A Writer's Ireland; Landscape in Literature

London, England: Thames and Hudson, 1984. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Bryan Woodfield (Map). Format is approximately 7.75 inches by 10.25 inches. 192 pages. Includes Map, Introduction, Postcript, Bibliography, Sources of Quotations, Acknowledgments, Index, and Sources of Illustrations. Contains 94 illustrations, 20 in color. William Trevor KBE (24 May 1928 - 20 November 2016) was an Irish novelist, playwright and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he was widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language. He won the Whitbread Prize three times and was nominated five times for the Booker Prize, the last for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2011. His name was also mentioned in relation to the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2014, Trevor was bestowed Saoi by the Aosdána. The author takes the reader on a personal journey through the island, a journey which not only includes the familiar literary figures in their context, but introduces many voices of perhaps less fame though of abiding significance. Derived from a Kirkus review: An attractively illustrated work, presented by novelist Trevor as "a writer's journey, a tour of places which other writers have felt affection for also, or have known excitement or alarm in". Many of the literary references are well known and well chosen: Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village"; Allingham's "The Winding Banks of Erne"; Yeats on Coole Park; Synge on Wicklow and the Aran Islands; O'Sullivan on the Blaskets; Joyce and O'Casey, from their different vantage points, on Dublin; MacNeice on Belfast. More importantly, Trevor covers some other, more overlooked bases as well: Jonathan Swift and the 18th-century garden; the S. C. Halls' early Victorian "picturesque" travel book about Ireland; John Banim; the "vastly" overlooked short stories of George Moore; Ulster novelist Forrest Reid. Some writers appear unconventionally fitted into the "landscape" category (Flann O'Brien's inclusion on the ground that his Dublin was "a playground for the imagination" is a case in point). Some fine material-interestingly joined together.