The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature
# The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature

The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature is a 1996 book edited by Robert Welch.

In over 2,000 entries, the Companion to Irish Literature surveys the Irish literary landscape across sixteen centuries, describing its features and landmarks. Entries range from ogham writing, developed in the 4th century, to the fiction, poetry, and drama of the 1990s. There are accounts of authors as early as Adomnán, 7th-century Abbot of Iona, up to contemporary writers such as Roddy Doyle, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, and Edna O'Brien. Individual entries are provided for all major works, from Táin Bó Cuailnge - the Ulster saga reflecting the Celtic Iron Age - to Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille, and Banville's The Book of Evidence.

The book also presents the historical contexts of these writers, and the events which directly inspired them, such as the Irish Famine of 1845-8, which provided a theme for novelists, poets, and memoirists from William Carleton to Patrick Kavanagh and Peadar Ó Laoghaire; the founding of the Abbey Theatre and its impact on playwrights such as J. M. Synge and Padraic Colum; the Easter Rising which inspired Yeats to write 'Easter 1916'.

It offers information on general topics, ranging from the stage Irishman to Catholicism, Protestantism, the Irish language, and university education in Ireland; and on genres such as annals, bardic poetry, and folksong.

