Why I Chose to Write About Anglo-Irish Literature

Before I start posting about the Dublin experience from an Anglo-Irish literary perspective, I want to lay out a few topics and themes that I will discuss as well as the inspiration for creating this blog. I am a 3rd year student at Champlain College, studying in Dublin, Ireland for the semester. My Irish Literary Experience class has exposed me to a number of Irish authors, playwrights, and poets which have made my understanding of Dublin as a city and the Irish people more clear.

This blog is to prove that, if you're going to be in Dublin reading a few books by Irish authors such as James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, or John Banville, or titles such as Dubliners, or even reading a play like Waiting for Godot will enhance your understanding of both the city and the Irish identity. It's important to distinguish the difference between Irish literature and Anglo-Irish literature, as Irish literature is written in Irish and Anglo-Irish literature is written in English. If you're reading Beckett, it was most likely translated from French to English, but I will get into that in a later post.

The idea for a blog about the literary depictions of Dublin sprang from a trip to the Guinness Storehouse one of the first weekends of my four-month long stay in Dublin. I was reading Oscar Wilde at the time, but quotes from James Joyce were posted on the window of the Gravity Bar.


I didn't understand the context of this quote until I actually read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. My next few posts will discuss the Irish theme of being in Ireland as an imprisonment and the flight motif in works by James Joyce. I will also write about my trip to Paris and how that city ties in with a surprisingly large number of Irish authors...