SOURCE: Dantanus, Ulf. “Friel's Literary Landscapes: The Short Stories.” In Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Dramatist, pp. 37-76. Göteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1985.

In the following essay, Dantanus outlines the nature of Friel's literary landscape through an examination of his short stories.

Rural Ireland Visited and Transformed

In the Introduction and in Chapter I [of Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Dramatist] I have tried to map out Friel's real-life and fictional habitat and suggest ways in which its distinctive climate of thought and feeling could begin to assume a “spirit of place” that would work on individual human beings exposed to it. The physical landscape itself provides the first fundamental (some people would say the most fundamental) element in the formation of the mental landscape of a locality. It is only, however, when this inanimate nature is activated by the existence of human...