Revisitations: Kiely's Literary Criticism (Benedict Kiely) (Critical Essay‪)‬

I Benedict Kiely's most sustained critical achievement was his slim book, Modern Irish Fiction: A Critique (1950), a survey of Irish novels and story collections published between roughly 1918 and 1948 (though with some backward looks). The survey has all the energetic briskness of a young critic simultaneously engaged on his own aspiring first additions to the body of Irish fiction; indeed, the critique appears to have been written while the first novels, Land without Stars (1946) and In a Harbour Green (1949) were in the process of being written or being published. His was the earliest critical harvesting of post-Independence Irish fiction and one gathered by a would-be professional writer rather than a professional critic, of whom there were very few in Ireland in 1949 when the book would have gone to press.