ABSTRACT
The sense of the west as the home of an authentic Irishness created at the time of the literary revival was to gain wide currency. While it would allow travellers there to integrate representations of the natural landscape and of its inhabitants in a single positive image, it may be seen as problematic in two related respects. It has been in many ways the work of 'outsiders'; and it has tended to gloss over the hardness of life in what has been an agriculturally marginal and economically little-developed terrain, seeking out the signs of poverty and cultural isolation but then transmuting them into a vision of noble simplicity and primitive tradition.
