As the shifting meaning of the term Anglo-Irish literature during the 20th century demonstrates, there is disagreement about how to characterize 18th-century Irish writing in English. There is little disagreement, however, about the dichotomous nature of Irish society at that time. The country was dominated by the Protestant and English-speaking minority, which had triumphed over Roman Catholic Ireland at the Battles of the Boyne (1690) and Aughrim (1691) after the Glorious Revolution; the Protestant population's control over the country was later referred to as the Protestant Ascendancy. The legacy of the political settlement in Ireland that followed the defeat at Aughrim thus had a strongly sectarian and colonial cast that, when coupled with the grim Irish realities of conflict and poverty, would later trouble the writings of Edmund Burke (Burke, Edmund). Whig (Whig and Tory) writers such as Burke and Jonathan Swift (Swift, Jonathan), who considered the Glorious Revolution a triumph of liberty, also stumbled over the long-standing unequal relationship between the kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain. Protestant patriots rejected the notion that Ireland was either a dependant kingdom or a colony, but the statute book, the economic and political restrictions placed on Ireland by the British government at London, and the planting of English placemen in Irish jobs instructed them otherwise. In The Drapier's Letters (1724–25), Swift asked:Were not the people of Ireland born as free as those of England? How have they forfeited their Freedom? Is not their Parliament as fair a Representative of the People, as that of England? And hath not their Privy Council as great, or a greater Share in the Administration of publick Affairs? Are they not Subjects of the same King? Does not the same Sun shine over them? And have they not the same God for their Protector? Am I a Free-man in England, and do I become a Slave in six Hours, by crossing the Channel?

Swift demonstrated no interest in the “barbarous” Irish language and, unlike Burke, no sympathy for poor Irish Roman Catholics. Swift's views were an expression of his own bifurcated vision of Irish writing. According to such a view, 18th-century Ireland produced two distinct literatures that never touched or intersected: one in English, the language of print, and another in Irish, mainly in manuscript. Thus conceptualized, the first—what is best called Anglo-Irish literature—can scarcely be separated from the wider English tradition. If, as English critic Samuel Johnson remarked, the noblest prospect that a Scotsman ever sees is the high road to England, for many an ambitious Anglo-Irish writer—including the Shakespeare scholar and editor Edmund Malone (Malone, Edmund), one of Johnson's friends in London—that prospect was the boat to Holyhead, the Welsh port that served as the chief entry point for travelers to the British mainland from Ireland. Burke, George Farquhar (Farquhar, George), Oliver Goldsmith (Goldsmith, Oliver), Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Sheridan, Richard Brinsley), and many others left Ireland and made their careers in England. After 1714 Swift wanted to leave Ireland but could not, given the political changes in England that had led to his Irish exile. He likened his condition in Dublin to that of a “poisoned rat in a hole.” London exerted an almost irresistible force as a literary and theatrical market. Anglo-Irish drama and novels were written mostly with an English audience in view; in terms of content, there is often nothing specifically Irish about, for example, the plays and novels of Henry Brooke (Brooke, Henry) or the essays and poetry of Goldsmith.

The Anglo-Irish style rises to its best, clearest, and most powerful expression in the works of Swift, Goldsmith (Goldsmith, Oliver), Sheridan, and Burke (Burke, Edmund). As the 20th-century Irish poet, novelist, and critic Seamus Deane observed, “Anglo-Irish writing does not begin with Swift, but Anglo-Irish literature does.” And where Swift begins, he adds, with Burke “the formation of the Anglo-Irish cultural and literary identity reaches completion.” All of these writers moved in the sphere of English letters and—with the exception of Goldsmith—politics, and to that extent they were insiders. All were born in Ireland, and in that respect they were outsiders. (It must not be forgotten that the English journalist John Wilkes (Wilkes, John) once said of Burke, today considered a giant of English political thought, that his oratory “stank of whiskey and potatoes,” a curt dismissal that lays bare Burke's status as an outsider.) Indeed, Anglo-Irish writers were doubly outsiders, given their minority status within Ireland's largely Catholic population. Their unique position within both English and Irish society nurtured a doubleness in their language, which was manifested in the finely honed sense of irony evident in Swift's savage satires and in the glittering verbal dexterity of Sheridan's The School for Scandal (1777).

A sense of nostalgia—for a traditional world lost or for an ideal world gone wrong—also gives a sometimes tragic note to Swift's indignation and suffuses Burke's complex literary output. A politician for most of his career, Burke entered public life after having written two philosophical books, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). These proto-Romantic treatises privilege the natural and the authentic over the artificial, and they prefigure Burke's defense of the integrity of native and traditional culture in India during the impeachment proceedings he initiated in 1786 against Warren Hastings, governor-general of India. Ireland too had an ancient civilization, and it is Burke's acute sensitivity to this fact—perhaps nurtured by his mother and by his wife, both Roman Catholics—that explains this Irish Protestant's unrelenting hostility to a parvenu Protestant Ascendancy.

The writer who, more than any other, took up the challenge of writing new “national” lyrics to Bunting's music was Thomas Moore (Moore, Thomas), who published 10 separate numbers of his Irish Melodies between 1807 and 1834. These hugely popular drawing-room songs (including "Let Erin Remember the Days of Old," "Dear Harp of My Country," and "Oft in the Stilly Night" ) reinvented for audiences across Ireland and Great Britain a form of romantic Celticism that, though nationalist in flavour, was nonetheless politically superficial. Moore's lyrics are sentimental and do not stand well when separated from the music to which they were written, but the cultural impact of the Irish Melodies was enormous. Later commentators, however, disdained them. James Hardiman—the editor of Irish Minstrelsy (1831), a collection of bardic poetry—called them “vulgar ballads,” and English essayist William Hazlitt (Hazlitt, William) accused Moore of having converted “the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuff-box.” Moore was made a best-selling poet by Lalla Rookh (1817), a long allegorical poem in which an Eastern princess traveling accompanied by a poet—her husband-to-be in disguise—hears tales of insurrection and passion. His historical novel The Memoirs of Captain Rock, the Celebrated Irish Chieftain (1824) also enjoyed wide popular appeal.

one who, among the somewhat sybaritic singers of his day, was like some aged sea-king sitting among inland wheat and poppies—the savour of the sea about him, and its strength.

a great Irish historian. The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battle-fields, but in what the people say to each other on fair-days and on high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage. These things has Carleton recorded.

In step with developments elsewhere in Europe, Ireland in the mid-19th century saw renewed expressions of nationalism. These, however, coincided with the greatest catastrophe experienced by the Irish people: the Great Potato Famine, or An Gorta Mór (“The Great Hunger”), of 1845–49.

If the abortive Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 was a military failure, its energy and the ways in which its intellectuals had altered the nature of the debate over Ireland's future did not disappear. In 1858 the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood was founded, with an American counterpart, the Fenian Brotherhood, appearing simultaneously. The Fenian leader and novelist Charles Kickham, a Roman Catholic who had taken part in the Young Ireland rising of 1848, was a kind of Irish republican counterpart to English novelist Charles Dickens (Dickens, Charles). Immensely popular in both Ireland and the United States, Kickham's novels Sally Kavanagh; or, The Untenanted Graves (1869) and Knocknagow; or, The Homes of Tipperary (1879) were initially serialized in newspapers. Sentimental and didactic, Kickham's fiction was the literary embodiment of the Fenianism that, through the latter half of the 19th century, played a vital role in building Irish nationalism as a political force.

The hermetic solitude and the autocracy of the great country house, the demonic power of the family myth, fatalism, feudalism and the “ascendancy” outlook are accepted facts of life for the race of hybrids from which Le Fanu sprang.

If I possess any talent, it is of darkening the gloomy, and deepening the sad; of painting life in extremes, and representing those struggles of passions when the soul trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed.

Two exiled Irish writers influenced British culture in important ways as the 19th century turned. George Bernard Shaw (Shaw, George Bernard) and Oscar Wilde (Wilde, Oscar) were both dramatists and polemicists. Shaw was a Dublin-born middle-class Protestant who by the 1920s had worked his way from an apprentice clerkship to a position as one of Europe's most influential men of letters. Shavian became the adjective used to describe the witty epithets that punctuate Shaw's writing and serve as the glue that holds together works that could often be didactic and dramatically stilted. Over the course of a long career, Shaw produced some 50 plays, five novels, and innumerable political and cultural essays. He played the part of the engaged public intellectual with insistence and courage, making himself unpopular in England with his criticism of World War I and his campaigns against the executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising. Shaw, a member of the socialist Fabian Society, condemned what he called “middle-class morality” and its strictures. Most of his plays were, in fact, modern morality plays, influenced, at least early in his career, by the realism and feminism of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Many of his early plays had to wait years before appearing in London; frequently his work would instead open in Germany or the United States. Among these plays were the then-scandalous Mrs. Warren's Profession (written 1893, performed 1902), which tackled the moral economy of prostitution; Arms and the Man (performed 1894), which subverted the conventions of romantic drama to undermine the ideals of war; and his first financial success, The Devil's Disciple (performed 1897), in which Shaw, this time inverting the conventions of contemporary melodrama, took apart two more “ideals”—those of family and marriage.

Shaw's middle-period plays—including Caesar and Cleopatra (performed 1901); John Bull's Other Island (performed 1904), the only play that dealt specifically with the Irish situation; Man and Superman (performed 1905); and Major Barbara (performed 1905)—established him as the leading playwright in London, particularly after Wilde's disgrace in 1895. By the time of Pygmalion (performed 1913), notorious for its onstage use of the epithet bloody, Shaw's work was drawing huge audiences to long runs.

Two years after the success of what is widely regarded as his best play, St. Joan (performed 1923), Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award that acknowledged his international reputation. He accepted the prize but declined the money. Shaw occupies an awkward place in the Irish literary canon, in part because of his long absence from his country of birth and in part because of his tangential relationship to the nationalist Irish literary renaissance.

Although his play Salomé (published 1893) was banned during rehearsals, Wilde's greatest literary success came in the theatre with a series of light, epigrammatic comedies of manners: Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). After the latter opened, Wilde was accused by the marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas, of sodomy; Wilde responded by taking out a warrant against Queensberry for criminal libel. Wilde lost the case in a scandalous and spectacular trial and was himself arrested, tried, and found guilty of homosexual offenses. During his two years' hard labour, Wilde wrote a long letter to Douglas, a moving meditation on love and suffering; first published posthumously in 1905 as De Profundis, it did not appear in its complete form until 1949. His final work was a poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), inspired by the execution of a fellow prisoner. Decadent, dandy, aesthete, wit, playwright, poet, novelist, critic, and public lecturer, Wilde remains one of the most controversial Irish writers, not least because, like Shaw, his relationship to his country of birth was an uneasy one.

I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser, and to Blake…and to the English language in which I think, speak and write…; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate.

Both Beckett and Joyce, 20th-century Ireland's towering literary presences, were exiles. But that century's literary history is also tied to the traumatic political and cultural changes that Ireland sustained and to which writers who stayed at home responded. By 1923, Ireland had experienced rebellion (the Easter Rising), the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), a civil war (1922–23), and the partition of the country into two states. Of the 32 Irish counties, 26 were newly independent; 6, in northeast Ulster, became “Northern Ireland.” In the independent counties, a new political and cultural dispensation reigned in which the energies of revolutionary nationalism and the Irish literary renaissance gave way to the lethargies of a constrictive, censorious, and clericalist Roman Catholicism, a narrow and conservative nationalism, and a parochial, self-imposed isolation that would last until the 1960s. While the new independent establishment officially sanctified the Irish Revolution, it now tried to close off revolutionary ideas. Writers inevitably reacted to these new conditions, many of them negatively.

Given its geographical and demographic diminutiveness and its catastrophic history, Ireland occupies an unexpectedly elevated position in European literature. Despite the country's apparently endless preoccupation with its past, its literary present and future at the beginning of the 21st century appeared vibrant and promising. Prominent poets included Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and Thomas Kinsella (Kinsella, Thomas). McCabe, Banville, Jennifer Johnston (Johnston, Jennifer), William Trevor (Trevor, William), Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, Neil Jordan, and Seamus Deane wrote fiction, and Friel, Frank McGuinness, Tom Murphy, Martin MacDonagh, and Marina Carr wrote for the theatre.

The most comprehensive single source is Seamus Deane, Andrew Carpenter, and Jonathan Williams (eds.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 5 vol. (1991–2002); each of the sections of this useful anthology is introduced by an essay. A concise account is Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (1986). Another survey is Roger McHugh and Maurice Harmon, A Short History of Anglo-Irish Literature from Its Origins to the Present Day (1982). A more extended history with comprehensive bibliographies is Margaret Kelleher and Philip O'Leary (eds.), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, 2 vol. (2006), which provides a collection of essays by experts in different genres and periods. Useful primers are Robert Hogan (ed.), Dictionary of Irish Literature, rev. and expanded ed. (1996); Robert Welch (ed.), The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (2000); and Denis Lane and Carol McCrory Lane (compilers and eds.), Modern Irish Literature (1988).Broad critical surveys include James Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (1983); Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (1999); and W.J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition, and Betrayal in Literary History, rev. and enlarged ed. (1994). Thomas Kinsella, The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland (1995), is an important and influential consideration of the hybridity of Irish literature. A collection of essays on key canonical writers and texts is Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (2000).

One of the most influential studies of the 18th century is Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (1925, reissued 1975). Corkery's “hidden Ireland” thesis is reengaged, refurbished, and refined in Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (1995); and Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development, and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (1997). Similar issues of ethnicity, identity, and scholarship are addressed in Clare O'Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c. 1750–1800 (2004). The impact of politics on writing during the 18th century is perhaps at its most vivid on the stage, as demonstrated by Helen M. Burke, Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theater, 1712–1784 (2003); and Christopher J. Wheatley, Beneath Iërne's Banners: Irish Protestant Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1999).Wide-ranging anthologies that include the work of such major figures as Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke as well as of lesser-known writers are Andrew Carpenter (ed.), Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (1998); and A. Norman Jeffares and Peter van de Kamp (eds.), Irish Literature: The Eighteenth Century (2006).

Surveys of 19th-century literature include John Cronin, The Anglo-Irish Novel: The Nineteenth Century (1980); Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (2002); James H. Murphy, Ireland: A Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 1791–1891 (2003); Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English: The Romantic Period (1789–1850), 2 vol. (1980; originally published in French, 1972); and Robert Welch, Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats (1980). An influential and wide-ranging study is Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (1996). A useful emphasis on the marriage of politics and literature can be found in Michael Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature: From Thomas Davis to W.B. Yeats (1972).Accounts dealing specifically with the Anglo-Irish include Vera Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (1998); A.C. Partridge, Language and Society in Anglo-Irish Literature (1984); and Terrence McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland a Colony?: Economics, Politics, and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2005).

Although it deals with only the Irish Republic and not Northern Ireland, a key general text is Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–2002, rev. ed. (2004). Other wide-ranging accounts of the modern period include Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (1983); and Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (1995). Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880–1980 (1985), was influential in reshaping the study of 20th-century literature. David Pierce, Light, Freedom, and Song: A Cultural History of Modern Irish Writing (2005); and David Pierce (ed.), Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century (2000), contain useful bibliographies, chronologies, and suggestions for further reading. Studies of the period include Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown (eds.), The Irish Short Story (1979); Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (2001); Neil Corcoran, Poets of Modern Ireland: Text, Context, Intertext (1999); Douglas Dunn (ed.), Two Decades of Irish Writing (1975); and John Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950 (2000). Tom Paulin, Ireland and the English Crisis (1984), is a provocative set of essays on Irish culture.Studies that examine the works and lives of individual authors include Richard Ellmann, Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (1986); and Ronan McDonald, Tragedy and Irish Writing: Synge, O'Casey, Beckett (2001). Matthew Campbell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (2003); and Shaun Richards (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama (2004), are comprehensive collection of essays. Julia Carlson (ed.), Banned in Ireland: Censorship & the Irish Writer (1990), includes interviews with writers.