Irreducible Ireland

This book, in tandem with Joysis Crisis (2021), attempts an existential reading of Irish writers who shaped the nation’s spiritual outlook for more than a century. Each of them lived an intense psychodrama which brought them into conflict with social and religious orthodoxy. Each of them saw himself as a liberator, yet none of them reached a serene harmonious vision. In attempting to follow their thought into its last recesses, we confront daring philosophical questions about the self, God, sexuality, freedom, life and death. These are framed in terms that are distinctively Irish, and the five great writers leave it to their compatriots to find the answers. Close reading of five Moore stories, five Yeats poems, and three Beckett compositions allows the existential questions to be sighted at the level of the actual writing. The theological potential of literature is thus given a concrete profile and a dialogue is opened up between Christian faith and these “unacknowledged legislators” of the Irish soul.