Background
Declan Liam Kibert was born on May 24, 1951 in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Fred and Eithne (Keegan) Kiberd.
(Synge was the victim of a cruel paradox: those who loved ...)
Synge was the victim of a cruel paradox: those who loved his works knew no Irish and those who loved Irish despised his works. This book aims to show that Synge's command of Irish was extensive and that this knowledge proved invaluable in the writing of his major plays.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0847661598/?tag=2022091-20
1979
(Ireland is suffering from a crisis of authority. Catholic...)
Ireland is suffering from a crisis of authority. Catholic Church scandals, political corruption, and economic collapse have shaken the Irish people’s faith in their institutions and thrown the nation’s struggle for independence into question. While Declan Kiberd explores how political failures and economic globalization have eroded Irish sovereignty, he also sees a way out of this crisis. After Ireland surveys thirty works by modern writers that speak to worrisome trends in Irish life and yet also imagine a renewed, more plural and open nation. After Dublin burned in 1916, Samuel Beckett feared “the birth of a nation might also seal its doom.” In Waiting for Godot and a range of powerful works by other writers, Kiberd traces the development of an early warning system in Irish literature that portended social, cultural, and political decline. Edna O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Hartnett lamented the loss of the Irish language, Gaelic tradition, and rural life. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eavan Boland grappled with institutional corruption and the end of traditional Catholicism. These themes, though bleak, led to audacious experimentation, exemplified in the plays of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy and the novels of John Banville. Their achievements embody the defiance and resourcefulness of Ireland’s founding spirit―and a strange kind of hope. After Ireland places these writers and others at the center of Ireland’s ongoing fight for independence. In their diagnoses of Ireland’s troubles, Irish artists preserve and extend a humane culture, planting the seeds of a sound moral economy.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674976568/?tag=2022091-20
2018
(Just as Ireland has produced many brilliant writers in th...)
Just as Ireland has produced many brilliant writers in the past century, so these writers have produced a new Ireland. In a book unprecedented in its scope and approach, Declan Kiberd offers a vivid account of the personalities and texts, English and Irish alike, that reinvented the country after centuries of colonialism. The result is a major literary history of modern Ireland, combining detailed and daring interpretations of literary masterpieces with assessments of the wider role of language, sport, clothing, politics, and philosophy in the Irish revival. In dazzling comparisons with the experience of other postcolonial peoples, the author makes many overdue connections. Rejecting the notion that artists such as Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett became modern to the extent that they made themselves "European," he contends that the Irish experience was a dramatic instance of experimental modernity and shows how the country's artists blazed a trail that led directly to the magic realism of a García Márquez or a Rushdie. Along the way, he reveals the vital importance of Protestant values and the immense contributions of women to the enterprise. Kiberd's analysis of the culture is interwoven with sketches of the political background, bringing the course of modern Irish literature into sharp relief against a tragic history of conflict, stagnation, and change. Inventing Ireland restores to the Irish past a sense of openness that it once had and that has since been obscured by narrow-gauge nationalists and their polemical revisionist critics. In closing, Kiberd outlines an agenda for Irish Studies in the next century and detects the signs of a second renaissance in the work of a new generation of authors and playwrights, from Brian Friel to the younger Dublin writers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674463641/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521602572/?tag=2022091-20
critic educator historian writer
Declan Liam Kibert was born on May 24, 1951 in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Fred and Eithne (Keegan) Kiberd.
Kiberd attended Belgrove Primary School before moving to St. Paul's College, Raheny. He also graduated from Trinity College in 1973 and Oxford University with Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1977.
Kiberd taught English at the University of Kent at Canterbury from 1976 till 1977, he was a teacher of Irish at the Trinity College for two years from 1977. He also served as a Director of the Yeats International Summer School during two years from 1985. From that year Kiberd worked as a columnist with The Irish Times, for two years as well. He joined The Irish Press as a columnist in 1987, working there for six years. Also he held a position of a regular essayist and reviewer in The Irish Times, The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and The New York Times. Kiberd was a lecturer of English literature at the University College from 2011.
Now Kiberd is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
Besides his teaching activity, Kiberd is the author. He is widely acknowledged as an expert on Irish literature and writers who write in Gaelic. In his first book, 1979’s Synge and the Irish Language, Kiberd aspires to broaden J. M. Synge’s reputation as a great Anglo-Irish writer to include an evaluation of his use of literary material from the Gaelic tradition.
Kiberd’s next publication, Men and Feminism in Modern Literature, is considered an exploration of the concept of “anima” in the work of leading male modernists.
Kiberd returned to the subject of Irish literature in his third book The Flowering Tree, an anthology of Gaelic poetry accompanied by English verse translations, which Kiberd co-edited with Gabriel Fitzmaurice.
Kiberd is also the author of Inventing Ireland, a highly praised examination of what is known as the Irish Literary Revival, the period in the early part of the twentieth century when Ireland produced a large number of world-class writers.
(Synge was the victim of a cruel paradox: those who loved ...)
1979(Just as Ireland has produced many brilliant writers in th...)
(Ireland is suffering from a crisis of authority. Catholic...)
2018
Kiberd is a member of International Association for Irish Literature.
Nowadays he serves on the advisory board of the International Review of Irish Culture.
Quotes from others about the person
“Kiberd’s brand of criticism is a mite too zesty and robust, and it doesn't always give a sense of plumbing the depths. But there are moments ... when it shifts into a register that is both moving and wise.” - Terry Eagleton
Kiberd married Elizabeth Mary Moriarty on June 23, 1979. The couple has 3 children - Lucy, Amy and Rory.
