Literature
Oscar Wilde once sighed to Yeats that "we Irish have done nothing, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks"; Samuel Beckett claimed that Irish writers had been "buggered into existence by the English army and the Roman pope". Irish writing has always flouted and challenged, experimented and fantasized, from the great anti-novel, Joyce's Ulysses , to what some see as the great anti-play, Beckett's Waiting for Godot . Much Irish writing concerns the dysfunction of real life, but this is usually laced with wild, fantastical and spiritual imaginings; one of the country's great contemporary novelists, Patrick McCabe, claims, in a typical Irish inversion, this should be deemed "social fantastic" not "poetic realism". Authors from Swift to Roddy Doyle present us with the conflict between high ideals and sordid reality, a conflict captured by Beckett when he claimed he wanted to "sit around, scratch my arse and think of Dante." Tension has also come from writing in a language that belongs, essentially, to another tradition. This is most clearly articulated by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney who sees the conflict between his folk background, what he deems "hearth culture", and expressing himself in poetry, the most formal genre in English, as the central dynamic in his work. Thus any study of Irish literature must begin with an examination of the folk culture and tradition to which Irish writers belong.
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