Dublin's Four Literary Heroes
About This Novel
Richard Ellman's Lectures on Irish Literature, winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for Biography, is a literary lecture on four profoundly influential Irish writers (Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett), which is both academic and readable. It may be said that these four people formed a strange combination. And similarities that they themselves were unaware of began to emerge: they were both far from home, witty, obscure, and violent. These Dubliners are outstanding and self-satisfied, even when they think they are down and out, they still show off their wealth, just like Pythagoras in Yeats's poem, with golden stockings. They raise and challenge their own assumptions, they move between art and anti-art, pleasure and fear, acceptance and abandonment. The fact that they all came from the same city doesn't mean much, but like their motherland, they fought hard for independence, despised occupation by external powers, and had many internal differences. These qualities are not unique to Ireland, but they are epitomized in Ireland. With these four native Dubliners, a city once forced into empire regained its power to influence the world with another kind of dominion: the dominion of art. --Richard Elman
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