The Troubles by Tim Pat Coogan7/5/2023 So it makes sense that Irish history should feel so literary, a kind of Irish Greek Tragedy. Yeats are famous Irishmen but did you know Oscar Wilde was Irish, as was George Bernard Shaw, and Bram Stoker (the author of Dracula…who incidentally married Oscar Wilde’s one-time girlfriend)? Ireland is a particularly literary country, too, with myths as memorable as any other nation, and a rich tradition of revolutionizing literature itself. It’s fair to call the various uprisings, revolutions, and conflicts that have been waged on this small island merely individual battles in a long, long war that has finally (and hopefully permanently) given way to relative peace.īut, you may ask, what if I’m more into reading fiction? I usually am, too, but the bloody history of Ireland is frankly as engaging, if not more so, than any novel I’ve ever read. Centuries-, even millennia-old enmities not only inform contemporary events, but are their driving force. Every country is, of course, shaped by its history, but time hardly seems to exist in Ireland in a neat past, present, and future. It’s fitting that Tim Pat Coogan’s riveting 1916: The Easter Rising draws so heavily on the past.
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