This chapter considers the connections between modern Irish literature and the politics of nationalism, rebellion, partition, and sectarianism. It discusses key moments in the evolution of Irish culture and writing, including the 1798 rebellion, the revolutionary period of 1916–22, and the 1998 Belfast Agreement. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) registered the decisive impact of the fall in 1890 of the parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, on the country and its literature. W. B Yeats seized on this moment of political crisis in order to launch a movement for cultural revival. Yet most Irish writing in the independent Irish state after 1922, although hostile to Catholic hegemony and to the censorship of art, was counter-revolutionary rather than aesthetically or politically radical. While Beckett explored the legacies of an experimental Irish modernism from Paris, realist novelists, such as John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, dominated the domestic scene. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the generation of poets and critics that emerged from Northern Ireland after the 1960s, including Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin, and Seamus Heaney.

While the attempt to recover or revive a traditional native culture was a key element of Irish cultural nationalism since the late eighteenth century, the moment of the so-called Celtic Revival, at around the turn of the twentieth century, remains distinctive and significant for a number of reasons.

In no other period has Ireland produced so many writers of such extraordinary quality. Moreover, the reputations and achievements of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge are inextricably bound up with the revivalist features of their Irish subject matter, and those of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are at least in part moulded by their rejection of the aesthetics and politics of the revival. The contemporary ‘branding’ of the Irish cultural heritage continues to exploit the fame of these literary stars. The works of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, of course, are all also central to the history of European modernism. Indeed, it could be argued that this unique instance of a modernist movement in a colonial setting presents an important challenge to theorists of modernism; certainly, this literature demands from its critics a nuanced understanding of modernity in relation to Irish history.