Benedict Kiely Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Thomas B. O'Grady

Critical Essay by Thomas B. O'Grady

SOURCE: O'Grady, Thomas B. “Echoes of William Carleton: Benedict Kiely and the Irish Oral Tradition.” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 3 (summer 1991): 321-30.

In the following essay, O'Grady finds parallels between the fiction of Kiely and William Carleton.

“He wrote good stories and he wrote very inferior stories,” Benedict Kiely declared of William Carleton in 1948; “he wrote well and he wrote at times with an excruciating badness. …” But despite Carleton's tendency to write “always with a certain spontaneous outpouring of things seen and heard and vividly remembered, with little evidence that he had ever given more than a moment of his mind to models or forms or the practices of other writers,” Kiely could assert unequivocally of his fellow transplanted Ulsterman: “He is among the greatest, possibly the greatest writer of fiction that Ireland has given to the English language” (Poor Scholar 177).

Although few students...
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