Arts and Literature
- June 16 - The first public celebration of "Bloomsday" takes place in Dublin. Writers Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin travel in a horse drawn coach stopping at numerous pubs to retrace the steps of the characters from James Joyce's novel Ulysses.
- November 19 - Brendan Behan's first play, The Quare Fellow, premières at the Pike Theatre, Dublin, to great reviews.
- First Cork International Choral and Folk Dance Festival.
- English-born painter Derek Hill settles at St Columb's Rectory, near Churchill, County Donegal.
- Publication of Christy Brown's autobiography My Left Foot.
- Publication of Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net.
Read more about this topic: 1954 In Ireland
Famous quotes containing the words arts and literature, arts and/or literature:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“No performance is worth loss of geniality. ‘Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
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