Irish Literature and the Western European Tradition: A Perspective from James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Irish literature stands among the oldest literary traditions in Western Europe, alongside Latin and Greek. Its origins trace back to the 4th and 5th centuries, during which the Ogham script a distinctive system of writing was employed from the early medieval period onward. Despite its unique linguistic and national characteristics, Irish literary production has long been intertwined with English language and culture, shaped by the phenomenon of the "dual tradition." This entanglement often led to the assimilation of Irish authors and their works into the canon of English literature, a process further facilitated by the fact that many prominent Irish writers lived and worked in England as emigrants. Figures such as Edmund Burke, Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw were, until the early 20th century, traditionally regarded as English or British authors. However, following Ireland’s partial independence and separation from England between 1920 and 1922, literary scholarship began to reclassify these writers and their works as integral to Irish cultural heritage. This shift is reflected in the emergence of the term “Anglo-Irish” literature, denoting works produced by Irish authors writing in English, often while residing in England.

            From the 17th century onward, Irish society existed in a paradoxical state simultaneously colonial and nationally autonomous. This duality became a persistent source of cultural tension within Irish literature, manifesting in four central thematic concerns: land, religion, nationality, and language. The profound cultural trauma engendered by this condition gave rise to Anglo-Irish literary expression. A quintessential figure of this tradition and arguably its architect was William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), a leading voice of the Irish Literary Revival and a pivotal contributor to European literary modernism during the 1920s and 1930s. While the late 19th-century Renaissance invigorated Irish nationalism with new texts and cultural energy, Yeats aspired to forge a modern Irish literature in the English language. Until the end of his life, he produced works of profound significance, particularly in poetry, often exploring paradoxes of identity and emotion. As Yeats himself declared: “I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser, and to Blake… and to the English language in which I think, speak and write…; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate.” In 1923, just one year after Ireland gained independence from England, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognized for expressing “the soul of a whole nation” through his poetic oeuvre.