Summary: | "Patrick Kavanagh has for long represented an alternative version of Irish poetry to the high-falutin' melodrama and rhetoric of W. B. Yeats. This collection of newly commissioned essays, by a range of established and younger scholars, re-examines his reputation in the light of recent thinking about Irish literature and the Ireland of his day in addition to authoritative, historically situated accounts of the whole body of his work, in prose and verse, individual studies consider his place in the pastoral tradition. his stylistic experimentation and debt to both popular and high intellectual traditions, his vision of rural and urban Ireland in the wake of independence, his reactions to contemporary political and social developments, and his continuing significance for present-day writers and readers." "This volume offers a definitive account for the general reader as well as the student of Irish literature and history of a writer whose reputation has continued to grow in the half century since his death. It will prove indispensable for anyone wishing to understand, not only the work of this uniquely original writer, but the Ireland in which he grew up and which his writing helped to define."--BOOK JACKET.
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