Ireland Western Islands Analysis

The reason why I wanted Ireland’s Western islands to be the focus of my thesis is that I have been fascinated by this primitive and wild world since the very first time I got in touch with it.
I was preparing one of my last exams, it was English Literature, when I first read Synge’s masterpiece: The Aran Islands (1907). This is undoubtedly one of the first and most important books ever written on the Irish Western Islands. Since the very first pages of this book I was struck by the harshness of the island depicted and what surprised me more was that the author was describing this difficult place where to live in as the best ever existed on earth. It took me some time to appreciate the greatness of these wild places depositary of Irish traditions

Then, it will be shown how today life on these islands is continuously threatened by the menace of emigration which is compromising the existence of these fascinating places. We’ll notice how isolation and poverty make an Irish island a difficult place where to live in. Therefor in this first chapter we will see that there is not just one way to look at the island life but there are many which are all different and personal to the authors who are writing.
In this second chapter the first two writers will be introduced. We’ll go shortly through Synge and O’Flaherty’s biographies in order to better understand their works. Then both the Aran Islands and Skerrett will be analysed in depth although not yet compared since this will happen in the following

This is why as we’ll notice some of his writings have to deal with politics. Therefore we’ll introduce his two books describing life on the western island Arranmore: Islanders (1927) and Proud Island (1975). We will make a comparison of these novels which were written in two different periods by the author since the first one was published in 1927 and the other one in later 1975. As it will be possible to notice through their comparison the two novels sharply contrast for the way they present the island theme. Islanders depicts island life in an extremely detailed and realistic way so that it seems to be more a documentary than a novel. A deep sense of realism is given here by the prominent use of Hiberno-English language. On the contrary Proud Island is written in standard English and uses a simple language being more focused on the message it seeks to convey rather than on its form. The idea this last novel wants to convey is that emigration is the only way left for islanders to live. O’Donnell believes that life on these islands is too difficult in comparison with that on the mainland and he argues that in a short time ireland western islands would be all