Lecture: The Irish Literary Renaissance — Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín examines the legacy of the Irish Literary Renaissance through successive generations of Irish writers in this free Grolier Club lecture.
Why we picked this
Tóibín is both a novelist steeped in that tradition and a critical scholar of it — he can speak about Yeats and Synge as influences on his own work, not just as historical objects. That double perspective makes him a rare lecturer on this period.
The Irish Literary Renaissance was one of the most concentrated eruptions of literary talent in the history of the English language — Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, O’Casey, and soon after, Beckett — occurring in a country in the process of becoming itself, where literature and political imagination were almost inseparable. What those writers created, and what they left for the writers who came after them, is the subject of Colm Tóibín’s lecture.
Tóibín is himself part of that inheritance. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and the author of novels including Brooklyn, Long Island, and The Master — a fictional study of Henry James that is also, quietly, about the Irish literary sensibility in exile. His critical writing on Yeats in particular has been influential for understanding how that period’s ambitions and contradictions echo through contemporary Irish fiction.
The lecture accompanies the Grolier Club’s current exhibition Risings: The Irish Literary Revival and the Making of a Nation. A rare chance to hear a major novelist speak historically about the tradition that shaped him.