Articulate question - involves history

[wailing eagle]

Hello all. I am doing a history project on literature in Victorian Dublin. Through a very simple bit of research and analysis I can see there was a huge explosion of literature in Dublin during the mid to late Victorian era. This time gave us GB Shaw, W B Yeats, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Bram Stoker as well as others.
Clearly this was the golden age of Irish Literature, with this level of writers not being seen before or since in Dublin. Although it did result in a continuous flow of writers to the present day.
I was wondering if anybody here had any suggestions as to why there was such a burst of creativity in this particular time and place.

[Whifflingpin]

If your question is at all valid, which I doubt, then maybe there is a connection with the Home Rule movement and rise of Irish nationalism that flourished in the period in which those writers were active and that resulted eventually in the independence of Eire from the United Kingdom. Such a connection would be somewhat complex however - from your examples, you could not say that the Irish were throwing off English yoke so Irish writers were able to express themselves. Four out of the five (Joyce being the exception) were born into families that actually were part of that yoke that was being thrown off. (Mind you, so was Parnell, the leading Nationalist, so ...?)

I doubt the validity of the question on two main grounds.
First is that of the five writers you name, only Yeats had a literary career in Ireland. The rest all left as soon as they could and pursued their careers elsewhere - 3 in London and 1 in Europe - rarely, if at all, returning to Ireland.

My second reservation about the validity of your question is that Ireland had plenty of great writers before the Victorian period - Swift, Burke, Moore for instance were as much the equals of their English contemporaries as the writers you name - and that the golden age of Irish literature is probably the present, or at least the last fifty years.


If your project is a history project, the a few dates might be useful:
Parnell 1846 - 1891 - became a Member of Parliament 1876
Stoker 1847 - 1912 - moved to London 1878
Wilde 1854 - 1900 - moved to Oxford 1874, London 1878
GBS 1856 - 1950 - moved to London 1876
Yeats 1865 - 1939
Joyce 1882 - 1941 - left Ireland by 1903/4