SOURCE: Bonaccorso, Richard. “Nationality and Beyond.” In Seán O'Faoláin's Irish Vision, pp. 41-72. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Bonaccorso discusses O'Faoláin's place in the Irish literary renaissance, his attitudes toward revolutionary thought, and his connections with other well-known Irish writers.

Patriotic, cultural, and social Ireland are O'Faolain's thematic resources, both as creative writer and social critic. That he and his literary contemporaries should concern themselves with the matter of Ireland is not surprising, given the inheritances of a literary renaissance and a political revolution. O'Faolain's generation of Irish writers began its work around 1930, overlapping by a few years the later careers of several Literary Renaissance figures. Augusta Gregory died in 1932, George Moore in 1933, AE [George Russell] in 1935, Yeats in 1939. And, though so vigorously separate in life, Joyce seemed to have joined that elder generation by his death in 1941. O'Faolain...