This document provides an overview of Week 10's reading assignment on nostalgia and prudery in mid-century Irish literature. It highlights quotes from John McGahern's memoir describing the lack of modern conveniences in rural Ireland in the past. It also references Kate O'Brien and discusses the semi-autobiographical nature of many Irish novels and how autobiography has been an important genre in Anglo-Irish literature.

1. Writing Ireland
Week 10: “A people who were satisfied with frugal comfort”?:
Nostalgia & Prudery in the Mid-Century

2. John McGahern (1934-2006)
Read more at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/mar/31/guar
dianobituaries.books
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jan/05/ficti
on.books

3. “The semi-autobiographical nature of many Irish novels
may remind us that autobiography itself has an important
place in Anglo-Irish Literature. Many writers have written
autobiographies, memoirs, reminiscences, or
recollections – the term used varies – and there are times
when autobiography reads like a novel of revenge.”
Roger Joseph McHugh and Maurice Harmon, Short
History of Anglo-Irish Literature from Its Origins to the
Present Day (Dublin, 1982), p.285.

4. “There was no running water then,
other than in streams or rivers, no
electricity, no TV, very few radios,
and when newspapers were bought
they were shared between houses.”
McGahern, Memoir, p.16

5. “A somewhat condescending backward look at an
allegedly more innocent time, the barely credible
precursor of the much more accelerated here and
now, and on the other hand as
appropriating, endorsing and promoting images and
ideas, which, by being represented as simple and
traditional, function as a means of resisting the
modernising present.”
O’Brien in Harte, Modern Irish Autobiography, p.234.

6. “In that country, individual thought and
speech were discouraged. Its moral
climate can be glimpsed in the warning
catch phrases: a shut mouth catches no
flies; think what you say but don’t say what
you think; the less you say, the more you’ll
hear. By 1950, against the whole spirit of
the 1916 Proclamation, the State had
become a theocracy in all but name.”
McGahern, Memoir, p.210.

7. “Over many days and months, gradually, a
fantastical idea formed. Why take on any
single life – a priest, a soldier, teacher,
doctor, airman – if a writer could create all
these people far more vividly? In that one
life of the mind, the writer could live many
lives and all of life. I had not even the
vaguest idea how books came into being,
but the dream took hold, and held.”
McGahern, Memoir, p.205.

8. “My father said he loved oranges then, and when
he knew he was going to be married he bought two
dozen oranges in Galway and went to sit on a park
bench and ate them all. He felt he would never be
able to afford oranges again once he was married.
In those first years his fears couldn’t have been
much realized other than in his imagination. My
mother’s salary was higher than his.”
McGahern, Memoir, p.57.

9. Kate O’Brien (1897-1974)
Read more at:
http://www.tcd.ie/longroomhub/digital-
atlas/writers/kate-obrien/
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3509330

10. Next Week
Week 11: A
Special Role?:
Irish Women
as Image and
Idea