final examination topics: MA, English: Irish studies

For your final exam, you will be responsible for the 12 sub-topics in the topic group (I, II or III) most relevant to your thesis. topics

1. The settlement of Ireland and conversion to Christianity
2. Ireland in the Middle Ages: the Viking and Anglo-Norman conquests, consolidation of English dominance; the Pale
3. Ireland under the Tudors
4. From Cromwell to William III: victory and consolidation of the English state organisation and social structure; settlement of Ulster, the roots of the Protestant Ascendancy, the forced retreat of Irish-language Catholic culture
5. “Georgian” Dublin in the eighteenth century; modern Anglo-Irish “national” politics at the end of the eighteenth century: Grattan’s Parliament, the United Irishmen movement and The Year of the French
6. From political union through Catholic emancipation to the Great Famine; the development of the new (Catholic and English speaking) Irish middle-class, the development of bourgeois mentality and the decline of the Irish language
7. Isaac Butt, Daniel O’Connell, and Charles Stewart Parnell: the Land League, and the Home Rule movement
8. The politics of independence and revolutionary violence: from the Fenians to the Easter Rising
9. Arthur Griffith and Sinn Fein, independence and the partition of Ireland
10. De Valera’s Ireland: from the 1920s to the end of the 1960s
11. Northern Ireland and “The Troubles”
12. Ireland in the EU, “The Celtic Tiger”

1. Literature of the heroic age: epic cycles
2. Irish culture in the early and mature Middle Ages: poetry, music, ornamental art
3. Survival, then gradual decline of literature in the Irish language by the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century
4. The beginnings of Anglo-Irish nationalism: Jonathan Swift
5. Ireland and the Enlightenment: Jonathan Swift’s Gullivers’s Travels
6. “We Irish”: George Berkeley, philosopher; The Language Issue: the rise of Hiberno-English
7. Anglo-Irish dramatists and the English stage: Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan
8. Ireland and the French Revolution: Edmund Burke
9. Maria Edgeworth, Ascendancy, and the culture of the Big House
10. Nationalism and Romanticism: the poetry of Thomas Moore and James Clarence Mangan
11. Repressed Ascendancy guilt: Anglo-Irish gothic in the 19th century (Charles Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker)
12. Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray: decadence, transgression and the Irish

1. The literary revival; Celtic Twilight, Douglas Hyde and the Gaelic League
2. Irish dramatists and the London scene: Oscar Wilde and G. B. Shaw
3. The new Irish drama; Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge and the Abbey Theatre
4. J. M. Synge and the modernist theatre
5. W. B. Yeats’s poetic career, significance and influence
6. Ireland and modernism: James Joyce
7. New trends in fiction between the two World Wars: sociographic-autobiographical populism (Thomas O’Crochan, Maurice O’Sullivan), late-naturalism (Liam O’Flaherty) and new experimentalism (Flann O’Brien/Myles na Copaleen and Samuel Beckett)
8. Samuel Beckett, dramatist
9. Modern Irish drama from the 20s to the present (Sean O’Casey, Dennis Johnston, Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy, Stewart Parker)
10. The first generation of Irish poets after Yeats (Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh)
11. Irish poetry after World War II (John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Brendan Kennelly, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Medbh McGuckian and others)
12. The novel today (John McGahern, John Banville, Dermot Bolger, Colm Tóibín, Roddy Doyle and others)

• Bew, Paul. Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Curtis, Edmund. A History of Ireland, London: Methuen, 1936 (And later editions)
• Foster, Roy F. Modern Ireland 1600-1972. (1988) London: Penguin Books, 1999. (several further reprints)
• Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. (several further editions)
• Kiberd, Declann. Irish Classics. London: Granta Books, 2000.
• Kurdi Mária (ed). Critical Anthology for the Study of Modern Irish Literature. Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, 2003.
• Mc Cormack, W. J.. From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History. Cork: Cork University Press, 1994.
• MacKillop, James. Myths and Legends of the Celts. London: Penguin Books, 2005. In Hungarian: MacKillop, James. Kelta mítoszok és legendák. Szieberth Ádám fordítása. Budapest: General Press Kiadó, 2006.
• Mesterházi Márton. Ír ember színpadon. Budapest: Liget Könyvek, 2006.