At the end of the course, the student
• has acquired a profound awareness of the role of literature in the creation and dissemination of cultural identities.
• has gained knowledge of the manifestations of Irish literatures and developments in the Irish literary field in the modern age, in broader European and transatlantic contexts.  
• has developed insight into various critical debates within the field of Irish as well as broader literary studies and is able to apply relevant theoretical frameworks from diaspora studies, memory studies and (post)colonial studies to a wide range of Irish literary texts.  
• is able to analyze and contextualize Irish literary texts at an advanced academic level, and to express him- or herself professionally on these subjects in oral and written forms.
 

Novelist Emily Lawless wrote in Ireland (1885) that the history of her native country was “beset with …distracting problems, bristling with …thorny controversies”. Indeed, especially during the second half of the nineteenth and the twentieth century, Ireland went through many formative events, ranging from the Great Hunger (1845-50) and the Irish diaspora to several abortive attempts at rebellion against the English; and including the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), Ireland’s partition and the successive troubles in Northern-Ireland.
Ireland long had an anomolous position within Europe as a colony. Its transition from British ‘colony’ to Free State and the emergence of global Irish communities following several significant tides of emigration ignited a strong engagement with cultural identity that is also reflected in Anglo-Irish literature: what does it mean to be Irish? And what is Ireland’s place within Europe and the rest of the world? In what respects does Irish literature engage with European literary traditions? Are the roots of authentic ‘Irishness’ in the West, as W.B. Yeats and many other Revivalists believed; or is ‘Irishness’ far from homogeneous, marked by a cultural hybridity and displacement that are inherent to its former status as a colony and nation of emigration? What does Ireland signify for Protestant or Catholic writers? Are there different gendered perspectives on Ireland and its sense of identity?                                                                                         
In this course we will examine these questions in relation to several key works of Irish literature. These texts engage with seven interrelated themes that are central to the development of Irish cultural identities and cultural legacies: the land, famine, emigration, rebellion, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, religious strife and the past. Covering a wide variety of literary genres (drama, poetry, the short story, the novel) and modes (regionalism, the Gothic, the pastoral), this course will explore Irish literature against the background of its turbulent history and in the context of theories on nationalism, migration, postcolonialism and cultural memory.