Irish-Language Children’s Literature, 1900–2022
Abstract
Irish-language children’s literature, as we understand it today, first emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. This essay provides an insight into Irish-language children’s literature over the past 120 years: the difficulties that authors and publishers had to overcome in the early years, the progress that has been made, and the challenges that remain for Irish-language children’s literature today. The essay show that Irish-language children’s literature was very much a male domain, both in terms of writers and target readers, in the first half of the twentieth century; however, this trend changed over time. The essay also makes clear the close link between Irish-language children’s literature and the state of the Irish language within the educational system. While the essay primarily focuses on newly composed literature for young people, translations and school textbooks are also mentioned.
Please note
COMHARTaighde is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal in the field of Irish language and literature studies. The full text of the article described on this page is available in the Irish language only. English-language translations of article titles, abstracts and certain metadata are provided in order to enable international scholars to discover research published in COMHARTaighde and to facilitate the indexing of articles in certain academic databases.
