February 26, 1982

Professor of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook Thomas Flanagan lectured on “Joyce and the Imagination of Irish History” in the Villard Room. Flanagan’s essay, “Yeats, Joyce, and the Matter of Ireland,” in the University of Chicago journal, Critical Inquiry, in 1975 was a seminal study of this interrelationship. His novel, The Year of the French (1979), was the first of a trilogy— with The Tenants of Time (1988), The End of the Hunt (1994)— that traced Irish politics and identity from the failed uprising of 1798 to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. The Year of the French, Flanagan’s first attempt at fiction, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction in 1979.