Jan 4, 2010

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Setting

The publication of Portrait in book form in 1916 coincided with one of the most important events in modern Irish history: the Easter Rising, which initiated a bloody war of independence followed by several months of civil war in Ireland. By 1922, in the wake of these conflicts, Ireland had thrown off British rule and transformed itself into the Irish Free State—a body comprising all but the six counties of Ulster (the modern-day British province of Northern Ireland); in 1949 the Free State became Eire, the Republic of Ireland. The Rising began when a citizen army of around 1000...