Writing the Irish West

<p>In recent decades a large and well-regarded volume of creative work has emerged from the West of Ireland written by residents of the region by those raised in West of Ireland families outside the region and by seasonal and occasional visitors. The fiction of John McGahern the plays and films of Martin McDonagh Tim Robinson's maps and place studies the work of Richard Murphy and the poetry of Mary O'Malley Moya Cannon and Sean Lysaght are known and admired worldwide. Yet for all that has been made of the Western themes and settings in the work of such writers and others little effort has been made to examine their work collectively and in depth. Eamonn Wall's <i>Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions</i> is the first critical study to examine these seven contemporary Irish writers in their shared Western context. </p><p>Wall describes analyzes and contextualizes their work to show the fundamental ways in which the region has influenced and shaped it. Certain themes and commonplaces recur obsessively: the bilingual nature of Western life and language landscape gender poverty the individual's relationship to nature and place connections between Christianity and paganism the overpowering weight of history and each author's complex relationship to the Irish Literary Revival of Yeats Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge. Although well-developed theoretical approaches to reading Western American literature have been practiced for years no such approaches exist in Irish discourse. Wall draws on extensive research on the literature of the American West for a comparative study that places the Irish and American Wests side by side. Underlined by an engagement with the role ecology plays in the study of literature <i>Writing the Irish West</i> highlights uncanny connections between the works of West-of-Ireland writers and their Western American counterparts.</p>