like the classical mansions popular in England. This meant that houses were often built of brick, with hipped roofs and dormer windows, as exemplified by Beaulieu in County Louth. Very soon, however, the Irish and English imagination was captured by Palladianism, a re-interpretation of the design principles evolved by Italian architect Andrea Palladio in the mid-16th century. The arrangement of columns and arches in the facade of Bellamont Forest in County Cavan is a typical Palladian motif.
Architecture in Dublin Cork Belfast Limerick and Waterford
The 18th century saw the architectural expansion and enhancement of Ireland's urban centers Belfast, Cork, Dublin, Limerick, and Waterford. During this period Dublin received a heady endowment of new buildings designed in the classical style incorporating elements from ancient Greek and Roman architecture such as Trinity College, the Four Courts, the Custom' House, and the Parliament buildings (now the Bank of Ireland).
Labels: Airport car rentals in Ireland, Monastic architecture in Ireland
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