Reactions to modernity
Emigration, which had been such a marked feature of Irish history since the nineteenth century, accelerated through the 1950s, creating the sense of an emptying countryside. Leaving the land is represented as alienation in Frank O’Connor’s story ‘Uprooted’, a tragedy to be resisted at all costs in M. J. Molloy’s play The Wood of the Whispering, while the plight of the stay-at-home sibling when all the others have left is the focus of William Trevor’s ‘The Hill Bachelors’. Nostalgia for a pre-modern rural landscape features in the work of Michael McLaverty, John Montague, and Maurice Riordan. In the fully urbanized Ireland of the twenty-first century, there is a sardonic take on modern farming in Kevin Barry, but the remaining connections to the land of contemporary society are still very much present in novels by Belinda McKeon and Anne Enright.