DESCRIBED by W.B. Yeats as this one great peasant writer of their Carleton, storyteller, novelist, polemicist, is fondly and proudly remembered in his native Co Tyrone.

This week his genius was brought into sharp focus by the fifth annual Carleton Summer School, held in Clogher's Rural Centre, an elegant 18th century house. It was a celebration of his graphic presentations on the sufferings, the pleasures, the occupations and religious practices of the country people of his beloved Clogher Valley.

Frequently cited as a major source for the study of the social history of Ireland before the Great Famine, Carleton, who died in 1869, was in many respects the first of his class to attempt to create an Irish prose tradition in English. He presents, sometimes with humour, sometimes in tragic vein, "a class unknown in literature" as they confront famine, sectarianism, economic oppression and emigration, yet continue to find often boisterous fun in weddings and wakes, dances and athletic contests.

Carleton has been acknowledged as a major literary influence by such writers as Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, John McGahern and Eugene McCabe. For the past week, Montague and others have been dissecting, analysing and debating the Carleton works in the countryside from which they drew their inspiration.

Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien was due to have delivered the keynote address on this year's theme The Writer and Rural Ireland, but due to illness he was replaced by the summer school's honorary director, Owen Dudley Edwards, with a lecture on Carleton and Cruise O'Brien, in which he remarked on the similarity of their backgrounds.

Both writers had been baptised Catholics, neither remained Catholics, but both took forceful moral stands in denouncing intellectual dishonesty and moral doublethink among their own people, in both instances strongly suggesting post colonial legacies of Irish Catholic self protective techniques," said Dudley Edwards, currently Reader in History at Edinburgh University.

Both were innovators, he continued. Both celebrated the Irish past, but both insisted on Ireland discarding its obsessive parochialisms. Both warred against excessive subordination to English models or deference to English ignorance of Ireland.

Dudley Edwards mused "Carleton was a stylist of extraordinarily wide ranging powers and variety of styles, while O'Brien had been described by the late John Silverlight, a famed columnist on Words as "the greatest stylist in the English language of his time".

"And both had remarkable wit and strong sense of humour which caused both of them to be undervalued and misunderstood by pompous and humourless people."

Carleton was born a Catholic, but died in the Church of Ireland. And both churches were represented, with the attendance of the Bishops of Clogher, Most Rev Joseph Duffy and Right Rev Brian Hannon.

Earlier, Dr W.A. Maguire, Keeper of Local History at the Ulster Museum, varied a famous Carleton book title to read Traits and Stories of the Irish Squirearchy, in which he showed that Maria Edgeworth's story in Castle Rackrent partly derived from several 18th century instances of heiress imprisonment by husbands intent on getting hold of their wealth or deploring their interest in other gentlemen.

Benedict Kiely, whose Poor Scholar appearing in 1947, was the pioneer critical analysis of Carleton, and remains a seminal work, came to the summer school to launch the new edition of Carleton's autobiography with his own new preface.

In mentioning his own work and that of Thomas Flanagan on Carleton, Kiely recalled with sorrow that Barbara Hayley, killed in a car accident, had through her study of Carleton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, proved herself the foremost Carleton student of her time.

Dr Antoinette Quinn, senior lecturer in English at Trinity College, stressed Patrick Kavanagh's fascination with the easy traffic between the sacred and secular in Carleton's writing. He saw Carleton as his precursor and looked on Carleton very much as the authentic voice of pre-Famine Ulster".

And Mark Mohan and friends gave a fine performance of traditional airs on banjo, flute and keyboards in McSorley's pub, the sounds if not the instruments echoing the bygone gatherings in Ned McKeown's, where stories were told which inspired the young Will Carleton in his literary career.