The house of gold liam oflaherty biography

This a worth reading novel for those seriously into Irish literature and history. It lets us see a lot about "real life" in Ireland in It is not a great novel but I think it is an important book for its historical value. Email This BlogThis!

The house of gold liam oflaherty biography

Labels: Ireland. No comments:. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Reject Read More. Necessary Necessary. Archived from the original on 27 March Retrieved 19 May Blood Kindred W. The Life, the Death, the Politics. People's World. History Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan US. Kelly, A. The Letters of Liam O'Flaherty.

Wolfhound Press. Irish Studies at the Hesburgh Library. Cahalan At least two of the Irish stories ' Daoine Bochta ' and ' An Fiach ' both written in were originally composed in Irish. The other stories in Irish were translated or recomposed into their English language version. Until the s it was difficult to get Irish language work published.

External links [ edit ]. Wikiquote has quotations related to Liam O'Flaherty. Works by Liam O'Flaherty. Gaelic literature. Celtic literature European literature Literature in the other languages of Britain. Authority control databases. Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description is different from Wikidata Use dmy dates from January Articles containing Irish-language text.

Toggle the table of contents. Liam O'Flaherty. Irish Renaissance, socialist, modernist, realist. Margaret Barrington. While the sheer quantity of his writing could account for such differences in interpretation, the fact that they occur in discussions of the same works implies, rather, that O'Flaherty is a writer of greater complexity than is often acknowledged.

Frierson suggested that "the author's writings reflect the chaos of his life. The setting for most of O'Flaherty's novels and short stories is Ireland, and his central characters are often Irish peasants deeply rooted in the land. James H. O'Brien pointed out in his Liam O'Flaherty that "collectively O'Flaherty's short stories describe two or three generations of life in the Aran Islands and the west of Ireland; perhaps they reach back even further, so little did life change in those areas until the end of the nineteenth century.

On the other hand, as an early reviewer of The Informer was quoted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as commenting, O'Flaherty "never makes the common error … of falling into sentiment about Ireland or slipping out of the world of reality into that non-existent world of petulant, half-godlike and utterly fictitious Irishmen that other writers have created out of their false vision and saccharine fancy.

The fact that O'Flaherty was ultimately forced to leave Ireland and take up residence in England further separates him from the Irish literary tradition. Nevertheless, one aspect of O'Flaherty's fiction grounds him solidly in an Irish tradition, specifically an oral tradition, and this is his ability as a storyteller. As O'Brien explained, "In both novels and short stories, a Gaelic influence is manifest in the directness of narrative, the simplicity of language, and an elemental concern with primary emotions.

His best pieces, such as 'The Conger Eel,' have the character of pictures, simple and moving because they mean no more than they say. A number of critics have taken exception to O'Fla-herty's classification as a naturalist. O'Brien believed that the writer's "purpose is not to present a realistic or naturalistic view of the Irish peasant….

Instead, O'Flaherty generally uses the simplicity of peasant life to depict elemental reactions and instincts. O'Flaherty is too forceful to be pessimistic, too violent and too melodramatic to present us with a study of humanity. His distortions are those of the expressionist. The expressionistic representation of violence and emotion is a characteristic other critics note.

Frierson explained it further: "Everywhere there is primitive physical violence, reckless impulse, greed, and cruelty; and the full force of the author's dramatic fervor is exerted by riveting our attention upon physical manifestation of the strongest emotions. Energy alone is not enough, but the sensuous poetic energy of O'Flaherty was like a flood; the reader was carried away by it and with it, slightly stunned and exalted by the experience.

These different aspects of O'Flaherty's fiction—the Irishman turning away from yet remaining tied to Ireland, the realistic storyteller imbuing his tales with an intense expression of human emotion—are brought together by John Zneimer's interpretation. Because the Ireland in which O'Flaherty lived was an Ireland in which the old values and dreams were being destroyed by twentieth-century reality, O'Flaherty's Irishness and his existential awareness are inextricably tied.

As Zneimer maintained, "He speaks in his novels about traditions that have failed in a world that is falling apart, about desperate men seeking meaning through violent acts. O'Flaherty turned his art, Zneimer concluded, into a religious quest, making his novels "spiritual battlegrounds whereon his characters … struggle to find meaning" in a meaningless world.