This is a critical survey of the fiction and non-fiction written in Ireland during the key years between 1880 and 1920, or what has become known as the Irish Literary Renaissance. The book considers both the prose and the social and cultural forces working through it.

On an Irish Island tells the remarkable story of a remote outpost nearly untouched by time in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the adventurous men and women who visited and were inspired by it. In a love letter to a vanished way of life, Robert Kanigel brings to life this wildly beautiful island, notable for the vivid communal life of its residents and the unadulterated Irish they spoke well into the twentieth century. With the Irish language rapidly disappearing, Great Blasket became a magnet for scholars, linguists, and writers during the Gaelic renaissance. As we follow these visitors—among them John Millington Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World—we are captivated both by the tiny group of islanders who kept an entire country’s past alive and by their complex relationships with those who brought the island’s story to the larger world.

Tomás Ó Criomhthain (1856–1937) is one of the giants of Irish-language literature. His best-known books, Allagar na hInise and An tOileánach, are acknowledged classics. But he was a highly unlikely author. He lived his entire life on the isolated and now-abandoned Great Blasket, in a house he built with his own hands using stones he found on the island. Likewise, he crafted a valuable literary heritage out of island life. With indefatigable persistence, he steadily built on his modest formal education, learning to read and write in Irish during middle age while simultaneously expanding his knowledge of literature and history. Scholarly visitors were impressed with Tomás's observations of his tiny community. They encouraged him to commit his stories and memories to paper. He wrote three first-person accounts of his experiences, bequeathing to us a captivating saga of a folk culture doomed by difficult circumstances. His works are among the first examples of Ireland's transition from oral to written folk storytelling. The Blasket Islandman tells, for the first time, the full story of Tomás's life, with its many triumphs and travails. This absorbing account also describes the forces that influenced his work and details his impressive legacy. Tomás was determined that his community be remembered. In the process, he achieved a level of immortality for himself. More than eighty years after his passing, he remains the famed 'Blasket Islandman' and, to paraphrase the man himself, the like of him will never be again.

Great Blasket Island is a townland in the parish of Dunquin, county Kerry.